But the job will also be to drive home an argument he hasn’t 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 is plenty of grist for that mill, but it’s not something Americans appear overly concerned about yet.
A new poll from Gallup makes that clear. It asked Americans whether Biden and Trump were “too conservative,” “too liberal” or “about right” ideologically. Despite Trump’s extreme rhetoric and often authoritarian-leaning 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 labeled Trump “too conservative,” significantly more — 56 percent — labeled Biden “too liberal.”
It’s worth injecting some nuance into these numbers.
It seems that on Trump, Americans differentiate between being ideologically extreme and extreme in other ways.
A CNN poll early this year provided an example. It asked straight up whether Americans saw the two candidates as “too extreme,” and the numbers were far different. In contrast to Gallup’s numbers, 38 percent labeled Biden as too extreme, while 63 percent did so for Trump.
The combined suggestion would seem to be that Americans see Trump as extreme, but not necessarily on policy.
The CNN poll also showed Trump with a slight lead. His extremeness — or at least the version of it that voters saw — didn’t seem to be a dealbreaker for middle-of-the-road voters. Other issues were more important.
But then the poll did something interesting. It ran through a series of actual proposals that Trump and his allies have floated, from directing the Justice Department to investigate his political rivals, to pardoning himself and Jan. 6 defendants, to purging the government of political opponents.
Vast majorities 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 much of anything in politics is difficult, but these ideas were apparently just that unpopular.
The totality of the data we have on Trump suggest that many voters probably aren’t that familiar with all of these things, just as they’re not terribly familiar with his indictments and the underlying conduct. So they might have a vague sense that Trump is too extreme — perhaps owing to the personal conduct they have long objected to — and tend to believe, when prompted, that Trump will do extreme things. But it’s not clear it’s a huge factor in their calculus right now.
It’s June, and they haven’t tuned in.
That could begin to change Thursday night and perhaps with next month’s Republican National Convention.
The trick for Biden is getting voters to actually consume these things and to care enough about them — to capitalize on the broad sense that Trump is extreme and point to ways in which that could actually matter. The fact that Americans seem to differentiate between Trump’s ideological extremeness and his more general extremeness would seem telling; they appear to see this as less a policy issue than a personal one. So you could understand why these issues might not rank highly for them, next to more immediate issues like inflation.
Biden has plenty of his own problems to address. But to gain traction with voters, he also needs to make sure they start caring more about Trump’s liabilities. The debate will be a proving ground.
