A new poll has revealed 78% of Americans say former President Donald Trump would have won the 2020 presidential election if voters had been given the truth about Hunter Biden's laptop, instead of being told it was merely "Russian disinformation."
The findings come for the latest Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP) polling.
"Terming the laptop 'disinformation' by the FBI, Intelligence Community, Congress, and the Biden campaign, along with Big Tech, impacted voters," TIPP President Raghavan Mayur said. "A significant majority — 78% — believe that access to the correct information could have been critical to their decision at the polls."
President Joe Biden spread the disinformation narrative during the one and only debate he would do with Trump, and he had shared a letter from a 51 intelligence officials aligned with him, saying the laptop story was a Russian disinformation campaign, echoing the 2016 allegations of Russian meddling in the presidential election.
And, this week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told "The Joe Rogan Experience" that his Meta platforms throttled down the reach of the laptop story after getting a visit and a warning from the FBI about Russian disinformation.
"The names have changed, but the allegations are the same, that these FBI agents were attempting to influence the outcome of the 2020 election by suppressing derogatory information about Hunter Biden and potentially Joe Biden," former National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe said this week.
"It is the FBI that is the primary domestic authority for investigating and leading to the prosecution of election influence and election interference. It's really a problem when the agency that is responsible for investigating those things is engaged in those things."
The TIPP poll found 74% believe the FBI and Intelligence Community deliberately misled the public on suggesting the laptop was a Russian effort to hurt Biden's candidacy.
But now a large majority of Americans believe the laptop is real. Just 11% still believe Biden's narrative it was Russian disinformation.
More than two-thirds of Democrats polled (71%) say they would have changed their vote if they had been told the truth on the laptop before the election. And 47% overall would have changed their vote, according to the poll.
Also, the media gets failing grades of D or F from a majority in the poll (51%) for the coverage of the laptop story before the election.
And now, 81% of Americans want a special counsel appointed to investigate Hunter Biden's laptop contents, according to the poll.
Ratcliffe attempted to dispel Biden campaign backers' disinformation on the laptop, including Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., calling the story "a smear on Joe Biden [that] comes from the Kremlin."
"I very clearly came out and said, 'Look, Adam Schiff is making this information up. There is no Russian disinformation involved here. It is Hunter Biden's laptop, and the investigation is real,'" Ratcliffe said. "And that has proven to be true."
The TIPP poll surveyed 1,335 adults Aug. 2-4, including 437 saying they were closely following the story. The results for the whole group had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points, while the smaller sub-group of in-tune laptop story viewers was 4.8 percentage points.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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