It’s more a statement of opposition to Trump than an expression of fealty to the idea that the former president was robbed of his due in 2020.
If you haven’t already, read Jeff Blehar’s piece on the confusing polling environment. Depending on the pollster, Donald Trump’s lead over Joe Biden is either stable and growing or Biden’s moribund performance in the polls has begun to recover. At this atypically early outset of the general-election campaign season, head-to-head polling may be indicative but hardly predictive. The voters who will decide this election just aren’t paying much attention to it yet. Still, if polling on the candidates isn’t especially valuable at this stage of the race, the same thing cannot be said for the issues that will determine their votes — at least, to the extent issues will prove determinative at all in 2024.
Quinnipiac University’s latest survey is useful in assessing voters’ priorities. When Quinnipiac pollsters asked respondents what they believe is “the most urgent issue facing the country,” 20 percent said the economy, and another 20 percent cited immigration. But “preserving democracy” beat them both out at 24 percent.
The issue of democracy takes the top spot because it is everyone’s concern. At 12 percent, it’s the third-most pressing issue for GOP voters. Thirty-nine percent of Democrats cited “preserving democracy” as their foremost priority, making it their primary focus by a long shot. Among self-described independents, democracy narrowly beat out immigration and the economy to take the top slot. To varying degrees, “preserving democracy” is the top priority among women, college degree-holders, white voters, and voters over 50.
As many have noted and this poll attests, the universality of this issue is attributable to its bipartisan appeal. Almost everyone can agree democracy is in peril, though they’re pretty sure the other party is the problem. And yet, Quinnipiac’s data suggests Democrats are far more passionate about the subject than Republicans. That’s hardly inexplicable.
If you’re a partisan Democrat and you’re disinclined to provide pollsters with evidence of your dissatisfaction with Joe Biden’s suboptimal record on consumer prices or border security, “preserving democracy” is a life preserver. But then, so, too, are the issues of abortion, climate change, and health care. A good portion of the Democratic Party’s base is not attempting to cynically manipulate pollsters when they say they fear for the future of democracy. They mean it.
Republican voters do not share that passion, and understandably so. For the GOP, “preserving democracy” — or, in the party’s preferred framing of the issue, “election integrity” — is retrospective. To Democrats, however, it’s a rallying cry and a warning of what is to come. Elections are always about the future, and a forward-looking concern will always have more salience than a reckoning with the past — however valuable that reckoning may be. If election results since Donald Trump left office are any indication, Democrats aren’t just filling pollster’s heads with their party’s preferred shibboleths. They vote on the issue.
In the wake of the 2022 midterm elections, a FiveThirtyEight poll found that the vast majority of voters cited inflation as their foremost priority — an issue that should have favored the GOP. In second place, however, were voters’ concerns about “political extremism or polarization.” Mitigating that threat was priority number one for Democratic voters, and self-described independents cited it as their second biggest concern (20 percent), just behind inflation (25 percent).
We can reasonably infer that concerns about “political extremism” serve as a proxy for the outrage in both partisan camps over how their opponents have observed the norms and conventions that make republican self-governance a viable prospect. And, given the degree to which voters who turned out in competitive races disproportionately punished Republicans who lent credence to Donald Trump’s claims surrounding electoral malfeasance, we can also infer from 2022’s election results that the issue is a potent vote mobilizer.
But we don’t have to go sifting through the political archives to prove that “democracy” cuts against Trump and the Republicans who remake themselves in his image. That’s pretty apparent in Quinnipiac’s polling. In a head-to-head matchup against Biden, that pollster found Trump trailing the president by six points with Biden securing a majority of the vote. In that poll, Trump lost independents by twelve points, women by 22 points, and degree-holders by almost 30 points — all demographics that cited “democracy” as their foremost concern. In a multi-candidate race featuring Jill Stein, Cornell West, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., those margins tighten some, but not enough to amount to a Trump victory.
It’s one poll and not necessarily one that comports with the broader polling environment. But it does confirm the impression observers have gathered over the last several years that suggests the issue of “democracy” rallies Democratic voters more than Republicans. It’s more a statement of opposition to Trump and his style of politics than an expression of fealty to the idea that the former president was robbed of his due in 2020. And it cements the impression that Republicans who press the issue dearest to Trump’s heart end up activating their adversaries more than their supporters.
Republican voters would do well to keep that in mind the next time Trump attempts to relitigate the 2020 election results, reminding voters of all the chaos that messaging campaign unleashed. It’s a trap.