For our Times Opinion focus group in April, we spoke with nine men who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 to explore what they think of him as the presidential election approaches. Today, we're offering the perspectives of our latest group, 12 women who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and were asked how they see him now. (We often zero in on specific demographic groups to discuss politics.) The Trump voters were considerably more enthusiastic about the former president than the Biden voters were about the current president, and more confident that Trump could improve the economy, interest rates and inflation — Biden, by contrast, struggles with the fact that voters don't see reason to be confident that he will do things differently in a second term. Still, many of the Trump voters seemed motivated more by anti-Biden sentiment than by pro-Trump attitudes. When we asked participants for a word describing Trump, at least half the responses were neutral or negative. The group's moderator, Kristen Soltis Anderson, and I were a bit surprised. These women saw negatives in Trump's personality and character, and had not forgotten those aspects of him since the end of his presidency. All of this made us more skeptical of the idea that Trump's legal problems will hurt him with those who have supported him before, because many seem to have already taken his behavior and past into account. Their frustration with Biden on policy and competence clearly exceeded their disdain for Trump's personality, and that was enough to keep most of them in the Trump 2024 voter camp. As Kristen told me, there's a belief that Trump's voters love him, love the things he does, and hate anyone who criticizes him. That may be true of the most ardent part of the former president's base, but there's a difference between a candidate's true loyalists and a candidate's coalition of voters. These women didn't think Trump was infallible. They did, however, think he was at least up to the job of being president, and that Biden was not. Read the focus group's discussion: Here's what we're focusing on today:
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Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Opinion Today: These 12 women voted for Trump. Will they again?
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