The NPR Politics Podcast - Most Trump-Leaning Independents: He Shouldn't Be POTUS If Convicted

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

According to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, 49% of Americans believe he has done something illegal and an additional 26 percent believe he has done something unethical but not illegal. Still, half of all independents prefer Trump to Biden — just 42% support the sitting president.We want to hear from you about the show: npr.org/politicssurveyThis episode: White House reporter Deepa Shivaram, political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.The podcast is produced by Casey Morell and Elena Moore. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Keen, and I'm 12 years old today. Since I live in Switzerland, this means I get to ride in the front seat of the car. Oh, cool. This episode was recorded at... 2.14 p.m. on Thursday, October 5th, 2023. Things might have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll be arriving at school in style. Enjoy the show!

Yes, he will be arriving in style. Congratulations, making it up to the front. Take over the radio, man. Just put it on scan and let it ride. What a champ. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Deepa Shivaram. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. So we've been talking a lot about Congress this week, and we'll definitely get to it again. But today we're going to start the show with the presidential race. Mara, primary season, technically not over yet, but both Trump and Biden have essentially started turning toward the general election. They're neck and neck in a hypothetical 2024 matchup in a new NPR PBS NewsHour Marist poll that came out this week. 49% of registered voters are supporting Biden compared with 47% for Trump. And that's virtually unchanged since August's poll.

That's right. This is a absolutely even race. Either candidate could win according to these polls. And what's really interesting is it's as if we have two incumbents running against each other. Who's the challenger? I mean, Trump is very much like an incumbent. He's been the president. He has a rock solid base. And Biden, who has been beating Trump by tiny little bits in the polls up until now, has a base that's less enthusiastic about him. That doesn't necessarily mean they're open to switching to Trump. Danielle, you have a story out this week where you point out

presidential race rematches have happened before, right? But this is the first contest with a former president facing indictments, in the plural, four of them on 91 charges. And that's not lost on the public. According to the latest NPR-PBS NewsHour Mayor's Poll, most Americans think that Trump has done something wrong. Right. Yeah. And we ask people a little bit of a nuanced question on this. We ask them, do you think the investigations into former President Trump, do you think he's done something illegal? Has he done something unethical but not illegal? Or has he done something wrong? Or are you unsure? And altogether, around three quarters of adults nationwide think he has done something wrong, illegal or unethical. To break that down a little more, it's about half think he's done something illegal or a quarter think he's done something unethical. So yeah, a lot of people have been paying attention to that. Right. And of course, that breaks down by party lines as well. Republicans probably have a different stance than Democrats. Their independence also weighing in.

How does that kind of break down? It's very partisan, as you rightly guess there. Democrats, 87 percent believe he has done something illegal, whereas only 12 percent of Republicans think he's done something illegal. But four in 10 Republicans think he's done something unethical. And I can tell you, when I have talked to Republicans out on the trail, you do hear people saying things like that, like, yeah, he could have behaved better, but this is all a witch hunt, that sort of thing. But independents, and independents, you independents in such a tight race in such an evenly matched country are just key to winning anything. 44% of independents think Trump has done something illegal, and around a third think he's done something unethical. So quite a few

independents as well. Okay, and let's turn to the Biden side of things. Despite what House Republicans have been pushing, there isn't evidence that Biden has done something illegal when it comes to connections to his son, Hunter Biden. But the polling shows that there also are a lot of people who believe Biden has done something illegal or unethical. What does that look like? Right. Yeah. So still a majority of Americans think Biden has done something wrong. Four in 10 believe Biden has done something illegal. Again, compare that to five in 10 for Trump. And another quarter think Biden has done something unethical, but not illegal. So altogether, 63%. And that's really striking because, again, these are two vastly different situations. Again, we have four indictments for President Trump. There was

sufficient evidence to indict him four times at the federal and state level. For Joe Biden, there are not legal proceedings related to Hunter Biden's business dealings. And yes, there is an impeachment inquiry in Congress. Totally true. But there is not evidence that has come from that, that Biden has done something wrong. So this is really, really reflective to me of how partisan that our politics are, of how partisan our fact bases are, of the fact that in particular, politicians and a media ecosystem on the right have very much spread this idea that Joe Biden is somehow corrupt, that he is doing illegal things when we don't have the evidence for that. Right. And politically speaking, we we've tracked

