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WASHINGTON (AP) — A majority of Republicans say they are confident in the 2024 vote count after Donald Trump’s win, according to a new poll that finds a sharp turnaround from GOP voters’ skepticism about U.S. elections after the president-elect spent four years lying about his loss to President Joe Biden.

About 6 in 10 Republicans said they have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that the votes in last year’s presidential election were counted correctly nationwide, according to the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s a sharp rise from about 2 in 10 Republicans who were confident in an AP-NORC poll in October. And about two-thirds of Republicans in the new survey said they were confident in their state’s vote count, up from about 4 in 10 before the election.

That helped drive up the share of Americans saying they have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the accuracy of the election to about 6 in 10. That’s higher than in October, when roughly half of Americans said they were highly confident the votes would be counted accurately.

The mood is substantially different than it was four years ago, when Trump’s supporters, fueled by his false claims of a stolen election, assaulted police and smashed their way into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to interrupt the certification of Biden’s victory. Weeks later, an AP-NORC poll found that about two-thirds of Republicans said Biden was not legitimately elected president.

That belief persisted throughout Biden’s presidency and until last year’s election, as Trump continued to sow doubt about the accuracy of U.S. elections. He even did so on Election Day in the hours before it was clear he would win.

But since Trump’s victory in November, Republicans’ suspicions about election security at all levels — including confidence in their own local election officials — have ebbed substantially.

There were no indications of trouble before the election despite Trump’s attempts to lay the groundwork to challenge the accuracy of the count if he lost the vote. Nor were there any real questions over the integrity of the 2020 count, which was confirmed by a wide range of state audits,recounts and reviews, some of which were led by Republicans, including Trump’s own Department of Justice.

Threats toward local election officials soared after 2020, leading to a wave of veteran administrators leaving office. In a potential sign that those hostilities might ease, the poll found that about 7 in 10 Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that votes in the 2024 presidential election were counted accurately by their local election officials, up from about 6 in 10 in October.

That movement was almost entirely driven by Republicans: About 7 in 10 were highly confident in local officials’ counts in December, compared with about half in October.

One group’s confidence in the integrity of the election ticked down — Democrats. Their confidence in the national vote count declined from about 7 in 10 to about 6 in 10, although their certainty in the accuracy of state vote counts remained stable.

Still, the dip in Democratic confidence is nowhere near the scale of skepticism among Republicans after Trump’s defeat in 2020. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, conceded her loss to Trump the day after Election Day and there has been no organized Democratic effort to prevent the handover of the presidency to Trump, as there was among some conservatives in 2020 to try to block Biden from ascending to the presidency.

DETROIT (AP) — Tesla posted its first annual sales drop in more than a dozen years Thursday, undercutting a stock that has soared since Donald Trump’s victory on optimism Elon Musk’s close relationship to the president-elect will help the company.

Tesla’s global vehicle sales rose 2.3% in the final quarter of 2024 thanks to 0% financing, free charging and low-priced leases. But that was not enough for billionaire Musk’s most valuable holding to overcome last year’s sluggish start.

The Austin, Texas, company sold 495,570 vehicles from October through December, boosting deliveries to 1.79 million for the full year. That was 1.1% below 2023 sales of 1.81 million as overall demand for electric vehicles in the U.S. and elsewhere slowed.

The year-over-year global sales drop is Tesla’s first since 2011, according to figures from analytics firm Global Data. The company sold 1,306 vehicles in 2010, but that dropped slightly to 1,129 the following year.

The fourth-quarter boost came with a cost. Analysts polled by FactSet expected Tesla’s average sales price to fall to just over $41,000 in the quarter, the lowest in at least four years.

That doesn’t bode well for Tesla’s fourth-quarter earnings report on Jan. 29 and Tesla’s stock fell 6.1% on Thursday.

Musk donated more than $250 million to Trump’s campaign and is a regular guest at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Tesla investors have pushed the stock up more than 50% since the election on hopes the new administration will streamline electric vehicle regulations and address other Musk policy priorities.

