A top rated poll, NYT/Sienna, issued findings yesterday showing Donald Trump unequivocally getting the Republican nomination. We figured that. But the poll also showed Trump in a dead heat statistically, 43% to 43%, against Joe Biden. That’s why it’s called the Doom Poll. And here’s pollster Larry Sabato and he’s laying it on with a trowel.
First let’s look at what this means for Ron DeSantis and the others. Then let’s get real about the nature of polling itself and what is real in this country right now and why. Yes, that’s a tall order, but we’ll distill it down as well as humanly possible. The Dispatch:
What makes this a “doom poll” and effectively a premortem of the DeSantis campaign isn’t the topline, though, as grim as that is. It’s the fact that, no matter how you slice and dice the Republican electorate demographically here, Trump is ahead—often handily. “He led by wide margins among men and women, younger and older voters, moderates and conservatives, those who went to college and those who didn’t, and in cities, suburbs and rural areas,” the Times says of its data. There are effectively zero “DeSantis constituencies” left within the party, only constituencies that prefer Trump to the governor a bit less emphatically than others.
The impression I’m left with after digesting it is that there was nothing DeSantis could have done realistically to defeat Trump, especially once the drumbeat of indictments began. The primary isn’t over. It never began.
I agree that the primary never began. And as I’ve said before, all the GOP has is a bunch of bit players and no leading man or leading lady. But DeSantis figured he’d wait for Trump to go under and then go on stage as the understudy. Don’t completely rule that out. We simply do not know what is going to happen legally.
Here’s the bottom line: this poll, and all polls, address public opinion. That’s what they’re designed to do. What happens in the court of public opinion and what happens in a court of law are two very different things. So we flat out don’t know, and the pollsters sure as hell don’t (and they’d be the first to admit it) what will take place when and if Trump is actually found guilty and sentenced.
Let us pause for a moment and consider how we got here. We are in a situation where the incumbent president, who is doing a bang up job by any reasonable metric that can be applied, has a 39% approval rating and is in a statistical dead heat with a twice-indicted, convicted racist, who has been using his campaign donations to pay legal bills? Yes. We are living in the political Upside-Down, no question.
We got there because there are two narratives of reality running in this country and that is a set up for complete disaster. And it is the GOP who is co-signing on this madness and encouraging it.
A movement that spends every waking hour brainwashing its members to dismiss any criticism of its leader as illegitimate and improperly motivated will struggle to criticize him persuasively when the time comes for new leadership. Go figure.
Republican voters have been poorly served by institutions during the Trump years, which helps explain why the Times poll says what it says. But for those who still believe in personal responsibility, explanations aren’t excuses. For instance, there’s no excuse for this:
What is terrifying about this, is that even Donald Trump, the Father Of All Lies, doesn’t claim that he never had the documents.
But the right’s justifiable skepticism of certain institutional actors combined with the hyper-contrarian “question everything” sensibility of populist media has inculcated in many a willingness to assume that any—any—politically inconvenient fact must be a lie. Reality itself is now suspect insofar as it conflicts with political ends. The word “Orwellian” is overused, but it fits here.
Which brings us back to the doom poll. Insofar as there’s good news in it, it’s that not all Republican voters have fallen into Orwell’s trap. The bad news is that enough have done so as to make it all but impossible for anyone else to win this primary.
There are four takeaways from the data.
Trump’s diehard base really does function more like a cult than a political bloc.
Nate Cohn of the Times sifted through the numbers and identified 37 percent of the party as constituting the “MAGA base,” as he describes it. How loyal is the MAGA base?
So loyal that not a single person in a group of 319 would concede that their hero had committed serious federal crimes. “The MAGA base doesn’t support Mr. Trump in spite of his flaws,” Cohn wrote. “It supports him because it doesn’t seem to believe he has flaws.”
I will now tell you what I think the good news is here. First of all, if there is one business you could not pay me to be in right now, it would be in the scientific polling business. It worked very well for a very long time. But when Trump came on the scene in 2016 it started breaking down. I well recall, and I’m sure you do as well, that Trump had a 15% chance of winning. With the exception of Michael Moore and a few others, rightly assessing the situation and calling the shot, we were all duped.
