Greg Sargent writes for The New Republic:
President Biden’s brain trust appears confident that
he will ultimately prevail over Donald Trump due to the threat Trump poses to
our constitutional system. By November, the election’s “focus will become
overwhelmingly on democracy,” one top Biden adviser told The New Yorker, adding that “the biggest
images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.”
If so, the Biden campaign had better get cracking.
Some new polling from a top Democratic pollster finds
mixed news for Team Biden on this front: Large swaths of voters appear to have
little awareness of some of Trump’s clearest statements of hostility to
democracy and intent to impose authoritarian rule in a second term, from
his vow to be “dictator for one day” to his vague threat to enact “termination” of provisions in
the Constitution.
That’s maddening for obvious reasons. But it also
presents the Biden campaign with an opportunity. If voters are unaware of all
these statements, there’s plenty of time to make voters aware of
them—and the polling also finds that these statements, when aired to
respondents, shift them against Trump.
The survey—which was conducted by veteran Democratic
pollster Geoff Garin for the group Save My Country and shared with The New
Republic—did something novel. It polled 400 voters in each of three swing
states—Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and weighted them in proportion with
each state’s Electoral College votes. It omitted respondents who voted for
Trump in 2020 and also said Biden didn’t legitimately win.
In short, the poll was designed to survey voters who
are genuinely gettable for Biden. The poll asked them about 10 of Trump’s most
authoritarian statements, including: the two mentioned above, Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our
country,” his vow to pardon rioters who attacked the Capitol,
his promise to prosecute the Biden family without cause,
his threat to inflict mass persecution on the “vermin”
opposition, and a few more.
Result? “Only 31 percent of respondents said they
previously had heard a lot about these statements by Trump,” the memo
accompanying the poll concluded.
The good news for Biden is that when respondents were
presented with these quotes, it prompted a rise in Trump’s negatives. For
instance, after hearing them, the percentage who see him as “out for revenge”
jumped by five points, the percentage who see him as “dangerous” rose by nine points,
and the percentage who see him as a “dictator” climbed by seven points.
“This is an opportunity to move voters and change the
race,” Garin told me, noting that this shows that current public polling, which
has Biden down to Trump, is “not set in concrete.”
If this Democratic polling is right, it might help
explain a dynamic that has perplexed observers. The latest New York Times poll finds Biden trailing Trump by five points among
registered voters even as 53 percent think he committed serious crimes.
Yet voters may still see Trump’s (alleged) criminality
as a theoretical proposition, without connecting it to the type of unbound,
lawless presidency he has told us he’d preside over—in his own words.
Indeed, the poll from Save My Country finds that after
voters are presented with these statements, the percentage of those who view
Trump unfavorably jumps five points, from 53 percent to 58 percent, and 69
percent say Trump will bring “chaos to the presidency and our country.”
In other words, when voters are presented with
evidence straight from Trump’s own mouth, they see an authoritarian second term
as very plausible.
In one sense, the lack of voter awareness of Trump’s
“dictator” threats shows that the Biden campaign and Democrats don’t appear to
have succeeded in making voters aware of the menace Trump poses. Perhaps their
messaging has yet to work, or maybe the party has not seriously used the levers of power at its disposal to
highlight Trump’s staggering corruption and malice.
But if this polling is right, one explanation
that doesn’t seem as plausible is that voters don’t care about these
matters. In fact, all this might in some ways validate one of the Biden camp’s
frequent claims—that voters are so checked out that they aren’t seriously aware
of the threat a second Trump term poses.
The new polling also counters a well-worn refrain from
skittish, nonconfrontational Democrats. They sometimes say Trump’s negatives
are so well known—or “baked in,” as campaign jargon puts it—that there’s no
sense in spending much time on his authoritarian outbursts, affection for
political violence, and wide array of (alleged) crimes. Yet all this may in an
important sense constitute new information for untold numbers of voters.
“Trump’s negatives are not baked into the cake at
all,” Garin told me. Fortunately for the Biden camp, between now and Election
Day there are some eight months to fire up the campaign crucible and ensure
that they do get baked in—good and hard.
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