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  • What the Polls May Be Getting Wrong About Trump

    What the Polls May Be Getting Wrong About Trump

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    In the months since Donald Trump’s indictments started piling up, pollsters have noticed something remarkable: The dozens of criminal charges brought against the former president have seemed to boost his standing in the Republican presidential primary. Trump has widened his already commanding lead over his rivals, and in poll after poll, GOP voters have said that the charges make them more—not less—likely to vote for him again.

    The dynamic has turned an infamous example of Trumpian bravado—his 2016 claim that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”—into something approaching a prophecy. To his critics, the emerging conventional wisdom that the indictments have benefited Trump politically is a dispiriting and even dangerous notion, one that could embolden politicians of any ideological stripe to disregard the law.

    Those fears, however, may be premature.

    David A. Graham: The Georgia indictment offers the whole picture

    A new, broader survey of Republican voters suggests that the indictments have, in fact, dented Trump’s advantage in the primary. The study was designed by a group of university researchers who argue that pollsters have been asking the wrong questions to assess how the indictments have affected Republican voters.

    Most traditional polls have asked respondents directly whether the indictments have changed their attitude about Trump or their likelihood to vote for him. According to Matt Graham, one of the authors of the new survey and an assistant professor at Temple University, this type of query leads to biased answers. And it devolves into a proxy question for whether voters—and Republicans in particular—like the former president in the first place. “Respondents don’t always answer questions the way we want them to,” Graham told me. Republicans “want to say, ‘Well, I still support him regardless of the indictment.’ And if you don’t give them a chance to say that, they’re going to use the question to say that.”

    The researchers spotted a similar polling flaw in the high-profile 2017 special election for an open Senate seat in Alabama, where Republicans told pollsters that the many accusations of sexual assault against Roy Moore only made them more likely to support him. Moore went on to lose the election to Democrat Doug Jones after a sizable number of Republicans deserted him in a deeply red state.

    Graham and his colleagues believed that they could elicit more accurate answers about Trump by asking respondents to assess their view of him—and their likelihood of voting for him—as if they did not know he had been indicted. To test their theory, they commissioned a SurveyMonkey poll of more than 5,000 Americans in which half were asked questions in this counterfactual format: “Suppose you did not know about the indictment. How would you have answered the following question: How likely are you to vote for Donald Trump?” They asked the other half questions that pollsters more commonly use.

    The experiment produced significantly different results. Like other surveys, the poll based on the traditional format found that the indictments increased Trump’s support among Republican primary voters. But the poll based on the counterfactual framing found that the indictments slightly hurt his standing in the party, reducing by 1.6 percent the likelihood that Republicans would vote for him.

    The real-world implications of the researchers’ findings are, well, limited—at least for now. Trump’s polling lead in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire averages more than 25 points; the gap widens to nearly 40 points in recent national surveys. A drop of 1.6 percent suggests that charging Trump with multiple felonies is akin to tossing a pebble at a fast-moving train. “I don’t know that I make much of it at all,” Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who regularly conducts focus groups of voters, told me.

    In Longwell’s experience, the response from Trump supporters to the indictments has been consistent for months: “They say they do not care about them.” Views about the former president have been locked in place for years, Longwell said, and most Trump supporters give either a neutral response to the indictments or say that the charges make them even more likely to vote for him. Almost no one, she told me, said the indictments make them less supportive.

    Watch: Making sense of Donald Trump’s 91 felony charges

    If anything, they help Trump reclaim the status of an outsider fighting establishment forces, which was central to his appeal in 2016, says Chris Jackson, the head of public polling at Ipsos, a nonpartisan research firm that frequently conducts surveys for news organizations. In Jackson’s surveys, Republican voters have told pollsters that the indictments make them more likely to support Trump. Still, he told me, he doesn’t think the charges themselves are helping Trump’s candidacy: “I think the media attention that the indictments have created have helped him.”

