In a poll taken just after the June 27 debate between President Biden and former President Trump, nearly half of those surveyed said the discussion hadn’t focused enough on crucial issues like inflation, crime, education, and immigration. The candidates had spent too much time talking about subjects like Trump’s conviction and Hunter Biden’s legal woes, said respondents. Nearly a month later, that survey should be good news to the Trump campaign, given that Democrats have decided to rally around Vice President Kamala Harris to replace Biden on the ticket—making it harder for the Democratic campaign to escape the Biden agenda’s unpopular legacy.
For much of this presidential race, even before Biden’s woeful debate performance and the assassination attempt on Trump, voters have consistently given the president low marks on the issues that matter to them the most. At the turn of the year, as the candidates headed into primary season, a Bloomberg poll found that, by a margin of 51 percent to 33 percent, registered voters felt Trump would do better on the economy. Some 52 percent rated Trump better on immigration, compared with just 30 percent for Biden. On crime, the spread was nearly as great in Trump’s favor. Throughout the ensuing months, those numbers haven’t changed much, especially on the crucial issues of the economy and inflation. Now, Biden’s replacement, Harris, must either disavow some of his agenda or struggle to convince voters that it’s somehow working. That will be especially hard to do on immigration, where Biden asked Harris to take the lead in creating policy solutions. Voters haven’t been impressed, which is why her approval rating as vice president has been under 40 percent for some time.
It’s an open question, however, whether the Trump campaign can exploit these vulnerabilities. Until Biden’s debate meltdown, Trump was having difficulty pulling away from the president. A substantial number of voters who favored Trump on key issues seem reluctant to commit to him. That’s especially true of voters in the increasingly vital independent bloc, which could make up anywhere from a quarter to a third of the national vote. Trump should do well with this group; a recent Manhattan Institute survey found that independents favored Trump on the economy by 47 percent to 32 percent for Biden, and by 45 percent to 32 percent on immigration. Yet, only 35 percent of independents had a favorable view of Trump in that poll. That’s one reason why polls have shown that about a quarter of independent voters remain undecided.
Much of independent voters’ reluctance to back Trump traces to his efforts to decertify the 2020 election, which caused his approval ratings to plunge outside of his core supporters. Trump’s unpopularity also played a role in the Republicans’ poor showing in the 2022 midterm elections, when they should have been able to capitalize on Biden’s already-plummeting approval rating. But Trump-backed candidates in swing states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin lost crucial elections, even as other Republicans who kept their distance from the ex-president and his claims of a stolen election succeeded at the ballot box in places like Ohio.
One of the ironies of American politics right now is that, as Republicans and Democrats move further apart on policy issues, the independent voter is growing in importance but becoming ever less of a focus for campaigns. As political strategist Karl Rove recently observed, both parties are waging presidential campaigns aimed at energizing their bases and ensuring that they turn out. Both are also spending much less time and effort to convert undecideds, a strategy once fundamental to presidential elections. For instance, even as Biden was withdrawing from the race and it became clear that Harris would replace him, Trump was still tweeting about “Crooked Joe”—the line of attack that Americans were least interested in hearing more about, according to pollsters. The Biden campaign wasn’t much better, taking every opportunity to remind voters that Trump is a convicted felon—though this strategy arguably made more sense for the president: “[G]iven Mr. Biden’s weaknesses, Democrats must rely more on creating fear of Mr. Trump than love for their guy,” as Rove observed.
Well before he entered politics, Trump was someone who couldn’t let an affront go unanswered. His acerbic retorts endear him to many of his core supporters, but they have also helped keep his own popularity below 50 percent for years. He’s been blessed this year with a Democratic Party that seems to be working hard to lose this election. Nominating Harris, saddled with an unpopular agenda that she can’t run away from, is arguably another gift to Trump. Will he accept it?
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