The polls have been doing something interesting this summer, which is… not much.
With pundits now measuring President Joe Biden’s survivability in terms of hours and the network electric with fresh news of congressional Democrats leaving his side, the impact of Biden’s poor debate performance on presidential polls has been much like former President Donald Trump New York criminal conviction.
You can’t say these developments helped either candidate’s polling numbers. But the numbers reflect a wider public much less excited by either the conviction or the debate than those at the intoxicating center of it all. This was a very close presidential race coming into the summer, and it still is.
Trump’s most notable move since the debate reflects this.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump posted on his social media website last Friday. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Project 2025 began more than a year ago as a Heritage Foundation effort to provide a future Trump administration with a blueprint for a permanent conservative majority, including replacing tens of thousands of federal employees with political appointees. The Trump campaign has its own Agenda 47 package of policy proposals, but to say the former president knew nothing about Project 2025, a widely publicized effort put together for him by one of the most prominent conservative organizations, is preposterous, or if you prefer, an exaggeration.
What probably spurred Trump to publicly condemn a longstanding ally was an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who said the country is “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” This is not the kind of flammable tinder you want to see in a close election.
This leads us, by a meandering path, to France.
The parliamentary politics of the European nations, with their flash elections and amoeba-like party coalitions, pose a different challenge for pollsters than U.S. elections. With the Conservative Party staggering after 14 years in power, polls predicted a big Labour Party victory, and that’s what happened last week.
After big victories in the European Parliamentary elections earlier this and in the first round of voting for the French Parliament, polls also predicted a big win for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally coalition in the second round of voting over the past weekend.
Instead, a recently formed coalition of leftwing parties, the New Popular Front, finished first, followed by President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition. National Rally gained its largest number of Parliament seats ever but finished third.
What the polls in France didn’t pick up on was something much like what worries Trump about that project he says he knows nothing about. It’s fear which can be a big motivator in politics.
From the moment Macron called this snap election, all the parties on the left put aside their differences and began working together, with candidates dropping out of races in districts where another coalition candidate had a better chance of defeating the National Rally candidate.
In contrast, the rightwing coalition members who had just scored a huge victory in the European Parliamentary elections began pointing fingers at each other as soon as the snap election was called. Some early disagreements were patched up, and National Rally’s momentum carried it through the first round, but in the end, it couldn’t overcome the anxieties stirred by its early success.
“Everybody had their smartphones and were waiting for the results, and then everybody was overjoyed,” a Parisian secretary stepping off the Metro told the Associated Press. “I had been stressed out since June 9 and the European elections… And now, I feel good. Relieved.”
Talk about a revolution that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be” stirs a similar kind of anxiety, and after this year’s U.S. Supreme Court session, it’s not far from the surface. That’s how Trump seems to be reading it.
