But the job is also to convince Americans of a case that has not been made effectively so far: that Trump is too extreme, and that, whatever reservations Americans may have about Biden, re-election to the White House poses a huge risk.
There’s plenty of material on this issue, but Americans don’t seem too worried about it yet.
A new Gallup poll makes that clear, asking Americans whether Biden and Trump are ideologically “too conservative,” “too liberal,” or “just right.” Despite Trump’s extreme rhetoric and often-authoritarian proposals, and despite Biden’s significant bipartisan accomplishments in his first term, Americans actually see Biden as the more ideologically extreme candidate.
While 44 percent rated Trump as “too conservative,” a much larger majority, 56 percent, rated Biden as “too liberal.”
It’s worth adding some nuance to these numbers.
When it comes to Trump, Americans seem to distinguish between ideological extreme and extreme. Other Ways.
One example is a CNN poll from earlier this year, which asked Americans point-blank whether they thought both candidates were “too extreme,” but the numbers were very different: In contrast to Gallup’s numbers, 38% said Biden was too extreme, while 63% said Trump was too extreme.
Taken together, it appears that Americans see Trump as extreme, but not necessarily in terms of policy.
A CNN poll also showed Trump with a slight lead, and Trump’s extremism, or at least how voters perceived it, didn’t seem to be the deciding factor for moderate voters. Other issues were more important.
But the poll turned up some interesting results: It featured a range of actual proposals put forward by Trump and his allies, from directing the Justice Department to investigate political opponents, to pardoning himself and the January 6th defendants, to purging the government of political opponents.
A majority of Americans — more than three-quarters — said they believed Trump would try to do each of these things. And in each case, about 70% of Americans opposed them. It’s hard to get 70% of Americans to agree with you in politics, but these ideas were clearly not that popular.
Given the totality of the data we have on Trump, many of those voters are probably not all that familiar with all of this, just as they are not all that familiar with the charges against him and the conduct behind them. So they may have a vague sense that Trump is too extreme, perhaps because of personal conduct that they have long opposed. And they are inclined to believe that, if prompted, Trump would go to extremes. But it’s not clear that that’s a big factor in their calculations right now.
It’s June and they haven’t watched it yet.
That could begin to change Thursday night, and perhaps at next month’s Republican National Convention.
The trick for Biden will be to get voters to actually consume these things and care enough about them to actually do so — to tap into the broader perception that Trump is extreme and point out that it might actually matter. The fact that Americans seem to distinguish between Trump’s ideological extremes and more general extremes seems to speak to that. They seem to see this as more of a personal issue than a policy issue. So it’s understandable why these issues might not be as important to them as more pressing issues like inflation.
Biden has a lot of problems of his own to solve, but to win over voters he also needs to get them to pay more attention to Trump’s debts. The debate will be a good opportunity to demonstrate that.