In 2022, Tesla predicted that its sales would grow 50% most years, but the prediction ran into an aging model lineup and increased competition in China, Europe and the U.S. In the U.S., analysts say most early adopters of technology already own electric vehicles, and more mainstream buyers have concerns about range, price and the ability to find charging stations on longer trips.

The fourth-quarter deliveries fell thousands short of Wall Street expectations. Analysts polled by data provider FactSet expected sales of 498,000 vehicles.

Falling sales early in the year led to once-unheard of discounts for the automaker, cutting into its industry-leading profit margins.

Competition from legacy and startup automakers is also growing as they try to nibble away at the company’s market share.

Daniel Ives, a financial analyst at Wedbush, said he thinks the stock should be valued more on its promise of creating fully self-driving, autonomous vehicles and its AI technology and is still worth buying despite the sales drop.

“We have never viewed Tesla simply as a car company … instead we have always viewed Musk and Tesla as a leading disruptive technology global player,” wrote Ives. “And the first part of this grand strategic vision has taken shape.”

The fourth-quarter sales, while a record for Tesla, show that the company’s aging model lineup is reaching saturation in the entry-level luxury vehicle market, said Morningstar Analyst Seth Goldstein.

Aside from the Cybertruck, which has had limited appeal, Tesla’s newest consumer model is the Y small SUV which first went on sale in 2020.

To meet Tesla management’s guidance of 20% to 30% annual sales growth this year, the company will need to come out with a vehicle priced in the mid $30,000s to appeal to more mainstream buyers who might be considering gas, electric or hybrid vehicles, Goldstein said.

Tesla has floated the possibility of a new version of the Model Y that would cost in the mid $30,000s that may be smaller inside than the current Y with fewer features, Goldstein said.

“At that point you’re comparable to some Hondas and Fords and GMs,” Goldstein said. “It takes you out of the luxury market to the more affordable vehicle market.”

Jeff Schuster, vice president of automotive research Global Data, said Tesla faces intense competition worldwide from EV makers in China, the U.S. and elsewhere, many of which are selling EVs to more mainstream buyers. “If they want to continue to see the growth they had, they need to expand to other sizes and price points,” he said.

Musk’s support of Trump for U.S. president also could be turning off some buyers who may be more environmentally conscious and lean toward Democrats, Schuster said. A broader, less costly lineup would appeal to a larger group of buyers, he said. “I suppose the choices that he’s made on the political front don’t line up with a good portion of his buyers’ profile,” Schuster said.

Industry experts say that Tesla used to be the only automaker with credible electric vehicles, but now others such as China’s BYD now have more to offer.

At present, automakers have 75 electric vehicle models for sale in the U.S. Through the first nine months of last year, electric vehicle sales slowed in the U.S., but they are still growing.

Through September, new EV sales rose 7.2% to about 936,000 in the U.S., according to Motorintelligence.com. That’s slower growth than the 47% increase in 2023. But EV sales this year still are likely to surpass last year’s record of 1.19 million. Most other automakers will report full-year sales on Friday.

Nearly all of Tesla’s sales last quarter came from the smaller and less-expensive Models 3 and Y, with the company selling only 23,640 of its more expensive models that include X and S, as well as the new Cybertruck.

Tesla’s global electric vehicle sales edged out Chinese rival BYD, which announced Thursday that its sales soared 41% last year including 1.77 million EVs. The company is vying with Tesla for the world’s top selling EV maker.

Fourth-quarter production of 459,445 vehicles was below total deliveries for the quarter, and full year production of 1.77 million was less than the year’s sales.

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Condon reported from New York City.

(AP) – Five years ago, a cluster of people in Wuhan, China, fell sick with a virus never before seen in the world.

The germ didn’t have a name, nor did the illness it would cause. It wound up setting off a pandemic that exposed deep inequities in the global health system and reshaped public opinion about how to control deadly emerging viruses.

The virus is still with us, though humanity has built up immunity through vaccinations and infections. It’s less deadly than it was in the pandemic’s early days and it no longer tops the list of leading causes of death. But the virus is evolving, meaning scientists must track it closely.

Where did the SARS-CoV-2 virus come from?

