The headline of the newest poll report out of Public Policy Polling says it all: "Republicans not handling election results well."
But it's a smaller nugget from the report that's most fascinating:
49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore.
It's true. Somehow about half of all Republicans think a magical nonexistent organization won the election for Obama. Or perhaps that it got a time machine in 2008 and jumped ahead to help Obama when reelection immediately. It's hard not to wonder if articles like this one might be somewhat to blame.
It's possible Dean Chambers has had an impact too. He's the guy who was responsible for UnskewedPolls.com--a site designed to show the reality of the American electorate and debunk all the supposedly liberal polling outfits that kept predicting Obama would win. He's now created BarackOFraudo.com, which claims that Obama stole the election by stealing 4 states. He colored those stolen states black on his map.
Virginia Attorney General and likely Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Ken Cuccinelli may have an impact too. He recently told radio hosts they were "preaching to the choir" when they complained about the potentially nefarious deeper meaning behind President Obama's inability to win a voter ID state. Having the man in charge of overseeing elections in the state insinuate that the president's reelection may have been less than lawful might sway a lot of Republicans.
That may be why Cuccinelli's office eventually issued a statement clearing up his opinion on the matter: "There is no question that President Obama legitimately won re-election. Ken was simply talking about the fact that there were problems on election day which need to be addressed."
Sadly, believing in something that doesn't exist isn't new territory for Republicans. Trumping up claims of non-existent voter fraud has been their justification for voter suppression laws.