If you’re going to do a poll like this, I think you also need to have a question with a multiple-choice option asking the public what it thinks Russia’s been accused of. In reality, they’ve been accused of hacking the DNC’s servers and John Podesta’s emails. In practice, God only knows how mistaken Americans are about how severe the hacking supposedly was. A Twitter pal wondered this morning how many Democrats falsely think Russia hacked the voting booths and changed the vote totals. Another countered that just as many, if not more, probably believe Russia’s been accused of hacking Hillary Clinton’s private server.

Anyway, too late now.

When asked whether the electoral college should change or withhold their votes today and let Congress “appoint” the next president(!), fully 46 percent said yes versus 54 percent who said no. Clearly what we’re seeing here is a heavy majority of Democrats willing to agree to virtually anything that’ll slow down or stop this process in the name of preventing a Trump presidency. Ask them whether they believe the electoral college should summon Batman to arrest Trump at the inauguration next month and you’ll probably get 45 percent overall for that too.

People insulating themselves from reality to avoid inconvenient political truths is a bipartisan phenomenon, though, of course:

In a nationally representative online survey of 1,011 Americans conducted by Qualtrics between Dec. 6 and 12, we asked respondents, “In last month’s election, Donald Trump won the majority of votes in the electoral college. Who do you think won the most popular votes?”

Twenty-nine percent said Donald Trump won the popular vote. This is a slightly larger proportion than in a recent Pew survey in which 19 percent said Trump won the popular vote.

Respondents’ correct understanding of the popular vote depended a great deal on partisanship. A large fraction of Republicans — 52 percent — said Trump won the popular vote, compared with only 7 percent of Democrats and 24 percent of independents.

That’s likely a blend of simple ignorance and “motivated reasoning” in the form of conspiracy theorizing about millions of fraudulent votes having been cast for Clinton. State officials see no evidence of that, and it’s weird to believe that Democrats could figure out how to pad Hillary’s national vote totals but not her totals in the few key states she needed to win, but that’s where we are. If you’re invested in the idea that Trump’s base is a “silent majority” even though he finished second in the popular vote, the obvious way to resolve that cognitive dissonance is to believe that he won the popular vote after all.

Watch below as Clinton flunky John Podesta, fresh off Wikileaks having aired his emails, is asked if the election was free and fair and basically answers no — the election was “distorted,” he says. Podesta went on record last week too in saying the electors should have had an intelligence briefing before voting. If you think today’s vote for Trump will put an end to all of this nonsense and start forcing the left to adjust to the reality of a Trump administration, think again, says BuzzFeed:

Assuming that effort fails to stop Trump, expect to start hearing about Title 3, Section 15 of the US Code and “objections” to the electoral vote results. An objection can be lodged in writing by two members of Congress: one each from the House and the Senate.

Although rare, this step is not unprecedented. In 2005, Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio filed such an objection, specifically to the counting of the votes of Ohio’s electors in the wake of allegations of voting irregularities. The objection was rejected within a few hours, with only 32 members of Congress — all but one from the House — voting against the counting of Ohio’s votes.

The next step after that will be protests nationally on Inauguration Day followed by Democrats inevitably focusing on the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause as grounds for impeachment in Trump’s business dealings with foreign states. This makes three presidencies in a row, notes BuzzFeed, whose legitimacy has been questioned by the opposition. Bush was allegedly “selected, not elected” in 2000 after losing the popular vote, then had to endure Democratic conspiracy theories about Ohio’s voting machine in 2004; Obama had his natural-born status attacked repeatedly throughout his presidency, most notably by Donald Trump himself, who didn’t formally abandon Birtherism until just a few months ago; and now Trump will take office having lost the popular vote himself and possibly won some votes due to public outrage at Democrats from material revealed by a Russian hacking operations. That’s 16 years of not so healthy politics. I’m sure it’ll all work out.