A poll of swing-state voters shows that Americans rate threats to democracy as an important issue, but that the president has yet to convince them he is the one to defend it.
I’ve spoken to more than one midwesterner who is dismissive of Jan 6. “Not an insurrection”, “bunch of idiots”, etc. There’s a real disconnect on what Jan 6 actually is.
It’s also clear in those conversations that they don’t see it as Trumps fault.
As such, there will be no perception of Biden as a Democracy custodian. In order for that to happen, perception of Jan 6 would have to undergo a seismic shift 3yrs later.
In speeches and campaign ads, Biden points to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, his incitement of an angry mob that ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the former president’s boasts that he will use the powers of his office to punish his political enemies.
In six swing states that Biden narrowly won in 2020, a little more than half of voters classified as likely to decide the presidential election say threats to democracy are extremely important to their vote for president, according to a poll by The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
The results offer troubling indicators for Biden, who needs voters who may be unenthusiastic about his candidacy to decide they must reject Trump to preserve America’s system of representative government.
“Many Americans don’t recognize Biden’s custodianship of our democracy, which is a bad sign for his campaign,” said Justin Gest, a professor of policy and government at George Mason University.
About two-thirds of key state voters say that a political system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from Congress or the courts — in a word, a dictatorship — would be bad.
The Deciders poll was conducted by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government April 15 to May 30, 2024, among a stratified random sample of 3,513 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
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