And again, this is just one poll, small sample size, caveat, caveat, caveat. And that is holding back Biden’s overall level of support in the poll. If one party’s base is upset at something about their party, you can only imagine what the Independents and the other side think about it. So I think this is almost certainly a problem for Biden, in some respect. There’s not much good news to go off of if you’re hoping to defeat Donald Trump without something from above coming in to shake up the race.
That makes me want to touch on something you just mentioned, which is the possibility of a third-party candidate. 10 percent of our respondents volunteered that they simply wouldn’t vote, or they would vote for someone else, if Donald Trump and Joe Biden were the candidates. And those weren’t options we listed to them. Those were options they went out of their way to tell us when we presented them with a presidential election matchup that looks increasingly likely. So to close out this poll, for now, it clearly dispels the wishful thinking, if we can call it that, of those who, within the Republican Party, want to see Trump defeated. They’re prominent — the Never Trumpers, who have invested both their time and their money into the idea that someone can rise up and beat him.
Walters detailed his sense of betrayal in the book. As Walters described it, Mickelson’s reputation as a losing gambler enabled the golfer to have access to place large wagers with bookmakers, who would severely limit the size of Walters’ bets because he was a known winner. The former Cincinnati Reds manager was banned from baseball for betting on his own team. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Julia Simon, Isabella Anderson, Desiree Ibekwe, Renan Borelli, Mahima Chablani, Nell Gallogly, Jeffrey Miranda, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer and Maddy Masiello. Nate Cohn, The New York Times’s chief political analyst, talks us through the first Times/Siena polling of the 2024 election cycle.
Well, they’re polling very low right now. I mean, Tim Scott and Mike Pence are at 3 percent and 2 percent. I think that they haven’t been tested on the national stage yet, because they haven’t emerged as major players in this race. Maybe if they did, it would go a lot better for them than it’s gone for Ron DeSantis. I think that if you’re the Biden campaign, your task is fairly straightforward, not necessarily to pull off, but at least to identify.
And whenever we tested the — I’ll call them “woke issues,” like taking on woke businesses or fighting the woke Left in schools — they didn’t fare that well. It’s not that Republicans disagreed and thought that Republicans shouldn’t fight these fights over woke. They just thought that other values and other issues were more important.
Now, voters may not be right about whether the economy is better or worse than it was then. I’ll leave that to the economists to debate. But what’s clear is that Biden is certainly not getting credit for the improving economy yet, and he may still be blamed for an economy that voters simply don’t think is good at all. And I’d add one more thing, which is that voters know these candidates really well.
- He had 54 percent of Republican primary voters to 17 percent for Ron DeSantis.
- You have to persuade voters that you’re doing a decent job.
- As Walters described it, Mickelson’s reputation as a losing gambler enabled the golfer to have access to place large wagers with bookmakers, who would severely limit the size of Walters’ bets because he was a known winner.
- It’s much larger than the lead that Donald Trump ever had in the last Republican primary.
- And that, based on this poll, is just not looking likely, unless somehow, Trump is literally disqualified from running through a criminal conviction before the primary is completed.
- And in our poll, none — that is, zero of the respondents — in this MAGA category said that Donald Trump has committed serious federal crimes.
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And never mind the fact, of course, that Donald Trump actually did lose to Joe Biden three years ago. On the Trump side of the ledger, I think that it’s a little weirder to think about what Trump needs to do in the same sort of terms. Because the poll doesn’t really suggest that he has an obvious path to, like, 51 percent of the vote or something. And I find it hard to believe that the people who believe he’s a criminal or who believe that he’s a threat to democracy can be talked out of that too easily with the right words on the trail.
Honestly, I think this is a notch worse than that. I mean, what we see — what we see since 2016 isn’t simply a low turnout among Black and Hispanic voters. We increasingly see both Democratic turnout declining further, and now, Republicans beginning to actually make gains. So it’s not just that non-white voters seem to be staying home, it’s that some more of the non-white voters who are turning out are supporting Donald Trump and other Republican candidates. How much of his problem is in the second bucket? Even though there’s a case that the economy is getting better, 49 percent of voters in this poll said the economy was poor, to just 2 percent who said it was excellent.
Certainly, DeSantis’s weapons aren’t strong enough to bring down the castle, but it’s not obvious to me that the problem is the weapons as much as the fortress. And Donald Trump is someone who’s been at the top of the Republican Party for the better part of a decade, and Republican voters have rallied around him in the face of the kind of issues that would ordinarily bring down a candidate. So I don’t see very much cause for anyone else to have hope here either. This group of voters is more affluent. It’s likelier to say that they’re only somewhat conservative, or in some cases, even call themselves moderates.
But we have seen these problems for Democrats and Joe Biden before. In the midterm election, https://www.gclub.co/askmebet-slot-football-betting/ Black turnout was really quite weak. There’s an information ecosystem that is in play here.