    In polls conducted by Ipsos and other firms, Trump has widened his lead among Republican primary voters since he was indicted by a grand jury in New York this spring. But that shift, Jackson said, is less about Trump than about his opponents, and particularly Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has lost support during that time. “He hasn’t actually gained in his share of the Republican electorate,” Jackson said. “I don’t actually think Trump’s strengthened so much as his challengers have weakened.”

    Jackson’s interpretation of the polling data is similar to what Graham and his colleagues found in their counterfactual experiment: The indictments may not have hurt Trump much among Republican voters, but they haven’t really boosted him either. “The way a question is worded always has an impact in survey research,” Jackson said. “So, yeah, I think it matters, but it’s not necessarily uncovering some deeper truth.”

    Graham, too, isn’t arguing that his team’s findings should fundamentally alter perceptions about Trump’s chances of becoming the Republican nominee. But he believes that the emerging and, it seems, false narrative that charging a political candidate with dozens of serious crimes will redound to his benefit is an important one to dispel. “I don’t think that survey researchers should be sending the public profoundly pessimistic messages about how their fellow citizens think and reason when those aren’t actually true,” Graham told me. “There’s plenty to be pessimistic about in our politics, but we don’t need to pile on by acting like people think that indictments are good.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • A Bouncy, Fresh Brand of Trumpism

    A Bouncy, Fresh Brand of Trumpism

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    Vivek Ramaswamy is a tall man with tall hair. And last week, when he stood in front of a crowd in Iowa wearing a black T-shirt under a black blazer, he looked like Johnny Bravo delivering a TED Talk.

    “We’re not gonna be angry tonight,” Ramaswamy told a few hundred Iowa voters before calmly explaining his theory of how America got to be so politically divided. The country is going through a national identity crisis, he explained, and people are turning toward “racial wokeism” and “radical gender ideology” to fill the emptiness inside. It’s Republicans’ job to fill that void, Ramaswamy said, “with a vision of American national identity that runs so deep that it dilutes the woke poison to irrelevance.”

    The 37-year-old businessman turned political candidate, who seemed to appear out of nowhere on the campaign trail, is now suddenly everywhere—including tied for third in GOP primary polling and, on Thursday night, at a campaign stop in the Des Moines metro area. The setting was industrial chic: an ultra-modern flooring-and-appliance store with exposed piping, broad glass windows, and huge whirring fans overhead. The crowd of Republican voters mingled between shiny model stoves and porcelain-tile displays, waiting to hear from Ramaswamy and a lineup of other speakers including Iowa’s governor, Kim Reynolds.

    As Ramaswamy had promised, the evening’s vibe was not pessimistic or angry. He and the other speakers echoed some familiar Trumpian culture-war and “America First” themes. But the event lacked the gloom and doom of a Trump rally; there was no ominous string music or rambling soliloquy of personal grievance. Clearly an appetite, however small, exists for Ramaswamy’s bouncy, fresh brand of Trumpism.

    David Frum: Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already?

    The voters there may once have liked or even loved Trump, but honestly, they’re a little tired of his negativity. They know that Trump is the current primary front-runner; they might even vote for him again. But Iowa voters, who’ve long relished their power of first presidential pick, like to keep their options open, and they’re intrigued by Ramaswamy. “His youthful optimism is a really good thing,” Rob Johnson, a lawyer from Des Moines, told me. He voted for Trump twice, but he’s ready for something new. Trump “brings an element into [politics] that is not productive. You get more with an ounce of sugar than you do with a pound of vinegar.”

    Ramaswamy, who was born and raised in Cincinnati, is the kind of entrepreneur whose actual job you can’t quite put your finger on. He got his law degree from Yale and founded a biopharma company called Roivant Sciences in 2014. He’s been brawling in the culture-war trenches for a while. In 2022, he started an investment firm explicitly opposed to the ESG framework, which involves incorporating environmental, social, and governance issues into business strategy. He’s written books called Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam and, more recently, Nation of Victims, which urges Americans to “pursue excellence” and “reject victimhood culture.”

