Last week, just before former President Donald Trump was convicted, I wrote that we are finally moving from possibility to solid reality, and it may be very different from what the polls predicted. The first batch of post-verdict polls has arrived, and we must admit that, yes, a lot of things look pretty much the same and the race between President Trump and President Joe Biden remains very close.
Not that the picture is all apples to apples: A June poll by The New York Times with Siena College found that Biden outperformed Trump by about 2 percentage points after the verdict. That alone isn't surprising: The result is within the margin of error for most polls and relatively close to the slight fluctuations detected in other recent surveys.
A closer look under the hood reveals that there may be more to this 2% change than meets the eye.
What makes the Times/Siena poll stand out is that it's a repeat poll: About 2,000 people who responded before the ruling were surveyed again. And the change wasn't evenly spread across the board. A closer look under the hood suggests there may be more to this 2% shift than meets the eye.
“The shift was especially pronounced among the young, nonwhite, Democratic-leaning and uninterested voters who had put Trump in the lead in early polls,” the Times noted. “Among those who voted for Biden in 2020 but previously said they would vote for Trump in 2024, about a quarter now say they will support Biden.”
Given the demographics of those surveyed, “Biden may have seen an uptick of more than two points among the people we were able to re-contact,” Nate Cohn, chief political analyst at The New York Times, explained in a newsletter on Wednesday. “Older, whiter, more interested voters were more likely to re-participate in the survey — groups that were much less likely to change their support after the verdict.”
Admittedly, this type of poll isn't very good if you want to get a true representation of the electorate, because it relies on a set of respondents who also agree to a follow-up survey. This survey contacted people who participated in a battleground state poll in May and a national poll in April, so it's even harder to get a truly representative group. But nevertheless, this survey tells us some important things:
Importantly, a jury finding Trump guilty could be a breakthrough for Biden with exactly the voters he needs to reach before November. An NBC News poll in April found that only 64% of registered voters said they were “very interested” in the 2024 election, the lowest figure in any survey at this point in the campaign since the question was first asked in 2008. The NBC News poll also found that “only 36% of voters ages 18 to 34 rated themselves very interested in the election.” Yet the Times/Siena poll revealed that this group changed the most after the verdict.
Holding Trump accountable is something worth shouting about, and it dovetails well with Biden's other campaign themes.
A New York Times Opinion focus group survey in February found that Trump is highly popular among people who are not interested in the race and have no idea how bad a person he is or how many horrible things he has done. New York Magazine's Ed Kilgore concluded that “low-information voters who dislike politics so much that they are unwilling to dig into the facts and evidence on political topics are highly vulnerable to the kind of disinformation that favors Donald Trump.”
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My colleague Jim Downey argued on Monday that the Biden campaign should not waste this rare opportunity to define Trump, pushing back against the reported notion that some Democrats close to the White House think “voters already know who Trump is.” I don't know if the Biden campaign read that article, but its strategy has begun to shift since then. The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that “Trump's felony convictions are set to become a regular part of his campaign messaging, liberally incorporating the phrase 'convicted felon' in statements, press releases and possibly paid ads.”
Once he has their attention, Biden should focus on informing newly interested voters about the popular policies he implemented during his first term, of which many appear unaware. This could work well in conjunction with his efforts to target anti-Trump Republicans, a persuadable group of voters, by highlighting the former president's unfitness. Such a strategy is better than pandering moves such as moving right on immigration, because it would allow him to close the gap with Trump without scaring away disillusioned Democrats who are threatening to stay home.
Holding Trump accountable is worth shouting about, and it dovetails nicely with Biden's other campaign themes. There's certainly a lot of time between now and November, and many more polls to come. But these early results point to a potential path for Biden to finally break the “Teflon Don” narrative and inspire Democrats to turn out in droves to vote in this fall's election.
