Poll: Nearly Half Of Republicans Think Defunct ACORN Stole 2012 Election

After President Barack Obama decisively won re-election with 332 electoral votes and almost 51 percent of the popular vote, Louisiana governor (and potential 2016 candidate) Bobby Jindal warned his fellow Republicans to “stop being the stupid party.”

According to Public Policy Polling’s latest national poll, Jindal’s message hasn’t yet sunk in.

The poll shows that 49 percent of Republican voters believe that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. That’s down from the 52 percent who thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election, although as PPP points out, the decline is “smaller than might have been expected, given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.” Indeed, the community organizing NGO shut down in 2010 under relentless pressure from Republicans — suggesting that much of the party is still stuck in a right-wing bubble located far from reality (and that the right needs to come up with some fresher conspiracy theories).

Many Republicans are so angry over the election results that they’d like to break up with the United States — 25 percent say that they would like their state to secede from the union, compared to 56 who oppose secession and 19 percent who aren’t sure.

To be fair, Republicans haven’t cornered the market on uninformed positions. According to the poll, 39 percent of Americans have an opinion on the Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction plan (23 percent support it, while 16 percent oppose it.) That 39 percent is not much higher than the 25 percent who professed an opinion on the non-existent “Panetta/Burns” plan, which PPP invented to test how many people would claim an opinion on a plan that they know nothing about.

The PPP poll did contain some more serious results. President Obama’s approval rating is now at 50 percent, with 47 percent disapproving; that number is up a net 4 percent from PPP’s final pre-election poll.

Additionally, PPP found that voters trust Obama over congressional Republicans on the issue of Libya by a 48 to 45 percent margin, in the latest piece of evidence that criticizing the administration’s handling of the Benghazi attacks has been a political loser for the party.

Photo by Frank Vest via Flickr.com