Most Americans don't believe the GOP’s baseless claim that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 presidential elections, according to a new impeachment survey from FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos. Overall, just 30% of respondents think Ukraine interfered, while 71% correctly believe that Russia attacked the '16 elections. "The theory isn’t even resonating broadly among Trump’s supporters: Republicans aren’t any likelier than Democrats to think that Ukraine meddled in 2016," writes FiveThirtyEight.
But one segment that has latched onto the Ukraine lie invented by Russian President Vladimir Putin and embraced by Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers is frequent Fox News viewers. Fully 44% of Americans who traffic in the Fox fever swamp of conspiracy theories believe that Ukraine meddled. That same cohort of Fox viewers is also much less likely to believe that Russia interfered in 2016, despite the fact that the U.S. intelligence community, the two-year special counsel investigation, and the GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee all concluded that Russia launched a coordinated, top-down attack on the U.S. electoral system in the last presidential cycle.
The good news is that the GOP’s Ukraine conspiracy theory hasn’t caught on more broadly among the American public. The bad news is that Trump and his Republican henchmen have convinced close to half of his cultists to believe Putin’s propaganda.