The Way We Weren't

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun.

In just a few years, a lot of people have forgotten how bad 2020 waws.

Lisa Lerer and Ruth Igielnik at NYT:

Views of Donald J. Trump’s presidency have become more positive since he left office, bolstering his case for election and posing a risk to President Biden’s strategy of casting his opponent as unfit for the presidency, according to a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College.

While the memories of Mr. Trump’s tumultuous and chaotic administration have not significantly faded, many voters now have a rosier picture of his handling of the economy, immigration and maintaining law and order. Ahead of the 2020 election, only 39 percent of voters said that the country was better off after Mr. Trump took office. Now, looking back, nearly half say that he improved things during his time as president.

The poll’s findings underscore the way in which a segment of voters have changed their minds about the Trump era, recalling those years as a time of economic prosperity and strong national security. The shift in views about his administration comes even as Mr. Trump faces dozens of felony counts and will appear in a New York courtroom on Monday for jury selection in one of his four criminal trials.

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Trump Amnesia

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun. The nomination phase has effectively ended.  With Super Tuesday, the withdrawal of Nikki Haley, and the State of the Union, the general election campaign has begun.

Political activists are familiar with the details of the Trump story.  Republicans simply deny those details. Outside the MAGA world, normals either do not know or have forgotten.

Cameron Joseph at CJR:

 A recent survey of voters who did not support Trump in 2020—conducted in three key swing states by Democratic pollster Geoff Garin and shared with the New Republic—found that less than a third of them had heard “a lot” about Trump’s most recent authoritarian statements, like his vow to be “dictator for one day,” and his description of his political opponents as “vermin.”

The question is whether voters just don’t really care—or if they’ll turn against him once they are reminded of Trump’s record in office and plans for a second term.

The New York Times’ Jennifer Medina and Reid Epstein tackled this question earlier this week with a piece aptly headlined “Do Americans Have a ‘Collective Amnesia’ About Donald Trump?”

It’s very much worth a read. They write: “More than three years of distance from the daily onslaught has faded, changed—and in some cases, warped—Americans’ memories of events that at the time felt searing. Polling suggests voters’ views on Mr. Trump’s policies and his presidency have improved in the rearview mirror. In interviews, voters often have a hazy recall of one of the most tumultuous periods in modern politics.”

Part of the problem is that many voters, especially the crucial bloc of younger ones, simply don’t remember Trump that well. Those turning eighteen and eligible to vote for the first time this fall were just ten years old and in grade school when Trump won the presidency, in 2016; the January 6 Capitol riots happened back when most of them were just starting high school. The rest of us don’t have memories that are as sharp and reliable as we’d like to think—it’s not just Joe Biden and Donald Trump who regularly get names wrong or forget in what year things occurred.

Believing Conspiracy Theories

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie.

 At WP, Aaron Blake reports that a third of Republicans think that Taylor Swift is part of a deep state plot.

The poll is merely the latest to suggest that a significant segment of the Republican Party is inclined to believe baseless conspiracy theories about the deep state. For example:

• An August 2022 YouGov poll after the search of Mar-a-Lago showed 38 percent of Republicans believed the FBI planted evidence there. Just 23 percent disagreed with that proposition (another 39 percent were “not sure”).
• A YouGov poll the next month showed a majority of Republicans said it was at least “probably true” that the FBI planted classified documents.
• A Suffolk University poll shortly after Jan. 6, 2021, showed 58 percent of Donald Trump supporters said the Capitol riot was “mostly an Antifa-inspired attack that involved only a few Trump supporters.” There remains zero evidence for this.
• A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll showed 34 percent said it was at least “probably true” that the FBI organized and encouraged the attack on the Capitol. (About half that number believed there was “solid evidence” of this.)
• YouGov polling in December showed 42 percent of Republicans believe “many top Democrats” are caught up in child sex-trafficking rings, 35 percent believe mass shootings have been faked to promote gun control, and 28 percent believe the government used covid vaccines to implant microchips in people.
• The same poll showed fully 60 percent of Republicans believe there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.” (Democratic support for the proposition was about half — 28 percent.)
• And, of course, polls generally show around 6 in 10 or more Republicans continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, despite the complete lack of evidence more than three years later.

People Don't Know About Trump's Legal Problems

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book will look at the 2024 campaign, and the impact of Trump's legal problems. New York courts have found that he is a rapist and a fraud.

 Philip Bump at WP:

As it turns out, even major developments often fly under the average American’s radar. New polling conducted by YouGov shows that only a bit over half of the country on average is aware of the various legal challenges Trump faces. And among those Republicans on whose political support he depends? Consistently, only a minority say they are aware of his lawsuits and charges.

YouGov presented American adults with eight legal scenarios to judge the extent of the public’s awareness. Two were invented: that Trump faces charges related to emoluments or related to drug trafficking. Happily, less than a quarter of respondents said those legal threats actually existed.

The other six were real. The one that was familiar to the most people was the federal classified-documents case that is moving forward in Florida; 6 in 10 Americans said they were aware of that case. The one that had the least awareness was the civil suit in New York in which a judge determined that he’d fraudulently inflated the value of his assets. Just under 50 percent of Americans knew about that.

But the pattern among Republicans is clear. At most, 45 percent of Republicans said they knew about legal issues: specifically, the documents case and his being found liable for assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. Only a quarter knew about the value-inflation suit, and only 4 in 10 knew about the criminal charges in Manhattan related to the hush money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.

 

Republicans Rejecting Reality

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

Aaron Blake at WP:

The Economist and YouGov this week became the latest to publish a head-scratching poll showing Republicans rejecting basic facts about Trump and his legal jeopardy.

