To go by the polls, Donald Trump stands a fair chance of being elected President again. From one team of pollsters comes a surprisingly simple explanation: the Times and Siena College asked a sample of voters in six swing states to express their feelings about “the American political and economic system.” Nearly seventy per cent said that it needed either a major shakeup or (the preference of fourteen per cent) to be “torn down entirely.” Just as overwhelmingly, they agreed that the system would get that kind of treatment from Trump and not from Joe Biden.
The Times completed its poll in early May, with the Trump trial still in progress. After the verdict, a series of follow-up interviews found a modest shift in Biden’s favor, cutting what had been a Trump lead of three per cent to one per cent. But the pool of voters who cared enough to reconsider was small compared to those who felt, in the words of Nate Cohn, the Times’ chief political analyst, “deeply dissatisfied with the direction of the country” and were looking for “something very different.” Cohn has likened Trump’s appeal, improbably, to that of Barack Obama, another political gate-crasher with an ideologically vague agenda. Millions of Obama supporters voted for Trump in 2016 or 2020, Cohn points out, and more such voters (young people and people of color, in particular) are in a mood to do so now.
Historically, polls conducted in the spring have been a poor guide to voting behavior in the fall. Even so, Biden’s allies and campaign strategists worry about an electorate currently inclined to treat the contest as a choice between the status quo and change—to compare Biden, in his own framing of the problem, to the Almighty instead of the alternative. An incumbent seeking reëlection would normally leave it to others to question a challenger’s character; Biden has decided to drop the niceties and do all that he personally can to persuade voters of Trump’s unfitness for public office. The country would be well served if the President and his team also took aim at the notion of Biden as a guardian of the established order. His many years of life (eighty-one) and service in elected office (going on fifty-five) might seem to cast him in that role. During the past three and a half years, though, the oldest-ever U.S. President has been a groundbreaking leader—an agent of changes that many of his doubters would celebrate, if they noticed.
The Times/Siena survey did not go into the particulars of the discontent that it measured. Based on the findings of more inquisitive pollsters, however, we can guess what many people would have said if they had been encouraged to elaborate. The Pew Research Center makes a specialty of tracking Americans’ trust in government. Pew’s most recent survey, conducted last September, found that trust at a seventy-year low, with just one in twenty-five adults saying that “the political system is working extremely or very well,” and more than three-quarters characterizing the government as a tool of “a few big interests looking out for themselves.”
That perception—of a political process captured by the rich and powerful—has been a top-line finding of one poll after another in recent years.