Saturday, August 22, 2020

Trump’s Approval Rating, Biden’s Low Bar: This Week in the 2020 Race

The Democratic National Convention, on the whole, was aimed more at appealing to moderates than rallying the base. Will the Republicans take the opposite approach?
Residents of The Villages, Fla., held a golf cart parade on Friday to celebrate the Democratic ticket.Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Welcome to our weekly analysis of the state of the 2020 campaign.

The week in numbers

  • Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign said it raised $70 million during the four-day Democratic National Convention.
  • 21.8 million people tuned in on television for Biden’s big night at the convention on Thursday, according to Nielsen, slightly more than the 21 million who watched former President Barack Obama and Senator Kamala Harris, Mr. Biden’s running mate, on Wednesday. The TV viewership for the nominee’s speech was down about 21 percent from Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech four years ago, though many people watched online.
  • A new Gallup poll put President Trump’s approval rating at 42 percent. Americans’ approval of his handling of the economy — typically his strong suit — was 48 percent, roughly even with his numbers from June but 15 percentage points off his career high in the winter, just before the pandemic struck.
  • Pollsters mostly paused their work during the convention, waiting for things to play out before taking a fresh read of the country. But at the start of the week, three separate polls by respected outlets showed Biden leading Trump by an average of eight points.

Catch me up

Democrats breathed a collective sigh of relief this week after the party pulled off an all-virtual convention, half political music video and half Joe Biden infomercial, largely without a hitch.

And whether you liked the content of Mr. Biden’s acceptance speech or found yourself unmoved by his message, one thing was clear: He outperformed the low expectations set in part by his general-election opponent.

The Joe Biden of the Republican Party’s telling is a gaffe machine whose age has rendered him unable to speak clearly, a caricature built over months of tweets by Mr. Trump, scores of interviews by his allies and nightly roasts by popular conservative media figures. The Joe Biden many Americans saw this week was cleareyed and capable of commanding an audience, albeit reading from a teleprompter in a room that was largely empty.

If that is a low bar, it is because Mr. Trump and some of his most prominent allies have helped to lower it.

The Trump campaign and the expectations game

President Trump has portrayed Joseph R. Biden Jr. as senile, giving his opponent a low bar to clear.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

Outside advisers have tried to warn Mr. Trump that he needs to raise expectations for his opponents while lowering them for himself. But that hasn’t stopped the president from bragging to people that he expects the fall debates to be a bruising experience for his opponent. Mr. Trump was eager to run as an underdog four years ago, but this time his campaign has sought to project an image of dominance, in ways that are not always helpful.

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  • At the president’s June rally in Tulsa, Okla., Brad Parscale, the former Trump campaign manager, violated a cardinal rule of politics: Underestimate crowd sizes in order to overdeliver. Instead, he made Mr. Trump look foolish when only 6,200 people showed up for an event Mr. Parscale claimed had one million ticket requests.
  • Instead of talking up how Mr. Biden could be a formidable opponent on the debate stage, Mr. Trump and his advisers have mostly done the opposite. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, claimed recently that there was “an active push to get Joe Biden to not debate my father” because of concerns that he was not capable of handling the matchup.
  • Jason Miller, a campaign strategist, has tried to change course on how the Trump team is framing Mr. Biden. “Joe Biden is actually a very good debater,” he told The Washington Post this month. But after all the denigration of Mr. Biden, a lone comment from one operative did little to reset the narrative.

Biden aims for the center, not the left

There was a choose-your-own-adventure element to the speakers at the Democratic convention. Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts made policy cases, while current and former Republicans made the case for decency. But throughout the week there was a clear emphasis on winning over ideological moderates and Trump-skeptical voters — a prioritization of persuasion over rallying the base.

Consider this:

  • John Kasich, a Republican and former governor of Ohio, addressed fears that Mr. Biden would govern in the interest of the party’s left. “I’m sure there are Republicans and independents who couldn’t imagine crossing over to support a Democrat,” he said. “They fear Joe may turn sharp left and leave them behind. I don’t believe that. Because I know the measure of the man — reasonable, faithful, respectful. And you know, no one pushes Joe around.”
  • Mr. Biden constructed his acceptance speech to explicitly pivot from partisanship. “While I will be a Democratic candidate, I will be an American president,” he said. “I will work as hard for those who didn’t support me as I will for those who did.”
  • During the convention, a key Biden adviser talked down the idea of deficit spending on new programs. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, former Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware, who is overseeing Mr. Biden’s transition team, said it was hard to envision big new spending programs in 2021. “When you see what Trump’s done to the deficit,” he said, citing the president’s tax cuts on top of virus relief spending, “we’re going to be limited.”

What will the Republican convention be like?

The Biden granddaughters were lovely. Shorter speeches were effective. The travelogue roll call made for strangely good TV. And answering the “Where’s Hunter?” battle cry with a video testimonial from the once wayward Biden son was delicately handled.

Those were concessions that Trump advisers and former White House officials handed to the Democratic National Committee after it pulled off the first-ever virtual convention, even while they took issue with the overall message of the week.

The question is, how do they top that? The answer may be that it’s difficult.

  • Republican officials wasted time that could have been used to plan a highly produced semi-virtual convention by trying — for much longer than the Democrats — to pull off a normal one. Mr. Trump scrapped his plans for an in-person convention in Jacksonville, Fla., just a month before the event was scheduled to take place.

