17 percent see path to reinstate Trump before next election: poll

Roughly 1 in 6 Americans believe there may be a path to replace President Biden with former President Trump before the next presidential election in 2024, according to a new Monmouth University poll released on Thursday.

Seventeen percent say that they still see a path to reinstating the former president sometime in the next 2 1/2 years, despite Trump losing both the popular and Electoral College votes to Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Six percent say they “definitely” see a path to replacing Biden with Trump, while 11 percent say there “probably” is. 

There’s no legal way for Trump to be reinstated as president before 2024. The U.S. Constitution doesn’t provide for such a possibility, and even if Biden were to somehow be removed from office, Vice President Harris would be next in line for the presidency. 

The vast majority of those surveyed in the Monmouth poll — 77 percent — say there’s not a path for Trump to be reinstalled in the White House before the next presidential election, including 56 percent who say that’s “definitely not” a possibility. 

Still, the poll underscores the extent to which some Americans remain convinced Trump actually won the 2020 race for the White House, despite finishing with 74 fewer electoral votes than Biden. 

Sixty-one percent of Americans believe that Biden won the 2020 election “fair and square,” according to the Monmouth poll, while nearly one-third of respondents — 32 percent — attribute his victory to voter fraud, echoing Trump’s baseless claim that the election results were marred by cheating.

Nevertheless, a majority of Americans believe that voter fraud is at least a minor issue. Forty-one percent of respondents in the Monmouth poll said it is a “major problem” while another 28 percent said it is a “minor problem.” Twenty-nine percent do not believe that voter fraud is a problem.

Voter fraud is exceedingly rare, and multiple state-level audits of election results from 2020 have reaffirmed the accuracy of the vote. 

The Monmouth University poll surveyed 794 U.S. adults by telephone from Jan. 20 to 24. It has a margin of sampling error of 3.5 percentage points.