    The Millennial candidate is a bit like the GOP version of Andrew Yang: a get-up-and-go business bro who does something vague in the new economy, and who seemed to wake up one day and ask himself, Why not run for president? Ramaswamy has been all over Iowa since announcing his candidacy 12 weeks ago on Tucker Carlson’s now-canceled Fox News show. A national CBS poll of likely GOP primary voters showed Ramaswamy tied with former Vice President Mike Pence for third place behind Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—albeit a distant third, at 5 percent.

    Read: Iowans knew this day would come

    On Thursday, Ramaswamy was introduced by a parade of joyful Republican culture warriors, who stood onstage while a loop of Fox News clips played from a projector in the back of the room. The Dallas County GOP chair performatively discarded an empty box of Bud Lite, a brand that’s drawn the ire of conservatives for its partnership with a transgender influencer. And the crowd applauded wildly as former State Senator Jake Chapman checked off a list of successful or in-progress Republican projects: banning obscene material in school libraries; pushing for a statewide bill banning abortion after six weeks; Don Lemon getting the axe over at CNN. The cheers rang loudest for the last.

    Ramaswamy’s stump speech was a plea for people to resist the “cults” of race, gender, and climate—and a call to redefine what it means to be an American. That redefinition would apparently involve a few constitutional amendments and a lot of executive power. As president, he told the crowd, he’d end affirmative action and shut down the Department of Education. He’d boost the national Republican Party by telling Americans to “drill, frack, burn coal, and embrace nuclear.” He’d send the military to patrol the southern border instead of defending “somebody else’s border in God knows where.” He’d shut down the FBI and give a gun to every adult in Taiwan to defend themselves against China. He’d prohibit young people from voting unless they performed national service or passed a citizenship test. He’d ban TikTok for kids younger than 16.

    Ramaswamy left his listeners with a rosy takeaway: “The bipartisan consensus in this country right now is that we are a nation in decline. I actually think we’re a little young. We’re going through our own version of adolescence, figuring out who we’re really going to be.”

    The New York Times has called Ramaswamy a “smooth-talking Republican who’d rule by fiat,” and the candidate was proud enough of the headline to put it on his website. At the Iowa event, nobody seemed alarmed by his plans for the country. On the contrary, they were excited. They’d come to the event expecting a rote political speech from a random nobody; instead, they got a grab bag of new ideas and a blast of energy they haven’t been seeing on the national political stage, where the current president is 80 and the former is 76.

    Read: A world without Chuck Grassley in the Senate?

    “I was very impressed,” Ree Foster, a two-time Trump voter from West Des Moines, told me. “I like Vivek’s attitude much better than Trump’s.” Tate Snodgrass, a 24-year-old from Burlington, remains a Trump fan. Still, he heard something from Ramaswamy that he hasn’t from Trump. “Vivek is like, ‘I don’t even care about the political parties. This is an American ideal,’ which I found really appealing,” Snodgrass told me. “I wasn’t expecting to be wowed—but he wowed me.”

    Ramaswamy, who is Indian American, spoke before a mostly white crowd, in an overwhelmingly white state, and received a notably warm reception. Unlike the Democratic Party, which has shuffled the order of its primary season and demoted the Iowa caucus, Iowa Republicans have kept their first-place spot in the nomination process. Some are confident that Hawkeye State voters can work magic for Ramaswamy the way they did for the little-known outsider candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976—or Barack Obama in 2008.

    Still, Ramaswamy is a long shot to win the primary; most GOP voters back the former president, who leads by double digits. Although DeSantis is still polling in second place, the conventional wisdom that the Florida governor is the natural heir to Trump has deflated in recent weeks, given his marked deficit of charisma on the campaign trail. But Ramaswamy’s surprisingly high numbers suggest that maybe a shinier, younger, and more animated “America First”–style politics can still be competitive—or at least disruptive—in the age of Trump.

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    Elaine Godfrey

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