The news is not getting out on how Bidenomics is helping the economy: NAJ screen shot

Public Opinion – National Politics –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Wait just a doggone minute. Did The New York Times just bury the lede?

In the Sunday Times, a banner headline promoting a public opinion story about the 2024 presidential election proclaimed that President Joe Biden was trailing former President Donald Trump in six key battleground states, and made it look like in a head to head matchup with Trump, Biden was headed for losing the election next year.

We cited that story in my Sunday column: The Emerging ‘Come Retribution’ if Trump Sidesteps Jail and Gets Elected President Again

But on Monday, the Times released another analysis piece on the latest survey research and polling, and the headline changed.

Trump Indictments Haven’t Sunk His Campaign, but a Conviction Might

Polls by The New York Times and Siena College show Trump has some strength in key swing states, in part because of concerns about President Biden’s age.

“But a conviction could be the difference in 2024.”

So the question becomes, how likely is it that Trump will be convicted for at least one of his crimes in 2024, potentially knocking him out of contention to be president? (See our analysis below).

Trump’s 91 felony charges in four different jurisdictions “have not significantly hurt him among voters in battleground states,” the Times reports. “Yet he remains weaker than at least one of his Republican rivals, and if he’s convicted and sentenced in any of his cases, some voters appear ready to turn on him — to the point where he could lose the 2024 election.”

That is significant. People are already complaining about “the polls” again, just as they did in 2016, even on my Facebook pages, so no doubt it is going on all over the internet as well.

The latest polling does find weaknesses for Biden in five key battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Bidea leads in Wisconsin. It also shows Trump doing better than in the past with some younger voters as well as some Black and Hispanic voters.

What’s puzzling is that somehow some voters say Trump would be better on the economy and national security, in spite of much evidence to the contrary. Perhaps that story is not getting out on social media as much as Republican attacks on Biden’s record based on lies?

Of course covering public opinion just based on the latest numbers is not equipped to pick up on that, but as a media analyst as well as a public opinion expert, I can.

Here’s the true lede.

“If the former president is convicted and sentenced — as many of his allies expect him to be in the Jan. 6-related trial held next year in Washington, D.C. — around 6 percent of voters across Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin say they would switch their votes to Mr. Biden. That would be enough, potentially, to decide the election.”

Convict Trump for being at the head of a seditious conspiracy to incite an insurrection in Washington and the ELECTION IS OVER!

Should that not be the banner headline and lede?

The Times interviewed Kurt Wallach, 62, a registered Republican from Maricopa County in Arizona, who said he voted for Trump in 2020, and thought the former president had performed generally well in office, except for the start of the coronavirus pandemic. But now, considering the pending criminal cases, his views have shifted.

“If he got convicted, I’d say great, put him out of the race, let’s get another Republican,” Mr. Wallach said. “If he’s not been convicted then I’d probably vote for Trump.”

Dakota Jordan, a 26-year-old also from Maricopa County, did not vote in the 2020 election. He said that he would rather not have Mr. Trump in office at all, but that “given the choices,” he would vote for him over Mr. Biden, absent a criminal conviction. “If he was convicted, there’s absolutely no way — I can’t elect a criminal as my leader,” he said.

“Indeed, Mr. Trump remains broadly unpopular,” the Times reports.

A majority of swing state voters view Trump negatively. And the Times/Siena polls show that another Republican candidate, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, would outperform Trump against Biden by 3 percentage points in these six states.

The polls found that Trump leads Biden by between 4 and 10 percentage points in five of the six battleground states with a year to go before the election. A majority of voters say Trump’s policies helped them personally. Roughly the same proportion of voters say they’ve been hurt by Biden’s policies. That’s their perception based on what they are hearing and seeing in whatever media or social media they follow for news.

In spite of an economy that is booming so much that we’ve had to deal with inflation for the first time since the early 1980s, the Times still finds voters in a “sour mood” with “pessimism about the economy,” probably due to high prices, especially on gasoline.

But the surveys underscore the fact that, according to the Times, “in close elections such as the past two presidential races and as 2024 is expected to be, even marginal changes in voting patterns can be enough to swing a state toward a candidate.”

More than half of voters say the economy is in poor shape, despite a multimillion-dollar push by Biden allies to promote his efforts to rebuild the country after the pandemic and record jobs reports and low unemployment numbers. Clearly it’s inflation voters don’t like, with some voters saying they perceive that the country is “heading down the wrong track.”

