Donald Trump would be on track to win a historic landslide in November — if so many US voters didn’t find him personally repugnant.
Roughly 53 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the former president. And yet, when asked about Trump’s ability to handle key issues — or the impact of his policies — voters routinely give the Republican candidate higher marks than President Biden.
In a YouGov survey released this month, Trump boasted an advantage over Biden on 10 of the 15 issues polled. On the three issues that voters routinely name as top priorities — the economy, immigration, and inflation — respondents said that Trump would do a better job by double-digit margins.
Meanwhile, in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, 40 percent of voters said that Trump’s policies had helped them personally, while just 18 percent said the same of Biden. If Americans could elect a normal human being with Trump’s reputation for being “tough” on immigration and good at economics, they would almost certainly do so.
Biden is fortunate that voters do not have that option. But to erase Trump’s small but stubborn lead in the polls, the president needs to erode his GOP rival’s advantage on the issues.
Biden’s approach to that task has long been clear: He wants to make voters more concerned about two policy areas where Democrats still have the upper hand — Social Security and abortion — while making them more aware of the GOP’s extremely unpopular positions on those issues.
Trump has tried to mitigate his vulnerability on these fronts by insisting that he opposes Social Security cuts (occasional off-the-cuff comments to the contrary notwithstanding) and endorsing a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, instead of the blanket ban on all abortions that the Christian right favors.
Congressional Republicans have aided this effort by distancing themselves from their historic support of entitlement cuts during last year’s
Read the full article here
