But the task will also be to drive home an argument he has not been able to make effectively: that Trump is too extreme and that, whatever concerns Americans have about Biden, a second Trump term is a huge risk. .
There’s plenty of grist for this mill, but it’s still not something Americans seem too concerned about.
A new Gallup poll makes this clear. It asked Americans whether Biden and Trump were “very conservative,” “very liberal” or “about right” ideologically. 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 called Trump “too conservative,” significantly more — 56 percent — labeled Biden “too liberal.”
It’s worth injecting some nuance into these numbers.
It seems that, when it comes to Trump, Americans differentiate between being ideologically extreme and being an extremist. in other ways.
A CNN poll earlier this year provided an example. It asked Americans directly whether they viewed the two candidates as “too extreme,” and the numbers were quite different. In contrast to Gallup’s numbers, 38 percent labeled Biden as too extreme, while 63 percent did so for Trump.
The combined suggestion seems to be that Americans see Trump as extremist, but not necessarily in political terms.
The CNN poll also showed Trump with a slight lead. His extremism — or at least the version voters saw — didn’t seem to be a deal-breaker for middle-of-the-road voters. Other issues mattered more.
But then the research did something interesting. She ran through a series of real proposals that Trump and his allies have floated, from directing the Justice Department to investigate his political rivals, to pardoning himself and the Jan. 6 defendants, to purging the government of political opponents.
The vast majority of Americans – three-quarters or more – said they thought Trump would try to do each of these things. And in each case, about 7 in 10 Americans opposed them. Getting 7 in 10 Americans to agree on anything in politics is difficult, but these ideas were apparently unpopular.
The totality of the data we have on Trump suggests that many voters are probably not all that familiar with all of these things, just as they are not all that familiar with his charges and the underlying conduct. So they may have a vague sense that Trump is very extreme — perhaps because of personal conduct that they have long opposed — and they tend to believe, when prompted, that Trump will do extreme things. But it’s not clear that this is a huge factor in their calculations right now.
It’s June and they still haven’t tuned in.
That could start to change Thursday night and perhaps with next month’s Republican National Convention.
The trick for Biden is to get voters to actually consume these things and care enough about them — to capitalize on the broad sense that Trump is an extremist and point to ways in which it could actually matter. The fact that Americans seem to differentiate between Trump’s ideological extremism and their more general extremism seems telling; they seem to see this less as a political issue than as a personal one. So you could understand why these issues might not rank highly for them, alongside more immediate issues like inflation.
Biden has plenty of issues of his own to deal with. But to gain traction with voters, he also needs to make sure they start to care more about Trump’s accountability. The debate will be a testing ground.
