Ed Kilgore takes a look at the inconceivable result in the Times/Sienna poll showing that huge numbers of people remember the Donald Trump years as glory days for America.
[W]hen the New York Times–Siena polling outfit asked voters “to describe the one thing they remembered most from Donald J. Trump’s presidency, only 5 percent of respondents referred to Jan. 6, and only 4 percent to COVID.” 39 percent cited “Trump’s behavior” as most memorable, and another 24 percent named “the economy.”
Aside from the radical shrinkage of COVID and January 6 in the rearview mirror, what’s remarkable about this reaction is that it had little to do with what we normally think of as specific events, much less issue positions. As political scientist Seth Masket commented, complaints (mostly coming from Biden supporters) about “Trump’s behavior” may well stem from initial reactions to his conduct even before he became president, while positive assessments of “the economy” under Trump are vague:
“Behavior” covers quite a bit of ground, from racist rhetoric to fulfilling campaign promises to assault of women to just tweeting too much. But to an impressive extent, most of the responses in this category have little to do with the Trump presidency at all. Many of these things occurred when he was running for president in 2016 or even earlier.
Similarly, “the economy” is pretty broad terrain. It’s not completely fictitious — the economy, by most measures, was growing at a respectable pace with low unemployment and inflation during Trump’s first three years in office, even if those numbers weren’t notably different from the economy during Barack Obama’s second term … To a considerable degree, voters seem to be saying that things were pretty good for Trump’s first three years, and the fourth wasn’t his fault.
The Times’ own analysis of these rather startling numbers attributes them to “recency bias,” suggesting that voters are letting their current concerns (particularly about inflation) distort their memories of the not-so-distant past. But they also suggest that voters have formed a fixed opinion of Trump and his presidency that may be very difficult to change. If COVID and January 6 are not front of mind when voters think of 2020 and 2021, and the economy as it was in 2019 is recalled as Elysian, what does that say about the Biden campaign’s efforts to remind people of Trump’s responsibility for the reversal of Roe v. Wade? Will voters accept that a Very Bad Thing that happened long after Trump left office was actually his fault?
Unfortunately, many Americans are apparently massively uninformed:
As it happens, a new survey of registered voters was released last week from Navigator Research showing that a sizable number of Americans, incredibly enough, held Biden responsible for “the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the elimination of the federal right to an abortion.” That opinion was held by 34 percent of self-identified independents, 32 percent of Black voters, and 42 percent of Hispanic voters. It helps explain why the Biden campaign is devoting so much energy to connecting the dots between Trump’s Supreme Court appointments and the Dobbs decision. But it also suggests public perceptions of Trump are very hard to change, and that’s a big problem for Democrats.
Oy vey. I just don’t know what to say about that. It’s literally insane.
I guess we just have to accept that Americans want the Trump circus and blame Biden for all the bad stuff that goes along with it.
Jamelle Bouie has some thoughts on this as well. An excerpt:
… “The economy” under Trump is simply the one that existed from Jan. 20, 2017, to March 13, 2020, when the White House declared the coronavirus a national public health emergency. For everything else after that date, the former president gets a pass.
No other president has gotten this kind of excused absence for mismanaging a crisis that happened on his watch. We don’t bracket the secession crisis from our assessment of James Buchanan or the Great Depression from our judgment of Herbert Hoover or the hostage crisis in Iran from our assessment of Jimmy Carter. And for good reason: The presidency was designed for crisis. It was structured with the power and autonomy needed for handling the acute challenges of national life.
“Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government,” Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist 70. “It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws.” And the most important ingredient that constitutes energy in the executive is “unity.”
“Those politicians and statesmen who have been the most celebrated for the soundness of their principles and for the justice of their views have declared in favor of a single executive and a numerous legislature,” Hamilton wrote. “They have, with great propriety, considered energy as the most necessary qualification of the former, and have regarded this as most applicable to power in a single hand.”
The point and the purpose of vesting a single elected official with the executive authority was to give the national government the ability to respond to national emergencies with alacrity and focus. We have made it a point to judge presidents on the basis of their ability to handle a crisis, whether war or internal rebellion or economic collapse.
Except, it seems, when it comes to Trump. With the notable exception of Operation Warp Speed — which he now disavows as he caters to anti-vaccine sentiment among Republican voters — Trump failed to handle his crisis, and the nation paid a steep price in lives as a result. But memories are short, and nostalgia clouds the senses. The voters who give Trump a pass for his final year in office may well put him back in the White House. Having failed to fulfill his responsibilities the first time, Trump may return to fail again.
This is beyond political analysis or polling. I think we need deep psychoanalysis to figure this out. As someone Bouie describes this way in the opening to his piece, it’s beyond me to figure it out:
For many millions of Americans, time seemed to move differently under President Donald Trump. There was no breathing room — no calm in the eye of the storm. From beginning to end — from the “American carnage” inaugural on Jan. 20, 2017, to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — it felt as though the country was in constant flux, each week a decade. We lurched from dysfunction to chaos and back again, eventually crashing on the shores of the nation’s worst domestic crisis since the Great Depression.
I get that the hardcore MAGAs don’t see it this way. But the amnesia on the part of moderates and Independents is mystifying to me.
