Voters attend a town hall meeting featuring Vice President Kamala Harris and former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts in Brookfield, Wisconsin, on Oct. 21. Sara Stathas for The Washington Post

A majority of swing-state voters are concerned that supporters of former president Donald Trump will respond with violence if he doesn’t win the presidential election next month and do not believe he will accept defeat. Significantly fewer voters across those key states feel the same is true about Vice President Kamala Harris and her backers, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll.

The poll of more than 5,000 registered voters conducted in the first half of October in six battleground states finds a 57 percent majority are very or somewhat worried that Trump’s supporters would turn violent if he loses, compared with 31 percent who think Harris voters would resort to violence. Two-thirds of voters are not confident Trump would accept a loss, while a little more than two-thirds are confident Harris would accept defeat.

“These findings are discouraging,” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. “It tells us we’ve lost a lot in a very short period of time, that we cannot assume that people will accept the legitimacy of the outcome of an election, and that a peaceful transfer of power is something that just automatically happens here.”

The peaceful transfer of power is considered an essential element of any functioning democracy, and it had long been taken for granted in the United States that the losing candidate would concede. That changed with the last presidential election, when Trump incited an angry mob to attack the U.S. Capitol to disrupt certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

Since then, Trump has been using discredited fraud claims to lay the groundwork to undermine the results if they don’t go his way in 2024. He has repeatedly said the only way he could lose the election is if the other side cheats, while claiming falsely that million of noncitizens are being allowed to vote. (Noncitizen voting in federal elections is illegal and extremely rare.)

Harris has said she has faith in the elections and has characterized her opponent as a threat to democracy – a line of attack she’s amplified in the final weeks of the campaign.

Officials have waged a concerted effort to tamp down the possibility of violence or other unrest related to false election fraud claims. Last week, former Democratic and Republican governors of Wisconsin and North Carolina, two critical battleground states, released videos urging against political violence and asking people to have faith in the elections. More than 90 percent of local election officials surveyed by the Brennan Center for Justice in May said they have increased security for voters, election workers or election infrastructure since 2020. And the federal government will have enhanced security at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2025, designating the day when electoral college votes are counted a National Special Security Event, which provides the same level of security as presidential inaugurations and political conventions.

When Biden was still running for president, he centered his campaign pitch around Trump as an existential threat to democracy and warned that America’s future was at stake if Trump was reelected. But Biden’s warnings failed to resonate with a wide swath of the population who struggled to prioritize an abstract concept over more concrete issues such as inflation and immigration.

When Harris became the Democratic nominee, she shifted away from that message to a broader appeal for protecting freedoms, which encompassed issues such as abortion and gun safety.

But in her closing argument, Harris has begun framing Trump more explicitly as a threat to democracy. She’s zeroed in on Trump’s comments about “an enemy within,” which experts say sounds like language used by an authoritarian.

She’s also been campaigning with former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), who lost her job in Congress because she disavowed Trump as dangerous after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Harris has also highlighted comments made by Trump’s former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, that the former president met the definition of a fascist and had spoken favorably about Adolf Hitler. Harris told CNN last week that she agrees that Trump is a fascist.

Trump has said he would act as a dictator on Day 1 in office – but only on that day – and has threatened to prosecute political enemies. Nearly 7 in 10 Trump supporters believe his false claims that the 2020 election was illegitimate, although more than 6 in 10 swing-state voters overall say Biden was legitimately elected, according to the new poll.

More swing-state voters, 45 percent, say they believe Trump would attempt to rule as a dictator than the 19 percent who think Harris would. Among Trump supporters, 37 percent think Harris would try to be a dictator whereas 85 percent of Harris voters believe Trump would seek unchecked power. Still, an overwhelming 81 percent majority, including 73 percent of Harris supporters, believe Congress, the Supreme Court or military leaders would block a would-be dictator, suggesting most people are not actually worried that American government will topple.

At a Harris rally this month in Flint, Michigan, Justice Patterson, 22, a Frito-Lay delivery driver, said as a young, gay, Black woman she was scared of what will happen if Trump wins. She also said she was scared that if he loses there could be another Jan. 6-style event.

“You have people who still don’t believe (Biden’s) the president,” she said. “It’s scary.”

The day before, about 40 miles away at a Trump rally in Saginaw, Michigan, Kelly Streich, 45, an environmental engineer wearing a “Hillary for Prison 2016” T-shirt, said there’s “no way” Trump lost in 2020 and that he should “absolutely” challenge the results again if he loses. Streich said under Democrats, she doesn’t feel that America is a democracy.

“I don’t have any reason to believe any promises any Democrats make because they’ve sunk this country the last three and a half years,” she said. “They just want total control.”

The poll shows that slightly more swing-state voters trust Trump over Harris to handle threats to democracy in America, 43 percent to 40 percent.

“That disconnect boggles my mind,” Rozell said. “Consider what happened on Jan. 6, Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of a presidential election, the outgoing president refused to participate in the inauguration of the incoming president. And yet, there was no clear majority saying that Mr. Trump is a bigger threat to democracy than his opponent.”

Some of the guardrails that could restrain Trump in a second term have been weakened. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled this year that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions related to their official duties. And unlike in his first term, when Trump had people around him who pushed back on his most antidemocratic instincts – ideas like deploying the U.S. military against citizens – Trump advisers have said he will prioritize loyalty when filling jobs in a second administration.

Daniel Drazenovich, 39, a registered independent in North Carolina, is among those who believe guardrails would stop Trump from acting on his worst impulses. Drazenovich, who voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, is still unsure whom he is going to support this time. He said he doesn’t like Trump’s rhetoric, but he also doesn’t like that Harris wasn’t selected through a traditional primary process.

“He’s a narcissist for sure,” Drazenovich said of Trump. “I can see him throwing a temper tantrum if things don’t go his way. But I don’t think it will be the downfall of our democracy. I don’t think either candidate has the ability to usurp the Constitution at this point.”

This poll was conducted by The Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government from Sept. 30 to Oct. 15 among a stratified random sample of 5,016 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The overall margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points. The sample was drawn from the L2 database of registered voters in each state; all selected voters were mailed an invitation to take the survey online, with additional contact efforts from live-caller interviewers, text messages and emails. Sample design, data collection and processing was conducted by SSRS of Glen Mills, Pennsylvania.