Donald Trump’s guilty verdict is flipping the exact demographic that Joe Biden’s re-election campaign most needs to reach.
Just ahead of last week’s guilty verdicts for former President Donald Trump, I wrote that we were “finally moving away from possibility to hard and fast reality, which may look very different than the predictions based on polling.” The first batch of post-verdict polls are in and, well, I must admit that a lot of things are looking very much the same, with the race between Trump and President Joe Biden still neck and neck.
That’s not to say things are entirely the same. According to the results of a survey The New York Times conducted in June with Siena College, Biden gained on Trump by about 2 percentage points after the verdict. By itself, that’s not eyebrow-raising. The result is within the margin of error of most polls and tracks relatively closely with the tiny swing other recent surveys have detected.
“The shift was especially pronounced among the young, nonwhite and disengaged Democratic-leaning voters who have propelled Mr. Trump to a lead in the early polls,” the Times noted. “Of the people who previously told us they had voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but would vote for Mr. Trump in 2024, around one-quarter now said they would instead stick with Mr. Biden.”
The demographics of the people who shifted means “it’s possible Mr. Biden gained a bit more than the two-point improvement among those we successfully recontacted,” Nate Cohn, the Times’ chief political analyst, explained in his newsletter Wednesday. “That’s because older, white and highly engaged voters were relatively likely to retake the survey, and those groups were much less likely to swing in the aftermath of the verdict.”