We don’t know. Scientists think the most likely scenario is that it circulated in bats, like many coronaviruses. They think it then infected another species, probably racoon dogs, civet cats or bamboo rats, which in turn infected humans handling or butchering those animals at a market in Wuhan, where the first human cases appeared in late November 2019.

That’s a known pathway for disease transmission and likely triggered the first epidemic of a similar virus, known as SARS. But this theory has not been proven for the virus that causes COVID-19. Wuhan is home to several research labs involved in collecting and studying coronaviruses, fueling debate over whether the virus instead may have leaked from one.

It’s a difficult scientific puzzle to crack in the best of circumstances. The effort has been made even more challenging by political sniping around the virus’ origins and by what international researchers say are moves by China to withhold evidence that could help.

The true origin of the pandemic may not be known for many years — if ever.

How many people died from COVID-19?

Probably more than 20 million. The World Health Organization has said member countries reported more than 7 million deaths from COVID-19 but the true death toll is estimated to be at least three times higher.

In the U.S., an average of about 900 people a week have died of COVID-19 over the past year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The coronavirus continues to affect older adults the most. Last winter in the U.S., people age 75 and older accounted for about half the nation’s COVID-19 hospitalizations and in-hospital deaths, according to the CDC.

“We cannot talk about COVID in the past, since it’s still with us,” WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

What vaccines were made available?

Scientists and vaccine-makers broke speed records developing COVID-19 vaccines that have saved tens of millions of lives worldwide – and were the critical step to getting life back to normal.

Less than a year after China identified the virus, health authorities in the U.S. and Britain cleared vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna. Years of earlier research — including Nobel-winning discoveries that were key to making the new technology work — gave a head start for so-called mRNA vaccines.

Today, there’s also a more traditional vaccine made by Novavax, and some countries have tried additional options. Rollout to poorer countries was slow but the WHO estimates more than 13 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally since 2021.

The vaccines aren’t perfect. They do a good job of preventing severe disease, hospitalization and death, and have proven very safe, with only rare serious side effects. But protection against milder infection begins to wane after a few months.

Like flu vaccines, COVID-19 shots must be updated regularly to match the ever-evolving virus — contributing to public frustration at the need for repeated vaccinations. Efforts to develop next-generation vaccines are underway, such as nasal vaccines that researchers hope might do a better job of blocking infection.

Which variant is dominating now?

Genetic changes called mutations happen as viruses make copies of themselves. And this virus has proven to be no different.

Scientists named these variants after Greek letters: alpha, beta, gamma, delta and omicron. Delta, which became dominant in the U.S. in June 2021, raised a lot of concerns because it was twice as likely to lead to hospitalization as the first version of the virus.

Then in late November 2021, a new variant came on the scene: omicron.

“It spread very rapidly,” dominating within weeks, said Dr. Wesley Long, a pathologist at Houston Methodist in Texas. “It drove a huge spike in cases compared to anything we had seen previously.”

But on average, the WHO said, it caused less severe disease than delta. Scientists believe that may be partly because immunity had been building due to vaccination and infections.

“Ever since then, we just sort of keep seeing these different subvariants of omicron accumulating more different mutations,” Long said. “Right now, everything seems to locked on this omicron branch of the tree.”

The omicron relative now dominant in the U.S. is called XEC, which accounted for 45% of variants circulating nationally in the two-week period ending Dec. 21, the CDC said. Existing COVID-19 medications and the latest vaccine booster should be effective against it, Long said, since “it’s really sort of a remixing of variants already circulating.”

What do we know about long COVID?

Millions of people remain in limbo with a sometimes disabling, often invisible, legacy of the pandemic called long COVID.

It can take several weeks to bounce back after a bout of COVID-19, but some people develop more persistent problems. The symptoms that last at least three months, sometimes for years, include fatigue, cognitive trouble known as “brain fog,” pain and cardiovascular problems, among others.

Doctors don’t know why only some people get long COVID. It can happen even after a mild case and at any age, although rates have declined since the pandemic’s early years. Studies show vaccination can lower the risk.

It also isn’t clear what causes long COVID, which complicates the search for treatments. One important clue: Increasingly researchers are discovering that remnants of the coronavirus can persist in some patients’ bodies long after their initial infection, although that can’t explain all cases.