Americans Report Openness To Voting for Trump in Landslide Numbers
A new poll finds that a wide majority of Americans are open to voting President Donald Trump in for a second term this November, with a significant increase from last year.
The poll, conducted by The Hill and HarrisX and released Thursday, found 62 percent of registered voters expressed openness to casting their ballot for Trump, compared with only 38 percent who said they wouldn’t vote for him.
The survey, which polled 1,001 registered voters between Feb. 14 and Feb. 15, with a margin of error of plus- or minus-3.1 percentage points, differed dramatically from a March 2019 poll on the matter from the same source.
In that poll, 54 percent of registered voters were open to voting for the incumbent, while 46 percent said they’d never check the box for Trump.
“The state of the economy proved to be the main reason voters would re-elect Trump, at 19 percent, up 7 percentage point from when this survey was last taken,” The Hill reported.
“Other top reasons were the current field of Democratic Presidential candidates pushing ideas that are too liberal, at 12 percent, and his tough stance on immigration, at 9 percent.”
Republican pollster B.J. Martino, a partner at The Tarrance Group, said America’s pocketbook was the driver behind the change.
“The primary reason for that turnaround is public perception of the state of the economy. It is the single largest reason in the poll (at 19 percent), and the only reason that has shown significant growth from a year ago,” he said.
“At the same time, observers should not sleep on the impact of views of the Democratic field,” he continued. “A strong economy combined with dubious field of Democrat is providing a clear opportunity for the Trump campaign. The president can now make his case to a segment of voters who only a year ago said they would never vote for him.”
That “dubious field” is kind of putting it mildly.
With or without Russian help, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders seems like the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, something which doesn’t exactly augur well for the party’s hopes in November, when they’ll have to appeal to the wide swath of the American populace that doesn’t find an unabashed socialist who was awfully fond of the Soviet Union and was a shill for Nicaraguan strongman Daniel Ortega all that agreeable.
HarrisX CEO Dritan Nesho agreed that the economy was Trump’s major selling point.
“The context in which the election is held will matter greatly: when looking at the economy, Trump’s approval is much higher and in the upper-50s,” Nesho, whose firm handled the polling, said.
“Polls therefore suggest it’s an open contest that gives the advantage to Trump if fought on the background of a strong economy and staying the course versus very liberal democratic policies like the Green New Deal or ‘Medicare for All.’”
And that’s the problem.
Assume, for a second, that the Democrats manage to narrowly avert the extinction-level event that would be Bernie Sanders crashing into their world of hopes like a giant meteor.
All right. You still have a lot of smaller meteors out there who believe in things like “Medicare for All.”
Even the more moderate candidates in the Democratic field have shifted to the left — and will likely have to shift further when you consider the necessity of appealing to the Sanders base, which has proven once before they’re perfectly willing to stay home and let Donald Trump become president if not properly ministered to.
That’s a hard act to balance when you’re trying to run against a conservative who’s done a good job with the economy.
Beyond that, the poll found that every group — Democrats, Republicans and independents — was more open to voting for Trump even though (or perhaps because) the poll was taken just after the president’s impeachment trial had finished.
“The number of Republican voters who said they would never vote for Trump in 2019 dropped 5 percentage points in 2020,” The Hill noted.
“The poll found the same amount of percentage drop among Democrats who said they would never vote for the President. The biggest drop, however, was among Independent voters who said they would never vote for Donald Trump, which fell from 51 percent in 2019 to 37 percent in 2020.”
Obviously, being open to voting for Trump is different from voting for him. That said, an 8-point jump in the number of people expressing that openness is a sign that Americans don’t share the same concerns the Democrats do.
Despite all of the crowing about how we’re facing a threat to democracy in our nation’s highest office, a threat who makes policy via Twitter, voters seem comfortable-ish with the president.
There are other indicators Trump’s seeing a rise in support when he most needs it.
A Gallup poll released this week found that, for the first time in the history of the survey, more Americans approved of Trump than disapproved of him, with 49 percent approving and 48 percent disapproving.
The RealClearPolitics polling average on Trump’s job performance has him at 46 percent approval and 51 percent disapproval.
If that doesn’t sound great, consider the fact the president was over 13 points in the red back in October. The numbers have steadily closed since then.
The more important question: Who will be facing Trump?
The Nevada caucuses happen Saturday; another flop and Joe Biden’s performance in South Carolina almost becomes an afterthought.
Even if Biden recovers and limps to the nomination, the former vice president still doesn’t seem like the invincible titan he was supposed to be when the race started.
Sanders, as previously stated, would be a disaster.
Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar would induce plenty of progressives to stay home.
One debate can’t finish off a candidacy, but Mike Bloomberg’s Vegas debut made it clear money can’t buy him the nomination and it certainly won’t buy him the White House.
Everyone else is, for all intents and purposes, out of it.
With that kind of opposition, you can imagine why people are more and more open to giving the president a second term.
Compared with the 54 percent that said they were open to voting for him last year, 62 percent is a landslide number — and it’s yet another sign that if the Democrats can’t get their act together, this is going to be a long year.
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