Conditioning.
"Roughly 70% of Republicans don’t see Biden as the legitimate winner. Surveys by different pollsters show virtually the same results, with the exception of a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll that dropped it to 61%."
In poll after poll, about 70% of Republicans say they don’t think Joe Biden is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.
www.poynter.org
Campaign manager Bill Stepien
told investigators that by Nov. 5, two days after the election, they saw Biden take the lead. Stepien and other top campaign staff went to Trump.
“We told him, the group that went over there, (we) outlined my belief on the chances for success at this point, and we pegged it at 5%, maybe 10%,” Stepien said.
The situation, Stepien said, was “very, very bleak.”
........
Focus groups have shown that Trump supporters weren’t swayed by specific pieces of evidence that rebutted his claims.
Sarah Longwell, executive director of Republicans for the Rule of Law, has conducted regular focus groups with fans of Trump.
“For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought,” Longwell wrote
April 18 for The Atlantic. “They know something nefarious occurred, but can’t easily explain how or why. What’s more, they’re mystified and sometimes angry that other people don’t feel the same.”
Trump, Longwell wrote, primed his backers to disbelieve the official results. Months before the vote, he linked mail-in ballots to fraud. On Election Night in many states, mail-in results come later than in-person tabulations. Longwell said that timing raised suspicions.
“A woman from Georgia told me, ‘When I went to bed, Trump was so in the lead and then (I got) up and he’s not in the lead. I mean, that’s crazy,’” Longwell said.