this a lot. We've talked about this a lot. But how voters respond to this, you know, how voters have these opinions about Trump and Biden and whether or not they think they've done illegal things and wrong things. You know, how does that play out in terms of how they're voting? Right now, we know that people don't have that high enthusiasm that we were talking about. So they're not really wanting to choose between these two candidates, but it's increasingly looking like that's their choice. What has that looked like on the trail? And what are you hearing, Mara, too? Well, there's the big question that we don't know is how much of these poll responses are a proxy for how people will actually vote next November. They think Biden did something wrong. They don't quite

know what it is. Does that mean they'll vote against him and vote for Trump? Or people who are Democrats who are unenthusiastic about Biden, does that mean they'll stay home or does that mean they'll cast a vote for Trump? Don't forget negative partisanship is the most powerful motivator for voters in recent elections. That means you go into the voting booth motivated to cast your vote to stop someone, not necessarily with a lot of enthusiasm for the guy you're voting for. So I don't know how much these poll numbers tell us about voter behavior next year. Yeah. And I talked to a couple of people who responded to our poll and I talked to a Republican who said he does not want Trump to be reelected. And I talked to a Democratic leaning independent who says she does not really want Biden to be reelected. But I pushed them on this.

I said, OK, but what if it's Trump versus Biden next year? What would you do? And they both really had to sit and think about that. They don't neither of them wants either of those two men to become president again. At least that's what they told us. But they both told me, big sigh. I guess I would vote for pick one, Trump or Biden. Or at the very least, I would really have to think about it. But I would lean towards voting because Americans also, a lot of them see a third party vote as throwing a vote away or as potentially spoiling in such a tightly matched environment. People who are not you know, not super enthusiastic about either candidate are very much in a point where they're like, I really I really don't want to make this

choice. Right. And I want to I want to be clear here that it's it can be easy to overstate the lack of enthusiasm because we ask Democrats, would you be satisfied with Biden as the nominee? We ask Republicans, would you be satisfied with Trump? And around three quarters of Democrats and Democratic leaners said, yeah, I'd be satisfied to some degree with Biden. Around three quarters said, yeah, I would be satisfied with Trump. So both of those guys are relatively popular in their parties. But then again, that leaves you with one quarter of people in each party who are not satisfied. So it depends on how you look at it. Yeah, they have some people who really like them, but they also have a sizable amount who don't. You know, in terms of the third party

candidate, which is so interesting to me, is that Donald Trump won in 2016 with 46 percent of the vote. In 2020, he lost with 46 percent of the vote. What was the difference? The difference was Jill Stein and Gary Johnson and the third party candidates who just shaved off a point or two in the key states to give the electoral college to Trump. And the third party candidates is a huge factor this year. Trump could win again with less than 50% and certainly less than a popular vote majority if third party candidates do just well enough in the right places. But also, I have a question about that, Mara. I mean, yes, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson played arguably spoiler roles in 2016, but also couldn't the discrepancy between 2016 and 2020 also be just that more people came out to vote for Biden? Like some people who stayed home in 2016 and said,

I don't like either of them, came out in 2020 and voted for Biden. Yeah, well, Trump also got more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. His percentage of the popular vote remained the same. And he won one time and he lost the next time. Yeah, I do want to get to one piece of tape that I got from talking to voters who responded to our survey, because this really gets at the kind of disaffection and disillusionment that voters have in this country. This is Julie Tindall. She is from Pink Hill, North Carolina. She leans Democratic. She does not identify with either party. She's an independent. But she identified herself as kind of a Bernie Sanders-leaning Democrat. So that's where she's coming from. But I asked her, OK, how do you feel about the political parties? And this is what she said. They never tend to do anything that's actually beneficial to the country. They just keep fighting each other. And that's all they care about. From very different angles, right, left, whatever. That is a pretty common feeling in the country based on polling, on people's trust in government, based on how people feel about the parties, based on people just feeling that everyone is unfavorable.

