Just ahead of last week’s guilty verdicts for former President Donald Trump, I wrote that we were “finally moving away from possibility to hard and fast reality, which may look very different than the predictions based on polling.” The first batch of post-verdict polls are in and, well, I must admit that a lot of things are looking very much the same, with the race between Trump and President Joe Biden still neck and neck.
That’s not to say things are entirely the same. According to the results of a survey The New York Times conducted in June with Siena College, Biden gained on Trump by about 2 percentage points after the verdict. By itself, that’s not eyebrow-raising. The result is within the margin of error of most polls and tracks relatively closely with the tiny swing other recent surveys have detected.
A look below the hood shows that there may be more to that 2% swing than initially meets the eye.
This Times/Siena survey stands out because it was a recontact study; nearly 2,000 people who’d responded before the verdict were polled again. Moreover, the shift wasn’t evenly spread across the board. A look below the hood shows that there may be more to that 2% swing than initially meets the eye.
“The shift was especially pronounced among the young, nonwhite and disengaged Democratic-leaning voters who have propelled Mr. Trump to a lead in the early polls,” the Times noted. “Of the people who previously told us they had voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but would vote for Mr. Trump in 2024, around one-quarter now said they would instead stick with Mr. Biden.”
The demographics of the people who shifted means “it’s possible Mr. Biden gained a bit more than the two-point improvement among those we successfully recontacted,” Nate Cohn, the Times’ chief political analyst, explained in his newsletter Wednesday. “That’s because older, white and highly engaged voters were relatively likely to retake the survey, and those groups were much less likely to swing in the aftermath of the verdict.”
Granted, this kind of poll isn’t great if you’re looking to get a truly representative sense of the electorate, since it hinges on an already defined set of respondents who must then agree to a follow-up survey as well. This survey reached out to people who’d participated in a May battleground-states poll and an April nationwide poll, which makes it even harder to yield a truly representative pool. But despite that, the survey tells us a couple of important things.
Importantly, a jury finding Trump guilty is the exact type of thing that can break through with the kinds of voters Biden needs to reach before November. An April NBC News poll found that only 64% of registered voters are “very interested” in the 2024 elections, the lowest at that point in the race than in any survey since the question was first asked in 2008. Tellingly, “only 36% of voters ages 18 to 34 rate themselves as highly interested in the election,” that NBC News poll found. But the Times/Sienna poll finds that’s the group that shifted the most after the verdict.
Trump being held accountable is something worth shouting from the rooftops, which folds in neatly with Biden’s other campaign themes.
A New York Times Opinion focus group in February found that Trump was doing great with people who are tuned out from the race and unaware of just how bad a person he is or how many awful things he’s done. As New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore concluded, “low-information voters who dislike politics so much that they are not inclined to dig into facts and evidence touching on political topics are highly vulnerable to the kind of disinformation that benefits Donald Trump.”
My colleague Jim Downie argued Monday that the Biden camp shouldn’t waste this valuable opportunity to define Trump, and he pushed back on the idea some Democrats close to the White House reportedly have that “voters already know who Trump is.” I can’t speak to whether the Biden campaign read that piece, but since then its strategy has begun to shift. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that “Trump’s felony conviction would become a regular part of the campaign’s message, with plans to incorporate the term ‘convicted felon’ freely in statements and in press releases — and potentially its paid advertising.”
Once he’s gotten their attention, Biden should be focused on informing newly tuned-in voters about the popular policies he’s delivered on during his first term — as many voters appear not to have noticed. It’s an effort that can work well alongside his efforts to target anti-Trump Republicans, a group of potentially persuadable voters, by highlighting the former president’s unfitness for office. Such a strategy is also better than pandering moves like swinging to the right on immigration because it can close the gap with Trump in a way that won’t drive off disenchanted Democrats who are threatening to stay home.
Trump being held accountable is something worth shouting from the rooftops, which folds in neatly with Biden’s other campaign themes. Yes, there’s still a lot of time between now and November, and many more rounds of polling to come. But these early results lay out a potential path for Biden to finally crack the “Teflon Don” narrative and encourage Democrats to turn out in force this fall.