The poll asked people whether Trump was “involved in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.” He, of course, was. Myriad pieces of evidence make that abundantly clear. We have a literal recording of him asking Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” just enough votes to overcome his deficit, and Trump on the call explicitly cited “flipping” the results in the state.

But to most Republicans, this apparently never happened. Just 18 percent in the YouGov poll said Trump was involved in trying to overturn Georgia’s results, compared to 59 percent who say he wasn’t.

It’s now the second poll to show the vast majority of Republicans saying Trump wasn’t even involved in trying to overturn the election. YouGov asked similar, non-Georgia-specific questions in August. Republicans said just 38-30 percent that there was an attempt to overturn the election. That’s shocking in and of itself. But then it showed only half of that 38 percent said Trump was personally involved.

So in both polls, only about 1 in 5 Republicans said Trump tried to overturn the election — the very basic threshold fact that undergirds two of his four indictments.

But these are hardly the only polls showing Republicans and Trump backers expressing a skewed view of the underlying facts. To wit:

• Marquette University polling in late 2022 showed 66 percent of Republicans said Trump hadn’t possessed “top secret and other classified material or national security documents at his home in Mar-a-Lago.” This despite the search of Mar-a-Lago having turned up such documents three months prior. That number later dropped after Trump’s indictment this summer, but only to 50 percent.
• A February 2021 USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed 58 percent of Trump voters said Jan. 6 was “mostly an Antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters.” That’s compared to 28 percent who said it was mostly a “rally of Trump supporters, some of whom attacked the Capitol.” (Nearly three years later, there remains no evidence of antifa inspiring or even participating in the attack.)
• A December 2021 CBS News/YouGov poll showed 67 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of Trump voters said the Jan. 6 riot was not an attempt “to overturn the election and keep Donald Trump in power.”
• A mid-2022 Monmouth University poll showed not only that 77 percent of Republicans said Jan. 6 wasn’t an “insurrection” but that a 51 percent majority said it wasn’t even a “riot.”

Some of these polls are dated. There are, regrettably, not too many surveys testing people’s knowledge of the basic facts surrounding these cases. But the thrust of all of them is similar, with half or more Republicans rejecting what is pretty plain to see.

Impeachment: Minds that Won't Change

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.     The update  -- recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. Impeachment is becoming likely.

Domenico Montanaro at NPR:

The country is witnessing one of only a handful of times in its history that Congress has gone through with public hearings on whether to impeach a president. And yet, the overwhelming majority of Americans across parties say nothing they hear in the inquiry will change their minds on impeachment, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

Half of Americans said they approve of the impeachment inquiry — about the same as the poll found last month. Respondents are also split on whether they think Trump should be impeached and removed from office.

But 65% of Americans say they can't imagine any information or circumstances during the impeachment inquiry where they might change their minds about their position on impeachment. And 30% say yes, it's possible.

The figures for partisans who won't change their minds: 68% of Democrats, 73% of Republicans. And wait, there's more:

By 47%-41%, Americans say they are more likely to support impeachment based on what they've heard or read from the testimonies and evidence presented. And the testimonies could actually be serving to harden their views — 86% of Democrats said they are now more likely to support impeachment after hearing testimony and evidence, while 83% of Republicans said they are less likely to now support impeachment.

Misunderstanding Medicare for All

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the health care issue in the 2016 campaign.  the update  -- recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

The Kaiser Family Foundation finds that Poll most Americans do not understand how much the leading Medicare-for-all proposals would restructure health care..

The most recent KFF Health Tracking Poll finds majorities across partisans think taxes for most people would increase under a national health plan, sometimes called Medicare-for-all (78 percent), and about half (53 percent) think private health insurance companies would no longer be the primary way Americans would get health coverage under such a plan. However, when it comes to other key changes that the leading Medicare-for-all bills introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal would bring, large shares are unaware of how the current health care system may be affected. For example, majorities say people would continue to pay deductibles and co-pays (69 percent) and continue to pay premiums (54 percent) under a Medicare-for-all plan. Likewise, majorities say people with employer-sponsored or self-purchased insurance would be able to keep their plans (55 percent each) under a Medicare-for-all plan.

Apocrypha Now

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's personal qualities. Among those qualities is his ignorance of important details and his tendency to make things up.

At The Daily Beast, Asawin Suebsaeng reports on a meeting between Trump and principals from veterans groups on March 17, 2017.  The conversation turned to Agent Orange.

Attendees began explaining to the president that the VA had not made enough progress on the issue at all, to which Trump responded by abruptly derailing the meeting and asking the attendees if Agent Orange was “that stuff from that movie.”

He did not initially name the film he was referencing, but it quickly became clear as Trump kept rambling that he was referring to the classic 1979 Francis Ford Coppola epic Apocalypse Now, and specifically the famous helicopter attack scene set to the “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Source present at the time tell The Daily Beast that multiple people—including Vietnam War veterans—chimed in to inform the president that the Apocalypse Now set piece he was talking about showcased the U.S. military using napalm, not Agent Orange.

Trump refused to accept that he was mistaken and proceeded to say things like, “no, I think it’s that stuff from that movie.”

One clue belying the president’s insistence is that the famous Robert Duvall line from the scene in Apocalypse Now, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” is not “I love the smell of Agent Orange in the morning.”

He then went around the room polling attendees about if it was, in fact, napalm or Agent Orange in the famous scene from “that movie,” as the gathering—organized to focus on important, sometimes life-or-death issues for veterans—descended into a pointless debate over Apocalypse Now that the president simply would not concede, despite all the available evidence.

Finally, Trump made eye contact again with Weidman [Rick Weidman, co-founder of Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA)] and asked him if it was napalm or Agent Orange. The VVA co-founder assured Trump, as did several before him, that it was in fact napalm, and said that he didn’t like the Coppola film and believed it to be a disservice to Vietnam War veterans.