That’s what the Republicans are telling people, and it is all over conservative media and social media.

It’s not just that the Democrats seem unable to sell this message. Close to half of all voters now consume only conservative media sources, where they hear nothing about all the money that is being spent to shore up the economy and help the environment. They hear nothing positive or even fair and balanced coverage about the president or the economy.

So is it any wonder that voters say they would rather have Trump in charge of the economy than Biden?

No. Media consumption matters.

“Jobs are down because Biden didn’t know how to handle the pandemic,” said Monica Fermin, 51, from Allentown, Pa. “Trump didn’t know at first but Biden was even worse.”

Clearly this immigrant from the Dominican Republic does not know enough about what’s been going on over the past three years to be trusted with the facts. Jobs are not down. They are up.

“Mr. Trump, however, remains in a weaker position than such gains might make it appear,” the Times reports way down in the story.

“How Biden has handled the conflict in the Middle East is easily the biggest factor for me,” said Hamza Rahman, 21, of Warren, Mich., who said he was concerned about America’s involvement in several global conflicts.

But look where he gets his news. He has “relied on social media sites like TikTok to help understand what’s really happening on the ground.”

What’s really happening? On TikTok?

This would appear funny if it were not so tragic.

Trump seems to have gained among voters of color, especially male voters without a college degree, the Times reports. Although it was Black males in urban areas in some of these same states like Detroit, Michigan and Pittsburg, Pennsylvania who voted for Trump in 2016 instead of the woman, Hillary Clinton, that allowed Trump to pull off his surprise victory in the first place.

The Times reports that Trump has made gains with Hispanic voters.

He began his 2016 campaign by declaring that Mexico was sending rapists and criminals across the southern border, so he only earned the support of 28 percent of Hispanics nationally in that election, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2020, Trump’s support among Hispanics rose to 36 percent in his election against Biden.

The Times poll found Trump gaining the support of 42 percent of Hispanic swing-state voters. And he does better among Hispanic voters than his top two rivals, Haley and DeSantis. The Times finds Hispanic voters hostile to anything branded “socialism,” and Trump and other Republicans always claim everything the Democrats do is “socialism.”

Nevermind Republican complaints about immigrants benefiting from our national safety net policies, including Social Security, health care and low income food benefits.

The Times interviewed Elaine Ramirez, 38, a Democrat from Las Vegas, who said Biden vowed to help the economy and lower inflation — promises she said he has failed to deliver.

But in fact he has delivered. The economy is back from the Covid crisis in a big way, and in recent months, inflation has been dropping.

“I think for me it’s all the broken promises from Biden that make me want to switch to Trump,” said Ms. Ramirez, who voted for Biden in 2020 and is considering voting for Trump. “In 2020, I didn’t like what Trump had to say and his womanizing wasn’t great. But Trump is also more dominating and aggressive and maybe we do need someone like that to fix our economy and our country.”

Perhaps in Latin America a “strongman” or “Caudillos” dictator would be OK with people.

Surely that’s not the case here in the United States, certainly not among a majority of the people, or a majority of voters.

In studying the ethics of survey research as an undergraduate and grad student who ran a public opinion lab for a time, it is important not to mislead people about the polls. In 2016, the Times and other national polling celebrities told people that “she’s got this” talking about Hillary Clinton. They were wrong. The polls were all in the 3 percentage point margin of error. Clinton had a slight 1-3 point lead in most of the polls, but the LA Times poll, for example, had Trump with a 7 point lead with two weeks to go before the election. Based on this, and what we were seeing on the ground in Mobile, Alabama, we predicted that they were possibly wrong and that Trump had a better chance of winning in 2016 than the press and media were giving him.

At the same time, the press and broadcast media were all covering every false thing Trump said, even on Twitter, as if it was legitimate political discourse. No wonder Trump won in 2016.

At the end of the day, we do not believe a majority of American voters are going to be fooled again.

Will Trump Be Convicted?

The chances are high that Trump will be convicted on at least some of the charges he faces, especially in the trial in Washington for conspiring to overturn the presidential election of 2020. The jury pool in the District of Columbia is 90 percent Democrat.

Related: Trump Pleads ‘Not Guilty’ in Conspiracy to Overturn the 2020 Presidential Election

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