A poll taken by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News earlier this month revealed that Independent voters are moving toward the president 100 days before the election on November 3.
Fifty percent of the 900 registered voters polled between July 9 and 12 said there was no chance they’d be voting for President Trump, while 37 percent said there was no chance they’d be voting for presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
That leaves 13 percent undecided. And 17 percent of them are leaning toward the president while 14 percent say they favor Biden.
Thirty percent were undecided a month earlier, according to Morning Consult. Most of them appear to be moving into the Trump column.
How Independents vote is critical to the outcome of the election in November. In 2016, Trump’s advantage among that bloc was four percent, enough to carry him to victory.
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Several indicators show them moving toward Trump, including the number of them who think that the president is better able to manage the economy than his opponent. Vanity Fair, a slick liberal magazine, was forced to admit that “Trump still retains an edge (if a declining one) with independents on the economy — a critical advantage.… To the extent that the economy rebounds in the fall, Trump may be able to convince independents he’s a safer bet to keep things moving.”
The magazine also noted that Biden, “despite his reputation as a likable centrist … doesn’t test particularly well among independents. In the Morning Consult tracking survey Biden rated a minus 15 (35% approval, 50% disapproval), and even in polls where he has scored better, his support [among independents] is weak.”
This trend toward Trump is also showing up in registering new voters. According to TargetSmart, those who were registering in competitive states “tended to be whiter, older and less Democratic” than before. Even though registrations of new voters had slowed considerably during the COVID shutdown, “Democrats were suffering disproportionately” during that period.
Further, as Politico reported, “The study from TargetSmart was especially alarming for Democrats because it spotlighted not only falling registrations, but which party was damaged most in battleground states.” In a majority of those states — including Florida, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania — new Democrat voter registrations made up a smaller share of new registrants than before the shutdown.
All of this was reflected in an opinion piece in Fox News penned by Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee. She wrote, “As Election Day approaches, it’s because of … enthusiasm that President Trump will carry the day once again.”
That enthusiasm included some 300,000 supporters who opened their wallets last Tuesday and pumped $20 million into Trump’s campaign coffers, compared to Biden’s best virtual fundraiser at just $7.6 million.
McDaniel said that Biden is dealing a losing hand: “It turns out that raising taxes on 82 percent of Americans or eliminating entire sectors of our energy industry, along with millions of reliable, good-paying jobs, isn’t a great rallying cry for your campaign.”
With independents moving to support the president, and the debates between the two candidates still to take place, it’s becoming clearer all the time that the contest in November won’t even be close. It’ll be a rout.
Photo: AP Images
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, writing primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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