Wednesday, July 19, 2023

DO MOST AMERICANS CARE ABOUT HOW OUR DEMOCRACY FUNCTIONS?

Josh Marshall is certain that a January 6 indictment (or indictments) will matter in ways that the first two Trump indictments didn't:
... the events of January 6th (which includes the probable state charges in Georgia) are damaging to Trump in a way the ones in New York and Florida simply are not.

... The nadirs of Trump’s public support and the only times GOP elites have toyed with the idea of abandoning him came when January 6th was at the center of public attention. That was on January 6th itself and during the public airing of those events during the January 6th committee hearings in summer and fall of 2022. Elected Republicans are happy to defend Trump on the charges in New York City. They are never wobblier than when called to defend Trump’s actions in the winter of 2020–21.
Marshall thinks Republican diehards will stand by Trump, but he assumes the rest of the public will be disgusted by a reminder of the events of January 6, and possibly by damaging new information. Marshall thinks this could drag down the entire Republican Party.
Every Republican candidate will carry those facts through the election. They’re the kind of impossible-to-answer questions that could easily knock a few percentage points of support from a number of Republican candidates. In a closely divided country, with closely divided houses of Congress, those small shifts can make all the difference.
It's true that Donald Trump's job approval numbers plummeted after January 6, in the last days of his presidency. It's also true that his post-presidential favorability numbers worsened somewhat, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average, after the televised January 6 committee hearings began in June last year.

But Trump's numbers in head-to-head polling versus Biden haven't changed much. He's still competitive. The numbers (currently Biden 43.8%, Trump 43.4%) suggest that quite a few voters outside the MAGA base are willing to vote for Trump again.

Could he still be a general-election contender because swing voters don't really care what happens in our elections?

When I look at polls that ask Americans about their trust in institutions, the numbers don't look good. Gallup says that trust in most institutions is "at or near rock bottom." Morning Consult says that the percentage of people who have "a lot of" or "some" trust in the U.S. government is only 44% and dropping.

What if a renewed focus on January 6 doesn't crater Trump's poll numbers versus Joe Biden because voters in the middle don't respect the government anymore and therefore don't care whether Trump and his allies tried to subvert the electoral process? January 6 was an attack on Congress, but according to the Real Clear Politics average, Congress has a 22% job approval rating.

If I'm right, this isn't just a problem for Democrats. The GOP's anti-indictment rhetoric will also fall flat with swing voters. Both Trump and his Republican allies refer to the legal pursuit of Trump as "election interference." That message resonates with GOP voters, but if swing voters don't think they get much out of elections, why would they care if someone says they're being interfered with?

I hope I'm wrong about this. The conventional wisdom is that the trial will make Trump unelectable. We'll see.

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