Ergo, I think it’s very likely that now the Republicans are going to be blindsided. Not with respect to their primary — no, I believe DeSantis is doomed and only some very unique set of circumstances, unseen and unforeseeable at this exact moment, would land him the GOP primary by default. And he would only get it by default. That is carved in stone right now, as much as anything can be. And that’s all DeSantis wants. He’s the understudy. I believe that.
I think that Trump’s extreme baggage will lose him the 2024 election, if he’s not already behind bars.
Yes, MAGA is behind Trump. MAGA is a minority. And there is plenty of evidence that what normal Republicans are left have had enough and want to go back to the world of sanity.
If we learned one thing in 2016, it’s that the polls are not infallible. Far, far from it. Trump under polled in 2016 and he over polled in 2020. He may be over polling right now. Biden won by a decisive margin in 2020. Unless there is a third party and I’m thinking of No Labels, bleeding votes away, I believe that Biden will win again and by an even greater margin. If that’s not the case, and Trump gets back in, then America as we know it will be gone.
At this point in 2016, Hilary was leading the Dems decisively and Scott Walker the Rs in national polling. I haven’t trusted polling since then.
I meant in 2008, not 2016. We’ve been in a doom loop since 2016.
I knew what you meant. And you’re not the first person to say precisely what you just said. And truth be known, the polls were probably right. The point is that what is happening in late July of the summer before an election year is not proof positive, or even close, of what will be on the ballot in the fall of that election year.
Yes, I remember 2008 and all that well.
Um, I don’t think you meant “2008” because at THIS point in 2008, Barack Obama had been declared the unofficial winner of the Democratic primaries and Hillary had already conceded the contest on June 7th of that year.
Kind of hard to be “leading the Dems decisively” after you’ve conceded the race to your main opponent.
I think you may have meant the “2008 cycle” (which fully began in 2007) but, then again, Hillary was the best-known candidate of the cycle. She had, after all, been HEAVILY pressed to run for President in 2004 but she stuck to her promise to serve a full term as Senator before considering a run for the White House. (I still argue that THAT was what led to so much of the anti-Hillary attitude in 2008 because every other one of her opponents who’d been in Congress in 2002 and cast a vote on the Iraq War authorization had voted just like she did but NONE of them were as criticized for their vote.)
Even back in relatively normal times (as in before Trump0 a year was a lifetime in politics. Not that polling this far out wasn’t instructive but everyone knew to take it with a big grain of salt. Now, in this events/developments at warp speed time a year is several (or more) lifetimes. Even for primaries not a big grain of salt but a whole salt-shaker of them is required. And for next year’s general election? A truckload of those big salt-blocks we’d put out in the fields for the horses (back when I looked after a friend’s race horses on a farm in WV) is needed.
From where I sit, polling on Biden vs. Trump won’t matter until almost a year from now. Once it’s know for sure who will be on the ballot. Then, and only then will voters start paying regular attention to the Nov. election. Watching Trump’s antics and remembering the recent ones on the campaign trail, as well as the outright chaos of his Presidency. And compare it to the calm, competent both at home and abroad functioning Biden Presidency. MAGAs are a hopeless cause to be sure. But for everyone else it will be a no-brainer decision. Even a fair number of Republicans, conservatives that want their old hard-core conseevative style governance back will vote for Biden. Or not vote at all whic would be almost as good.
If, by a couple of weeks after the conventions next year polling is this close I’ll be worried. Right now, it’s just background noise, and d\fodder for “journalists” to spin into their beloved “horse race” coverage.
As I said in the piece, we can’t foresee what’s going to happen to Trump. Joyce Vance said a few nights ago that yes, Trump may be winning in the court of popular opinion but that does not translate into a court of law.
We’re at a crossroads right now. Jack Smith and Fani Willis could both indict this month and then we’re going to see some real fireworks. This month will be a game changer. Let’s see what the polls do with that.
who is going to vote for trump that didn’t vote for him in 2016 and 2020? his older white voters are dying off every day. Biden has low poll numbers because of dissatisfaction from the left as much from the right. people on the left may not be happy but they are not going to vote for trump.
Does anyone with any intelligence pay ANY attention to polls now? Polls have proven to be worthless. If polling companies said they got their numbers by pulling them out of their asses I would not be surprised.