Would You Still Vote For Trump If...?
As Donald Trump's support in the GOP wobbles, why doesn't an opposing candidate commission a good, old-fashioned push poll? It's a time-honored way to attack a a candidate
So, we are now awash in indictment news: although Watergate was a formative experience for me, when it comes to breaking the law, Donald Trump eats Richard Nixon’s lunch. If you have a friend who is trying to make sense of all this, please:
Almost a week ago, the New York Times promised us that Presidential candidate Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was finally growing a pair. “DeSantis Jabs at Trump’s Legal Trouble as He Resets His Campaign,” read a headline about a campaign swing in Iowa, followed by the subhead: “Ron DeSantis’s remarks to a voter in New Hampshire suggest he may step up his attacks against the man who leads him in national polls by a wide margin.”
This was, of course, just wishful thinking. DeSantis’s criticisms of Trump remind me of the Cardinal’s order, in Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch, to “Put her in the comfy chair!” As Nicholas Nehamas describes it,
Two days after former President Donald J. Trump used a demeaning nickname to describe Ron DeSantis to a packed hall of Iowa Republican activists, Mr. DeSantis pointedly invoked the federal indictment against his chief rival, saying that if Mr. Trump had “drained the swamp like he promised,” then he probably “wouldn’t be in the mess that he’s in right now.”
Speaking to reporters on Sunday after a campaign event in New Hampshire, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, added that Mr. Trump’s use of “juvenile insults” served as a reminder of “why there are so many millions of voters who will never vote for him going forward.”
DeSantis, Nehamas comments, “has generally not used Mr. Trump’s legal troubles against him” (he has, in fact more than implicitly defended him) and this trenchant moment suggested that the Governor “may be taking a less timid approach against the man who leads him in national polls by a wide margin.”
But isn’t “wouldn’t be in the mess he is now” a far cry from saying that Trump is in very serious legal trouble, and it is entirely of his own making? That if the so-called “swamp” had been drained, the resident alligators wouldn’t be sitting on his doorstep in Bedminster, New Jersey waiting to eat his face?
What, exactly, is DeSantis afraid of? According to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, Trump has a 37-point lead, and collectively, every other candidate is sharing the rest of the vote (about 16%). Even if all those other candidates dropped out and their voters switched to DeSantis, Trump would still be comfortably ahead.
Furthermore, even though Trump continues to lead the primary field, his support has been quietly slipping for some time. At the end of June, 25% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said they would not cast a ballot for him under any circumstances and, according to CNN reporters Jennifer Agiesta and Ariel Edwards-Levy, “Overall, 47% of Republicans and Republican-leaning registered voters say Trump is their first choice for the party’s nomination for president, down from 53% in a May CNN poll.” According to a Politico/IPSOS poll released at the beginning of July, “roughly half of the country” and a quarter of Republicans “believes that Trump committed the crimes alleged against him.” As of yesterday, FiveThirtyEight.com says, more than 56% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Trump.
And yeah, yeah, yeah—I’ve seen those polls about the 2024 presidential race being a “statistical tie” in many states—but you know what means more to me? That everywhere there is a special election, the Democrats seem to be eating the GOP’s lunch, even in districts that have been close or leaned Republican.
What I’m saying here is that there is an opening here for another candidate, but unless he makes a move (and believe me, I would rather be staked to an ant hill than have Ron DeSantis anywhere near the presidency), the Governor from Florida needs to make a move. And I would like to suggest a good, old-fashioned push poll.
Since the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which empowered essentially unlimited corporate and dark donor campaign contributions, polling has joined the arsenal of vehicles that a campaign can weaponize.
Why did we need the unlimited spending of Super PACs to do that? Because polling costs a lot of money. Junk polls don’t, of course: the Political Campaign Superstore will poll 500 voters for $650, 1000 voters for $1650.00, and 2000 voters for $2,500 (cheap!) Being a superstore, they will also sell you the voter lists (starting at 300 names.) Respectable polls done by news organizations and campus-based think tanks disseminate information at no cost to candidates. According to a 2016 article at CNBC, a lot of the most recognizable polls are done more or less as a marketing devices. Would you have ever heard of Quinnipiac, Monmouth, or Siena Colleges if they did not do political polls? Research firms like Gallup make their reputations on political polls, but their millions on research done for private industry. News organizations not only advertise themselves through polling, but they actually create news, even if that “news” is something we already know: the dozens of polls that show Joe Biden’s approval rating hovering in the mid-forties, and hard-core Trump voters’ determination to keep voting for Trump are good examples.
The real expense for political campaigns is the polling expert who targets particular districts, reads the tabs, and nowadays, also works with the media consultants who break down other data purchased from digital media companies to target messages (in other words, the breakdown of voters within categories). Polling experts are always very well-paid, and sometimes snake-oil salesmen. For example, in 2008, Hillary Clinton spent $9 million on polling which turned out to be hideously wrong in key states. In 2012, the Obama and Romney campaigns spent $5 million apiece: Obama’s were right, and Romney’s were so wrong that on the morning of election day he believed that he was about to become president before a single ballot had been counted.
But the push poll, which is not really a poll but a disinformation machine, is an entirely different beast, it’s cheap, and it has been around for a long time. It is a subset of a larger category of scurrilous campaign activity known as “the ratfuck.” As CBS’s in-house polling expert explained in 2000, “A push poll is political telemarketing masquerading as a poll. No one is really collecting information.” This is why it costs so little too. Instead, they are push polls disseminate information, usually false, in the form of questions.
