Independents Uninformed but Key to Victory in November

Political researchers have found that independents and soft partisans (voters who lean Democrat or Republican) are woefully under-informed regarding Donald Trump’s criminal indictments and trials. They’ve also found that once those voters learn of the charges behind those trials they are much less likely to support his re-election. Worse in some ways, these voters don’t see Trump’s actions including those on January 6 as an attack on our democracy. In fact, those voters aren’t even clear on what a democracy is.

When doing market or political campaign research organizations use polling to learn how people feel or what they believe about a topic. In order to get a better understanding of why they feel or believe as they do they’ll hold what are called “focus groups”. In a focus group just as in polling the organization tries to select participants that fit their needs. In political polling that is usually registered voters or when an election is close what are defined as likely voters, often those who vote nearly every election. Polling organizations usually try to find a mix of genders, ages, and economic groups that is also representative of the overall population of the area they’re researching, congressional district or state for example. For a focus group the organization may choose from a narrower group in order to better understand how that group thinks and why they might vote a particular way.

In focus groups organized for Navigator Research in three swing states, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Nevada, voters who lean Republican or consider themselves independent generally were very disturbed to learn that Trump had been indicted on 91 charges over 4 criminal trials. Participants were also concerned with Trump’s claims of immunity for anything done by the president including the use of the military to murder opponents.

Even some voters who lean Republican cited Fox News as part of the problem regarding the political divide in the country, misinformation, and distrust of media. Unfortunately that has caused many voters to distrust main stream media entirely rather than find more reliable sources. It’s also frightening that the voters participating in the focus groups didn’t have a common understanding of political violence or recognize it beyond the insurrection on January 6, 2021.

The only positive point I see is that for the most part participants in the focus group and hopefully others like them were less likely to support Trump upon learning more about the indictments and criminal trials as well as his claims of total immunity.

It is important to remember that Trump lost the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020. He only won in 2016 because of a relatively small number of votes in a handful of swing states giving him the edge in the electoral college. It will only take a small number of independents and soft Republicans voting for Biden to insure that Trump never again has political power in the United States.

As a Democrat and believer in the peaceful transfer of power through free and fair elections I hold out hope that readers of this column and others will reach out to family and friends to insure that they are informed about they recognize the dangers of re-electing Trump.

Published in the Seguin Gazette February 7, 2024