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  • Instead of handing over the reins to an experienced television producer, Mr. Trump is trying to weigh in on much of the programming himself, mostly with the help of people from his own White House. And he’s insistent on having it still look on television like a “real convention,” i.e., with an audience component, and on playing a major role himself every night.
  • The D.N.C.’s four nights showcasing the diversity of the Democratic Party also heightens the pressure on the Republican National Committee and Mr. Trump to do more than appeal to aggrieved white voters. Republican officials are planning to highlight Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the white couple from St. Louis who brandished weapons at Black Lives Matter protesters in June. Will they have a message for people other than the president’s hard-core base?

What you might have missed

Giovanni Russonello contributed reporting.

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posted by Goatz @ 4:00 AM   0 comments

Friday, August 21, 2020

On Politics Poll Watch: Is the ‘Convention Bounce’ a Thing of the Past?

After the Democratic primary campaign came to an abrupt halt in late March as the coronavirus

Welcome to Poll Watch, our weekly look at polling data and survey research on the candidates, voters and issues that will shape the 2020 election.

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A national political convention gives presidential candidates their first major opportunity of the campaign to connect with a national audience, reaching viewers by the millions and kicking off the race’s climactic final leg.

Until recently, it also usually meant the candidate would get a bump in the polls — like a guaranteed $200 for passing “Go” — though bravado performances tended to add a few extra points to the so-called convention bounce.

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The average convention bounce has been on the wane in recent years — and with the coronavirus limiting the convention’s proceedings, this could be the year when the convention bounce disappears completely.

Of course, we probably won’t have enough polling results until next week to measure the effects of the Democratic National Convention, and we’ll have to wait longer to determine the impact of the Republican convention, which begins Monday. And, historically, convention bounces have mostly tended to wash out anyway: Both parties are about evenly likely to get a bump, and voters’ preferences tend to revert within a few weeks, or to be swayed in a fresh direction by newer developments.

Still, the fact that the campaign bounce itself is on the wane carries implications about the state of play in politics more generally.

Polarization and favorability

American politics have grown more deeply partisan over the past few decades, so there’s far less fluctuation in pre-election polling. Put simply, persuadable voters are in short supply.

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So it makes sense that since 2004 the average convention bounce for candidates in both parties has been only around two points, according to data from the American Presidency Project compiled by FiveThirtyEight. That’s far less than the six-point average of the two previous cycles. Going back further, the average ticks up higher still.

With President Trump in office, polarization has only deepened: Public opinion of his performance has been markedly stable throughout his term, and most Americans report feeling strongly about him one way or the other, according to polls. Even among independents, his approval rating has hardly climbed higher than the low 40s.

“Historically the conventions have been a time for the party to unify,” Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said in an interview. “But the bottom line is that there are not that many undecideds, and the conventions don’t really need to unify the party because the parties are already unified.” He pointed to an average that he had calculated using four high-quality national polls taken just before the D.N.C., showing that more than nine in 10 members of each major party said they would support their nominee.

Then again, it’s not all about the horse race. Polls show that supporters of Joseph R. Biden Jr. are overwhelmingly likely to say they’re casting their ballot mostly to oust Mr. Trump, not because they’re particularly eager to put Mr. Biden in the Oval Office. The Democratic nominee’s favorability rating currently runs about five points lower than the share of registered voters who say they plan to vote for him in the fall, according to averages from RealClearPolitics.

This isn’t exactly a fatal flaw — but it’s enough to cause Mr. Biden’s campaign some concern. If all the pro-Biden messaging at the convention failed to give him a bounce in head-to-head matchups against Trump, but nevertheless brought his favorability rating up, that could offer him a new sense of security.

Who’s watching?

Mr. Biden has remained something of a candidate-in-waiting since the pandemic began and he became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. That’s partly by choice: Widely known as an uneven campaigner, the former vice president has seemed content to mostly stand aside as Mr. Trump publicly struggled to contain the coronavirus crisis or stem the economic downturn.

The convention was supposed to be Mr. Biden’s moment to turn on his campaign, addressing his largest audience yet after days of runway programming to boost his momentum. But then the pandemic got in the way.

The Democrats canceled their plans for a large in-person gathering in Milwaukee, dampening anticipation in the run-up to the event. This also significantly altered the vibe of the broadcast itself, making it feel less like a live event and, at times, more like a telethon.

Average live TV ratings over the four-night convention were down by almost 20 percent compared with 2016, according to Nielsen statistics (although those ratings don’t include online views, which likely rose this year). On some nights, the major broadcast networks saw a drop of nearly 50 percent in their convention viewership compared with four years ago.

The Republican Party will also hold a heavily altered version of its convention, though it will include an in-person nomination vote, for which state-party delegates will gather at the originally planned location in Charlotte, N.C.

Mr. Trump currently trails Mr. Biden by an average of eight points in national polls, according to various polling aggregators. If the Republican convention does manage to make a splash, Mr. Trump certainly has more room to grow than Mr. Biden did going into the Democratic convention.

“We have seen Trump weaker than he probably needs to be with seniors and even with white non-college voters,” Mr. Kondik said. “So I wonder if Trump can sort of bring some of those folks back with his convention.”

Michael Grynbaum contributed reporting.
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posted by Goatz @ 4:20 PM   0 comments