The Long Shadow of the Big Lie: How Beliefs about the Legitimacy of the 2020 Election Spill Over onto Future Elections.

This article examines how belief in the "big lie"—the false claim that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump—has influenced public perceptions of the legitimacy of subsequent elections. Using panel survey data from the Annenberg Institutions of Democracy (AIOD) tracking voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin across the 2020 and 2022 elections, the study finds that individuals who doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 election, termed "election skeptics," exhibit significantly lower confidence in the fairness of later elections even before votes are cast. Moreover, election skeptics who supported losing candidates in 2022 show further declines in trust and are more likely to attribute losses to voter fraud, amplifying the delegitimization effect beyond typical partisan dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes. The findings suggest that election skepticism is a stable, partisan-aligned attitude that undermines democratic norms of "losers' consent," with implications for electoral trust and political stability extending into future elections.