At least they still hate Trump
I’m not really sure what to make of this but I thought I’d throw it out there anyway. Let’s just say I have a hard time understanding people who would vote for Trump or the GOP in general at this point, But going back and forth like the two parties are even in the same universe is incoherent in my book.
A critical group of swing voters was asked to give a brief, one-word description of the emotions they feel upon seeing President Biden.
The answers were bleak: “Indifferent … mixed to indifferent … bored … ambivalent … frustrated … flabbergasted … lost.”
Then the same voters, who had cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, were asked for a show of hands for those who would support the former president in a rematch vs. the sitting president.
“None of you,” Rich Thau, president of market research company Engagious, said to his focus group Tuesday night in Pennsylvania.
It’s the same thread Thau has seen in focus groups all year. In six key battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — he has asked 89 Trump-Biden voters the same question about how they would vote in a rematch, and just 13 would prefer the former president.
This independent-inclined group has grown quite sour on Biden and the Democrats, but they have little interest inreturning to a Trump presidency and remain reluctant to support candidates in midterms who present themselves as mini-Trumps. And that may be the key to how candidates can win the election next month.
[…]
Conservatives outnumbered liberals by nine percentage points in 2016 and by 14 percent in 2020, according to exit polling data. After narrowly winning independents in 2016, Trump lost them to Biden by 13 percentage points four years later, ending his chances of a second term.
“Only one other major party presidential candidate has lost independents by a larger margin than Trump — Walter Mondale in 1984,” Winston wrote.
Thau, whose main work focuses on public policy messaging for trade associations, dug down into the key states and, ahead of the 2020 election, discovered that about three-fourths of the Obama-Trump voters planned to stick with Trump.
“These people were wound very, very tight. They were unbelievably stressed. You asked them what emotion they felt in the last week. It was anxiety, fear, unhappiness,” Thau said in a recent interview, during which he showed highlights from the past several years of research.
This group also was inclined to some degree of “xenophobia” and “bizarre conspiracy theories,” he said. But a critical bloc broke away from Trump after four years of chaotic governance.
In a March 2021 focus group, the Trump-Biden swing voters gave a better, but not great, view of their emotion upon seeing Biden: “Relaxed … a little relief … positive … more calm … mostly relief … trust and relief … renewed pride … renewed calm.”
By April 2022, after a run of bad news and high inflation, a different group of Trump-Biden voters expressed feeling just deflated by the new president: “Bored … confused … lack of confidence … uninterested … apathy … silly or goofy.”
They almost all support abortion rights and disapprove of the Supreme Court’s June ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, Thau has found. They didn’t place much emphasis on abortion rights while voting for Trump in 2016 because they wanted an outsider who would shake things up.
Abortion animates their thoughts heading into the November elections, but inflation is also very central to their everyday stresses. Yet at the same time, this sliver of voters does not blame anyone in particular for high costs.
“They typically don’t go to Biden and the Democrats,” Thau said. “They will say that it’s the pandemic and all the spending that came out of the pandemic. It has to do with supply chains. It has to do with Putin and Russia.”
When it comes to news consumption, the vast majority of these swing voters first turn to their local TV news stations, with CNN, Fox News and Facebook providing backup information.
And they typically know very little about federal policy debates. One group last fall was asked about the roughly $1 trillion infrastructure plan that had been approved just a couple of days before: No one knew about it. Another group could not name a single legislative policy that Biden was pushing on Capitol Hill at that moment.
On Tuesday night, Thau asked if anyone knew the abortion position of John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee in Pennsylvania’s critical Senate race. No one knew.
But the group clearly favored Fetterman, with nine backing him, two supporting Republican nominee Mehmet Oz and two undecided.
These swing voters may be unaware of Fetterman’s strong support for abortion rights but they loved his outsider persona in describing their feelings toward him: “Weed … different … tax evasion … unpolished … tall … plain-spoken.”
Seven of the 13 Pennsylvania swing voters said Fetterman’s stroke concerned them, but only three said it would factor into their vote. Most just wished him a speedy recovery.
“I’m concerned about his health for him. I don’t like these smear attacks,” said a 44-year-old from Lansdale, a northwest suburb of Philadelphia.
… [I]f those independents who decide these races have views similar to Thau’s focus groups, Democratic candidates have a chance to stand out on their own. These voters are “divorcing” their views of Biden toward midterm candidates and instead reviewing everyone closely, with their somewhat idiosyncratic measuring sticks.
“Biden is not what’s in their mind when it comes to voting. They’re not thinking about him and trying to punish Democrats or punish Biden because of what’s happening in the country” Thau said. “They’re looking at the people running for that office and who’s better.”
Hopeful? Maybe. All I can say is that my instincts tell me that people outside the cult are sick of the Trump drama and his inescapable presence hovers over everything. The election is a choice between more of that and … not more of that.