Sometimes it is just one poisoned question embedded in a series of otherwise bland items. For example, as I recount in my 2020 book, Political Junkies, in South Carolina, in 2000, partisans George W. Bush supporters called voters to draw attention to the fact that rival John McCain, potentially popular in a state with a large military population, had an adopted 9-year-old daughter from India. But the caller did it by asking a “question” that misidentified the child and her relationship to the McCain family. "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain,” the caller inquired, “if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate Black child?"
McCain’s campaign came to end in South Carolina.
Republicans no longer need push polls, of course, because they campaign on manufactured resentment rather than issues. The ubiquity of conspiracy theories, racism, and homophobia in the party means that their base already believes that anyone who isn’t a Trump voter is a communist pantywaist. But what if the push poll could be used to disseminate trueinformation in a way that could crack the unreality bubble many Trump supporters are living in?
Here are some questions I would ask if I were running a push poll for Ron DeSantis—or anyone else in the GOP clown car.
If you knew that former President Trump was spending so much on his legal defense that it will potentially cripple his own ability to mount a national campaign and end any hope of a Republican Congressional majority, would you still support him? According to The Washington Post (July 29, 2023) Trump’s Save America PAC, established mostly with small donations from partisans who believed the former President’s lies that the election was stolen, has spent almost $60 million of that money. He has spent $40 million in this fiscal year. But not on his campaign: on his legal defense. The PAC “is footing the legal bills” not just for Trump, but “for almost anyone drawn into the investigations who requests help from the former president and his advisers.”
If you knew that former President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had raised $2 billion for his investment fund, Affinity Partners, from the Saudi Arabian government’s $620 billion Public Investment Fund, despite his poor record as a businessman, and that he has virtually no American investors, would you worry that Donald Trump and his family are indebted to foreign powers? In April, 2022, David D. Kirkpatrick and Kate Kelly of The New York Times revealed that, within months after leaving his position in the West Wing, Kushner acquired this investment when no American company would trust their money with him. In fact, the Public Investment Fund didn’t want to give Kushner the money, and was overruled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (who easily overrules others, because disagreement can result in being killed and chopped up into little pieces.) By March 2023, the firm still only had $2.5 billion under management—which included $200 million investments from the Emirates and Qatar.
If you knew that Donald Trump had made $2.4 billion during his time as President, and at the same time, added $7 trillion to the national debt, would you still vote for him? According to Forbes magazine, “The biggest portion of Trump’s revenue flowed through his clubs and golf properties, which generated approximately $940 million over four years. Trump National Doral, the golf resort in Miami, contributed roughly $270 million to that total. Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach, brought in about $90 million. A New Jersey golf club, where the former president has been spending time this summer, took in $60 million or so.” But for the pandemic, he would have made more, and even so, a lot of this revenue came from influence peddlers, and from Trump charging the government for the use of the properties when he was there.
It’s really hard to know what DeSantis, or anyone else, has to lose at this point. And the beauty of a push poll is you never have to identify what campaign is doing it! You can just say that you are calling from “Americans Against WOKE,” or “Mothers Against Gender.” And now is the time to strike. We are up to three indictments, two superseding indictments, and waiting for a fourth to come in. Trump’s lawyers are juggling 78 felony counts, he lost a civil defamation case to E. Jean Carroll (and will be back in court with her shortly), and numerous associates will be standing trial on charges related to his own indictments.
There’s no time like the present.
You can track the litigation against Trump here (hat tip: CNN.)
Memories of arraignments past:
If you missed the special edition podcast I did outside Manhattan Criminal Court on April 5, 2023, as we waited for Donald Trump to be arraigned in the Stormy Daniels payoff coverup, you can listen to it here.
Short takes:
Noah Berlatsky and Aaron Rupar chew over yesterday’s indictment watch, as well as the arraignment news, and make a number of trenchant observations. Berlatsky spends an extended time on the Trump team’s contingency plan to unleash violence on Americans who were expected to oppose his coup. But Rupar, bless his bloggy little heart, has been watching Trump’s attorneys on TV, and points out that they may be struggling to grasp the outlines of the task at hand. On Newsmax Trump lawyer John Lauro explained that all Trump asked Pence to do was pause the Electoral College voting for ten days—that’s it! Yet one charge against Trump is that he “conspir[ed] to obstruct an official proceeding,” Rupar writes, “and federal law mandates that presidential elections be certified on January 6. In other words, pausing the voting for 10 days—something Lauro admits Trump asked Pence to do—is illegal.” (August 4, 2023)
Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter warns us that the “very close and very competitive” 2024 presidential race could be upended in a heart beat—literally. Both candidates are old, and one “serious health crisis can put someone who is over the age of 75 in the hospital or take them out of commission for days or weeks.” Furthermore, Walter notes, we “can’t predict how voters will respond to a presidential nominee on trial (and potentially convicted or acquitted of a crime) during the campaign….the prospect of a former president and currently active candidate for president being convicted or acquitted in criminal court right before an election is uncharted territory.” (August 3, 2023)
Tom Josceleyn at Just Security shows that the work of the January 6 Special Select Committee was crucial judicial scaffolding for bringing Donald Trump to account for his actions. While the Smith has clearly obtained new evidence, “the analysis and finer points embedded in the indictment are importantly very similar to those produced by the Select Committee,” Josceleyn writes. “It is likely that Jack Smith was focused on Trump’s political conspiracy, which caused the violence at the U.S. Capitol. In that regard, the Special Counsel’s indictment lines up well with the Select Committee’s final report. And make no mistake: The indictment lays blame for the attack on the U.S. Capitol at Trump’s feet.” (August 3, 2023)
Yes it would. I am still not convinced (as per Amy Walter in the short takes) that the whole Republican primary field isn't going to blow up. We are still months away from the first primary, and so much discovery!
Brilliant idea. However put numbers into anything and the financially illiterate (which is most Americans) will say “so what.”