The President is trying to protect “democratic values,” but unless Republicans join him in speaking out, Trumpism won’t break.
Between May and August, something shifted in the minds of a lot of American voters. They got a lot more worried about what is happening to our democracy. Tonight in Philadelphia, President Biden is expected to address that issue head on. The slow boil that is political conflict in America is about to get a lot hotter.
First, what changed? In May, the NBC News national poll asked registered voters what the most important issue was facing the country, gave them a list of possible responses, and then combined their first and second choices. At the top was the cost of living, with 36% mentioning it as their first or second biggest worry. Second came jobs and the economy, with 33%. A distant third with 20% was “voting rights and election integrity.”
In mid-August, the top issue had changed radically. Now, according to NBC News, 29% of registered voters say “threats to democracy” is the biggest issue facing the country, with 21% listing that as their first choice. The cost of living was tied at 29%, but only 16% made it their first choice. Jobs and the economy wasn’t far behind, at 28%.
What’s behind this shift? Well, the most obvious answer is that the January 6th committee started its run of nationally-televised hearings in early June and extended them into late July. Polls show that public attention to the hearings rose substantially as they went on. The NBC poll shows a solid majority of 57% now favor continuing the hearings “because if there is wrongdoing by Donald Trump, he needs to be held accountable just like anyone else.” Forty percent think the hearings should end “because they are political motivated against a former president and divide the country.”
In addition, the second poll was conducted August 13–15, a week after FBI agents conducted a widely publicized search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, but before details had been released about the classified documents found there. It also was conducted before Trump announced that he was paying the legal costs of some of the defendants in the January 6th assault on the Capitol and that he was considering a full pardon for all of them if he gets to be president again. Yes, you read that right.
NBC didn’t release the cross-tabs on its May and August polls, so it’s impossible to say who is most worried about threats to democracy. My guess is that it’s a combination of Democrats who have long seen Trump and Trumpism as deeply authoritarian and anti-democratic, and Republicans who believe the federal government is in the hands of a “deep state” bent on preventing Trump from running for office again. Other polling has found that a majority of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen, which would ipso facto be a violation of democracy if it were true. But still, in May, those people could have picked “voting rights and election integrity” as a top concern.
Either way, roughly one out of every ten registered voters has gotten more concerned about this package of issues since May. And that’s likely to rise even more after tonight’s primetime speech from Philadelphia by President Biden, which is being billed as focused on the “the continued battle for the soul of the nation.”
According to the White House, the speech is “not in response to any news of the day,” like the latest twists and turns in Trump’s legal fight with the Justice Department over the classified documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago. “It is a response to what he sees as a moment in this country … where he feels it is his responsibility to bring to the American people this fundamental question about what kind of a nation we are going to be, and what we need to do in order to address the threat to our democracy that he believes exists right now.”
The speech will detail what the president sees as threats “not from the Republican party,” but from “MAGA Republicans and the extremism that is a threat right now to our democratic values,” a senior White House official told reporters in advance. The official described the MAGA agenda as “a movement that does not recognize free and fair elections, a movement that is increasingly talking about violence in response to actions that they don’t like or don’t agree with, which is not the way democracies behave.”
Biden has already referred to this as “semi-fascism,” which is pretty accurate, since the most basic definition of a fascist movement is one that believes that violence is a legitimate way to resolve differences instead of voting. But if that’s what we’re dealing with, talking about it in the hopes of rallying more Americans to oppose it may not be enough to quell it — unless more Republicans start speaking out too. By not painting the entire GOP with the MAGA brush, I suppose Biden is hoping he is leaving room for the Republicans he used to be chummy with to do the right thing. I’m not holding my breath expecting that to happen, but if it doesn’t, it sure likes we’re heading toward a confrontation that will make January 6th look like a garden party.