They disapprove of so many politicians because increasingly everything seems it's all it's a cliche at this point. Washington seems dysfunctional. Everything seems broken. And especially given the total mess in Congress this week, I don't know how that ever turns around. Yeah. Speaking of that total mess, we're going to talk more about that after the break. We'll be back. All right. And we're back. Mara, I want to broaden this conversation out here because these polling numbers are about Trump and Biden specifically. But it also kind of points to this very intense partisanship that we were talking about that's coming up in all kinds of issues, right? Like how people feel about the economy used to be a little bit of a marker on how the economy was doing and also a little bit tinged with partisanship, but that's becoming a lot more polarized. How people respond to questions on someone's criminal conduct or potential criminal conduct is becoming polarized. What are you making of all of this?

Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that we are in a hyper-partisan moment. And in the past, president's approval ratings, as you said, used to rise and fall with the health of the economy and voters' perceptions of the economy. Now, when there's a Democrat in the White House, Republicans tend to think the economy is bad. And then when the shoe is on the other foot, Democrats think the economy is bad. So everything is a proxy for your party ID. And it's bad for democracy when there's no incentive or room for people to come together in the middle,

when they always have to be, you know, in their own end zones fighting each other. Right. Yeah. And right now with things so pretty evenly matched, right, where in any given election, each party can see victory for themselves just over the horizon, like, oh, we can win, we can just get there without compromising. I mean, when that occurs, you just don't have the incentive to compromise, right? If you think you can win with exactly where you are because you have right around half of the voters, you just might do that. And that kind of seems to be where the parties are. And the hell of it is, the parties have also pulled further apart. We keep saying the word polarized, pulled further apart on their issue positions, the GOP more so than Democrats. Then what you have is what political scientists call calcification,

right, where people are set in their party ways. They're far apart. They're not going to move across that line. And what you end up with is a pretty sclerotic government, right? Because any time things tip past that halfway point and Republicans are elected or Democrats are elected, the entire way that Washington operates, the entire kind of policies that are attempted are totally changed and everything just lurches back and forth. And you end up with, as I was talking about, as voters perceive this really ineffective government in Washington. And Mara, let's let's kind of turn to the Hill stuff specifically here.

I feel like everyone's been trying to make sense of this group of eight House Republicans led by Matt Gaetz, who ousted McCarthy, the former Speaker of the House this week. And in some sense, I feel like it's kind of hard to make sense of it because these folks have been dubbed the chaos caucus. They are breaking rules. But the thing that's funny to me is that they're also following the rules in order to cause this chaos. Matt Gaetz was allowed to do this. And if you're a regular person, someone just turning on the news, trying to make sense of what happened this week, I mean, how do you make sense of what happened this week? Well, Matt Gates was allowed to do this because he negotiated a change in the rules with McCarthy. And McCarthy was so weak and had no other way of becoming speaker, then he had to

agree to a new rule, which is that any one member can put in a motion to vacate. In other words, can call a vote to see if you want to fire the Speaker. That's what happened. Now, the reason that eight House Republicans could oust McCarthy is because McCarthy had such a small, fragile majority that he could only afford to lose about five Republicans. And these House Republicans who voted to fire him come from ruby red districts. Because we have partisan gerrymandering, because we have districts that are drawn to protect incumbents, incumbents have no incentive to work across the aisle or to appeal to swing voters when they get to Washington. All they're worried about is a primary challenge from the left of their Democrats, or in this case, from the right of their Republicans. Those are the structural

things that allowed the chaos that we just witnessed to happen. Institutionally, you know, like, what does this say about the fragility? What it says about the House of Representatives at the moment is that the Republican majority seems to be ungovernable, and a lot of them seem uninterested in governing. Their most primary constitutional responsibility, if you are the House of Representatives, is to originate spending bills to fund the government, and they were not willing to do that. Yeah. This does not appear to be a fight within the Republican caucus about necessarily substantive policy issues or perhaps more

precisely an argument about different forms of conservatism. Rather, this is a group of people who are willing to let Congress just stop working as opposed to coming in and saying, you know, we're going to really fight and gum things up because we want lower taxes. We want better trade deals. No, this is just flat out. Let's just gum up the works of government. Yeah. And the funny thing to me also, as we kind of watch this all unfold this week and continue to unfold next week, is that the point seems to be to not get things done in a way, to stop the procedure from happening, to stop normal proceedings from happening. They have been dubbed the chaos caucus. The way this is all unfolding is, I think, you know, to no surprise to anyone, also deeply polarized.

All right. I think we're going to leave it there for today. I'm Deepa Shivram. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.