According to a freshly released Washington Post/ABC News survey, a solid majority of the American electorate thinks Donald Trump should face criminal charges for trying to illegally overturn the 2020 election (56 percent), for fomenting the January 6 riot (54 percent), and for his mishandling of classified information (54 percent). There’s a even a strong plurality (49 percent) who believe the criminal charges the twice-impeached ex-president is already facing in New York are appropriate and not politically motivated.
The same survey respondents say they would vote for Trump (49 percent) over Biden (42 percent) in 2024. In fact, 36 percent say they would “definitely” vote for Trump, while only 32 percent say that about Biden.
For context, the FiveThirtyEight average of polls, does not show any major slippage in Biden’s approval numbers, so this WaPo/ABC News survey looks like an outlier, at least for now.
What’s notable, however, is this idea that Trump should be in prison but maybe he should be reelected if the alternative is another four years with Biden at the helm. There’s clearly a sizable number of people who are holding these two thoughts in their head at the same time.
Maybe people just aren’t very honest when they answer surveys. I don’t really know how to explain results like this.
If you have any insights, leave them in the comments.
Insights?
It seems a significant minority of people have accepted the alternate reality that Trump and his core team of Congressional supporters and their media machines have been painting for the last 8 years. It seems to be working for them, at least as far as this poll indicates.
Granted, I live in a place that exists within that bubble. And almost everyone I know who is not a Democrat thinks that the only worse economic time in this country in the last 100 years was The Great Depression. And in their view the Biden administration is the owner of this situation. On top of that, all those armed IRS agents are going to soon be swarming Southwest Ohio to sweep up all the honest, tax paying white people, while ignoring all the Mexicans and various other foreigners in the county who, I guess, are somehow siphoning off Biden Bucks in massive amounts, while hard working white people like themselves are in the cross-hairs of the coming socialist takeover.
Just a little example of how people here think, and how reflexive and unconscious is their bias. My little township, with all Republican trustees, by the way, voted on electrical aggregation a few years ago. Since then, every two years they negotiate for best rates and recommend a supplier for the entire township based on those negotiations. Everyone, of course, has the opportunity to opt-out at any time, with no penalty, and choose another supplier for themselves. But you are automatically included in this renewal if you don’t return the opt-out notice. Well, in case anyone hasn’t noticed, since the last renewal 2 years ago, electrical rates have increased. Actually, by a pretty fair amount. And all these rural Republicans here have noticed. They are all up in arms about the looming rate increase. After receiving the notice this past week, I took the time to go to the state website and have a look at all of the available suppliers, and their rates and contract obligations. What I found is that there is no better deal available in this county than the one we are getting. But who do you think the residents are blaming for this? Yes, they are bitching about the township government and the trustees, but when you look at all the local social media, guess who is really to blame for this situation? It is Joe Biden and the Democrats. Yes, we Democrats have so fucked up the whole of the economy that even way down in this podunk rural township in SW Ohio, the tentacles of Democratic socialism have crept into the electrical supply chain and totally fucked them over. We have such power that we single-handedly ramrodded an increase in their utility bill.
So when I step back and look at a poll like this, I really don’t have any difficulty squaring the circle when it comes to how people view this sort of thing. We have become a nation of idiots, driven like lemmings by the social and media ponds in which we swim, and there really is no short term solution for this. Perhaps if, in the short term, we somehow avoid the death of American democracy in the next few years we might get an opportunity to get things headed in the right direction. If we don’t then, well, this is just a big masturbatory exercise. If we do get an opportunity we still have all these people to deal with. People who need what is essentially deprogramming from a cult. And how, exactly, do we do that for tens of millions of unwilling people? I wish I had that answer.
In another topic I commented thusly:
[blockquote] Unemployment on election night in 2010 was still very high, stupidly high, a terrible thing to defend. But inflation was low and housing didn’t even bottom until 2012. We never recovered 25-54 employment rates until 2019!
On the other hand, most of the evidence shows that it was the liberalization of cultural norms in an increasingly multi-racial country which drove the reaction to Obama’s record, not really the record itself. Additionally, we have the best job market since 1998 and The People hate it! Perhaps it’s because this is the first bout of inflation in 40 years so no one really knows what it felt like, but they knew what jobless recoveries felt like.[/blockquote]
https://progresspond.com/2023/04/11/the-republican-coalition-is-built-on-hostility-to-common-enemies/#comment-2249144
So there’s a lot of ways we can look at this:
1. “It’s The Economy, Stupid” is no longer operable and largely hasn’t been since at least 2016. Presidential job approval used to coincide pretty well with the economy. Or rather, how people “felt” about the economy was almost equivalent to the status of the job market. But this hasn’t been the case since inflation picked up in June 2021.
2. Coincidentally, or not, the withdrawal of Afghanistan happened at a similar time that inflation moved up. The withdrawal took off a lot of sheen that “Biden was a steady hand and knew what he was doing” (I think it went almost as good as you could have hoped tbh, and the media/The People are not in any sort of reality based position).
3. Ever since he hasn’t really been able to recover. Additionally, Young Voters (aged 18-29) do not clap like seals as Republican partisans do for their presidents, and they are a lot likelier to be down on Biden because he’s not as liberal as they would want. This WaPo/ABC poll captures this. Additionally, Gallup sees Biden’s approval among 18-29’s as historically low. However, YouGov/The Economist has recently seen an uptick, where 18-29’s approve at the highest levels in a while (+30 now compared to -8 July 2022). So who is correct? Gallup? WaPo/ABC? YouGov?
4. What if it actually is “It’s the Economy, Stupid?” but because of inflation “the job market” just isn’t as high up in importance. The thing is that would definitely signal a new normal. Even during inflation of 1970’s, feelings on The Economy matched the job market. But as I said, no inflation in 40 years means no memory of any lived experience of elevated prices. So the reaction is wildly different.
5. But then if The People HATE the economy, why are they able to vote on supposed “cultural issues” more than economics? Perhaps The Economy isn’t as bad as people think that it is, and you can tell because people are still spending money, people are making more money than ever, and the savings rate started increasing last Fall so you can’t say they’re just spending away their extra earned income. People seem to recognize this because Pollsters also ask how their personal financial situation is doing, and everyone is basically saying they’re doing great.
6. In 2022, Democrats were able to keep the Republicans to only a +2 victory despite all of this inflation. Despite Old People voting at ungodly levels. Despite the share of the white electorate increasing for the first time since the early 90’s. Is this a good sign, or a bad one? 2022 was the most educated electorate in US history, and higher educated people are continuing to migrate to the Democrats. However, there’s the flip side to this story whereby Democrats do not any longer “benefit” from the voters who only vote at disparate moments (usually in general elections) and a large chunk of them are very important to Trump’s coalition after they left Obama (white noncollege, young black men (not a large absolute number but it still hurts to go from 98% to 85-90%) and Clinton (Hispanic/Asian voters of all sorts). So in 2024 it’ll be a much less white electorate, but on the other hand will Trump drive out an insane number of disparate voters who watch The Bachelor and are otherwise tuned out from politics. Midterms aren’t very predictive of the next year, either.
Anyway, that’s a wide collection of my (conflicting) thoughts. I could sell you on any of it; there’s evidence for it all.
Here’s a vote for the possibility that the normal, average citizen (quite rationally) isn’t thinking about an election 18 months away from now, and that some measurably large percentage of our fellow citizens are therefore responding to pollsters as if the question were “which reality TV star’s show would you rather watch this summer”?
(Otherwise, I’ve got nothing.)
3.5