Several Daily Kos commenters in my column last weekend expressed fears that the violence erupting in some American cities was going to give Donald Trump a leverage point heading into these final campaign months, while significantly damaging Joe Biden.
The good news is, none of the post-convention polling last week appeared to bear that out, as Markos pointed out in his polling round up. In fact, taken as a whole, the polling was nothing but bad news for Trump.
But NBC News had a good take on Trump's "law and order" message, writing that it "might be a better issue for Trump than the coronavirus. But it isn’t a winning issue for him." That was their conclusion after multiple polls found: having Trump as president makes most voters feel less safe (versus Biden making a plurality of voters feel safer), 58% of voters say the country is worse off today than it was four years ago, and Biden has a 5-point edge over Trump on who would better keep the country safe from harm, at 51%-46%.
While Trump fares better on those questions than he does on issues surrounding the coronavirus, he still loses to Biden overall—meaning, Trump's last best hope of finding an issue that will drive people away from Biden is a dud.
Beyond that, the coronavirus—Trump's worst issue—continues to be foremost on voters' minds. From last week's Civiqs poll:
- 58% of respondents think the U.S. has handled the pandemic worse than other countries
- 57% said the U.S. government should have done more to contain the virus in the spring
- 44% said it would be at least six months or more before life returns to normal, and another 27% said things will never go back to normal—quite a turnaround from April, when 55% thought the pandemic would be over by June
- 62% said school reopenings are not going smoothly, while just 17% said they were
That last data point speaks to Trump's ability to win back those white suburban voters he so badly needs after they largely defected from the GOP in 2018. Let's just say it's not looking good for Trump, and school reopenings aren't likely to get any better in the next couple of months as flu season collides with the pandemic.
In addition, while the Republican convention worked hard to try to reframe Trump in his absence (as I noted last weekend), good ol' Trump came back with an unscripted vengeance. After a singular convention in which the candidate himself mostly managed to steer clear of stepping on his own campaign message, Trump returned to just trample the heck out of it with a series of head-turners:
Last week's smorgasbord of Trump-driven news couldn't have been any wackier or worse for a candidate who continues to trail by roughly 7 to 8 points nationally and in most battleground state polling.
Meanwhile, Biden offered up the best possible response to Trump's "law and order" ploy, asking, “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?”
Nope. Or at least, not anyone whose vote is likely determine the outcome of the election.