Do you trust this election will be run well? The answer might depend on your politics

(TNND) — Most Americans trust that this election will be administered well, but there's a sizable partisan gap in the trust level, according to the Pew Research Center.

A new survey published Thursday showed that 73% of voters and 90% of Vice President Kamala Harris’ supporters expect the election will be administered well.

But just 57% of former President Donald Trump’s supporters feel the same.

Todd Belt, the Political Management program director at George Washington University, said the GW Politics Poll found similar results in recent weeks.

GW asked voters if they were confident the votes will be counted accurately. Over 90% of Democrats said they were, while under half of Republicans said they were.

The new Pew Research Center survey also found Harris supporters are more confident than Trump supporters that it will be clear who won after all the votes are counted (85% vs. 58%), are more confident that mail-in ballots will be counted as voters intend (85% vs. 38%), are more confident that our elections are secure from hacking (73% vs. 32%), and that ineligible voters will be prevented from casting ballots (87% vs. 30%).

Are Trump supporters too distrustful, or are Harris supporters too trusting?

“Trump supporters are too distrustful,” Belt said. “And the reason I say that is there is incredibly little actual electoral malfeasance that occurs. It's only a few votes here and there, and usually they find the person who did it. There are no real big problems with the counting processes. These are done with oversight from both parties, and you can be very confident in the electoral counting process."

Belt also said, despite some concerns expressed following the 2020 election by Trump and his supporters, that there were no problems in that election or the midterm election that would be cause for concerns this time around.

The Pew Research Center said Republicans were actually more likely than Democrats in 2018 to say that year’s election would be run well, but the sentiment flipped by 2020. And the gap this year is even wider.

Belt said Trump’s rhetoric of a stolen election and allegations of a Department of Justice witch hunt have affected Republican attitudes.

“We've seen Republicans become less trusting of other institutions of government, such as the FBI," Belt said. “I mean, you never think in the world that you'd see Republicans want to get rid of the FBI. But now because Donald Trump has put them in his crosshairs, this is something we're seeing now among Republicans, this tremendous amount of distrust of the institutions of democracy and the institutions of government.”

Public trust took a hit in the Vietnam and Watergate era, Belt said. But what we’re seeing now is more based in partisanship, he said.

The Pew Research Center says just 11% of Republicans currently trust the government to do what is right at least most of the time compared to 35% of Democrats.

An NBC News poll from 2023 found that just 17% of Republicans had a positive view of the FBI, while over half of Democrats had a positive view of the FBI.

On the flipside, the Pew Research Center says Republicans expressed more trust in government than Democrats when Trump was in the White House. In August 2020, 28% of Republicans said they trusted the government to do the right thing, compared to 12% of Democrats at the time.

We saw the highest voter turnout in 120 years in 2020.

Belt expects a high turnout this year, too. But he said it could fall short of 2020.

“And the reason I say that is because we don't have COVID, and there have been more and more restrictions that have been placed by states on the voting process, particularly in mail-in voting (that) have made the windows shorter and made it a little bit more difficult,” he said.

Still, millions of Americans across the country have already cast a ballot.

And even the Trump camp, which in the past has cast doubt on mail-in voting, is encouraging the practice this election.

"We've really tried from the RNC and the Trump campaign to send the message out there that we want you to vote early," Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump told The National News Desk this week.