Jan 6. anniversary: Republican politicians aren’t the real threat to American democracy.

Republican politicians have spent the year since Jan. 6, 2021, working to undermine democracy and the rule of law. In a national survey taken three weeks ago by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 61 percent of Republicans said Biden’s victory was illegitimate because “fraudulent ballots supporting Joe Biden were counted by election officials.” Forty-six percent said it was illegitimate because “ballots supporting Donald Trump were destroyed by election officials”, and 41 percent said it was illegitimate because “voting machines were re-programmed by election officials to count extra ballots for Biden.” Only 21 percent said Biden had legitimately won. In an NPR/Ipsos survey taken two weeks ago, 57 percent of Republicans said that “Trump and his allies were exercising their correct legal right to contest the election” or, more boldly, that they “did not go far enough in contesting the election.” Only 29 percent chose one of the alternative answers: that the former president and his allies “went too far” or “broke the law trying to overturn the election.” In the UMass Amherst survey, 62 percent of Republicans said Vice President Mike Pence should have “used his role in counting the Electoral College votes to challenge Joe Biden’s victory.” When a CBS News/YouGov poll asked what Trump should do now, 56 percent of Republicans said he should run again in 2024, but an additional 20 percent said he should “fight to be put back into the presidency right now, before the next presidential election.” Given these views, it’s not surprising that rank-and-file Republicans want to shut down the Jan. 6 investigation. In the UMass Amherst poll, 55 percent of Republicans said they’d be more likely to vote for a Republican congressional candidate who “questioned the legitimacy” of the 2020 presidential result; only 10 percent said they’d be less likely. Fifty-two percent said they’d be less likely to support a candidate who “voted to create a commission to investigate the events of January 6”; only 17 percent said they’d be more likely.