66% of Republicans don't consider the January 6 Capitol riot to be an attack on the government, according to a new poll
Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
- Quinnipiac University released a new poll that indicates Republicans voters have moved on from Jan 6.
- 66% of Republicans don't consider the January 6 Capitol riot to be an attack on the government.
- That same poll also found that 77% of Republicans don't hold Trump responsible for it anyway.
A full two thirds of Republican don't consider the January 6 assault on the US Capitol - which resulted in several deaths and disrupted the counting of electoral votes for several hours - to have been an attack on the US government.
That's according to a new poll from Quinnipiac University released on Tuesday, which was conducted from October 15 through 18, included 1,342 adults nationwide, and had a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points. The poll found that 66% of Republicans do not view the storming of the US Capitol as an attack on the government.
The poll also found that the vast majority of Republican voters don't hold Trump responsible for the events of that day, regardless of whether it was an attack on the government; 21% of Republican poll respondents said the former president bore "not much" responsibility for the storming of the US Capitol, while 56% said he had no responsibility for it whatsoever.
Both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have said that Trump bears responsibility for what happened that day.
Regarding the ongoing congressional investigation into what happened that day, 74% of Republicans said that enough is already known about the events of Jan 6, compared to just 38% of Democrats and 58% of independent voters who said the same.
The poll's results indicate that Republican voters have largely moved on from January 6, and some GOP elected officials have taken that same path. Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina has described detained rioters as "political prisoners," while Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has claimed that they were being abused.
Meanwhile, Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona and the former President himself have sought to turn Ashli Babbitt, a pro-Trump rioter who was shot and killed by Capitol police after she tried to enter the speaker's lobby through a broken window, into a political martyr.
More broadly, 51% of Americans told Quinnipiac that they believe Trump has been undermining democracy since the 2020 election ended, though significant partisan divides exist on this question. 94% of Democrats said Trump was undermining democracy, while 85% of Republicans denied that, saying he's in fact protecting democracy.