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As the second round of the electoral confrontation between Joe Biden and Donald Trump Politics specialists have begun to notice unusual anxiety among hesitant voters. They fear that Trump, if he returns to the White House, may refuse to leave it when his term ends.
Siggy Carpenter, vice president of the David Binder Foundation for Research, sensed this fear in early April when he was managing focus groups. It includes people who voted for Biden in 2020 but were disappointed so they are thinking of moving to the other party. “We talked to Latino men and Asian Pacific Islander women who were going to vote in battleground states, and they asked directly what would happen if Trump refused to leave office,” Carpenter said.
Dynasty
Carpenter has been running focus groups for the Democratic Party for a decade, but has never encountered such concerns in any previous election cycle. “This is not something we were measuring, but what we have seen so far indicates there are real concerns,” he said.
Republican strategists felt the same. “This is coming up in our focus groups… and it even happened just a few days ago,” said Sarah Longwell, CEO of Longwell Partners and publisher of the conservative website Bulwark.
Longwell shared a video recording how a group of undecided voters in a swing state reacted when they were asked if they were concerned that Trump would violate the constitutional amendment that allows him to serve as president for one additional term if he wins the November election.
The moderator asked the audience: “Do any of you think that you will not abide by the 22nd Constitutional Amendment and leave office after the 2028 elections? Do any of you fear that?” Seven out of eight participants raised their hands in the affirmative. One Pennsylvania man even expressed concern that Trump would go further and seek to create a dynasty. He said: “I do not rule it out, especially since he now controls the Republican National Committee… Don Jr. may take over the next term, and he is entitled to two terms, and then Barron succeeds him and takes over two more terms. We will have a false inheritance system.”
As far-fetched as it may seem, the possibility that Trump will violate the constitutional provision that allows a person to serve as president only twice, or simply ignore this provision, is pushing some undecided voters toward Biden. This is despite their reservations about the current president, whether because of his age, turmoil in the Middle East, or high inflation rates.
Today, strategists in both parties are working to investigate the extent of the spread of these feelings, especially among hesitant voters, who are likely to be a key factor in deciding the outcome of the elections.
“Last free elections”
It appears that Trump’s provocations are fueling fears that he will cling to the presidency forever. Perhaps the riots in the Capitol building on June 6, 2021 are the clearest evidence of this, as Trump’s supporters, with his encouragement, attempted to disrupt the certification of the results of the 2020 presidential elections in order to keep him in office. Later, in a social media post in 2022, Trump called for parts of the Constitution to be “repealed” in response to the electoral fraud he falsely claimed occurred in 2020.
In December, Fox News host Sean Hannity called on the former president to try to ease voters’ concerns about his authoritarian rhetoric. Instead of doing so, Trump responded that he would be a “dictator” only on the first day of his presidential term. He then explained in an interview with Time that his comment was just a joke, but added that he thought “a lot of people liked it.”
While Trump’s hints about exceeding presidential powers excite many of his supporters, they are a source of concern for other voters, including some who supported him in the past.
Lori McCammon, a grandmother from Alma, Wisconsin, voted for Trump in 2016 but withdrew his support due to his recent statements, and will not vote for him in November. She expressed her concern that Trump would not give up power if re-elected. “Based on what I’ve heard from him and people like Steve Bannon, this will be our last free and fair election,” she said.
Impact of Supreme Court decisions
Strategists and statistics specialists say that many nonpartisan voters do not find Trump’s language funny or sarcastic, and do not find the prospect of seizing power funny.
Pollster Brian Bennett at the pro-Democrat company Navigator Research said: “When we ask about his record on the Democratic front, we notice a lot of anxiety even among Republicans about what Trump’s second term will be like.” This concern is also evident among non-Democratic voters in public polls. The Quinnipiac University poll found that 21% of independent voters and 8% of Republican voters considered “preserving democracy in the United States” to be the most important issue facing the country.
The fear that Trump will do something unprecedented to undermine democracy brings a new twist to a race that would otherwise have seemed familiar between the two unpopular candidates who had previously faced off. Several voter interviewers said they have observed a fundamental shift in the way people view Trump’s motives and intentions compared to other politicians.
“Normally, when we point out concerns about a candidate’s agenda, people are skeptical, tend to do their own research first, or see it as an attack,” said Carpenter, the focus group director, “but that’s not the case with Trump. Voters believe he will try to eliminate term limits, and they are Worrying about what might happen.”
Based on conversations with non-partisan voters, Carpenter has concluded that this shift in opinions goes beyond the events of January 6 and Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, and much of it is due to a less prominent factor: the Supreme Court. Its 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, thus abolishing women’s constitutional right to abortion, prompted voters to think more about other matters that they take for granted, and which could be changed or eliminated altogether. “The magnitude of what could be perceived as a real threat has increased because of Roe,” Carpenter said. “Since that decision you’ve started to hear voters talk themselves out of seeing something as out of touch with reality.”
Trump’s fear is a benefit to Biden
Most of the new polls showed Trump ahead of Biden, including six of seven crucial states, according to the latest Bloomberg News poll with Morning Consult. Democrats are striving to exploit any potential weakness in Trump, and may be deliberately exaggerating fears about his possible seizure of power.
The liberal group Priorities USA recently asked 1,500 likely voters in eight battleground states to rank more than two dozen Trump speeches and policies from “most” to “least” troubling. The results, published for the first time, showed that Trump’s statement about being a “dictator” and his call for violating the Constitution were the “most disturbing” of all the proposed options.
“Ultimately, we expect what will decide the election is the clear choice voters will have to make on abortion, the economy, and protecting democracy,” said Nick Ahamed, executive deputy director of Priorities USA. “Trump’s promise of dictatorship will impact each of these issues.” If elected.”
Many Republican strategists agree with this view. A Republican pollster who is not affiliated with any party, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid angering the Trump campaign, said, “This is what the Biden campaign is betting on… In the end, people will be afraid of what Trump’s next term will be like, which will push them toward Biden.”
After months of deliberate silence, Trump finally said in an interview with Time magazine in April that he would only serve two terms as president. But this did not reassure his opponents, such as Ahamed, who pointed to the organized efforts made by the Heritage Foundation and other pro-Trump bodies to radically expand the president’s powers. The conservative American Conservative magazine published an article in March in which it called for nullifying the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, and considered that it imposes “arbitrary restrictions on presidents who serve non-consecutive presidential terms and on democracy itself.”
Efforts that failed
There is a long history of attempts to invalidate this constitutional amendment. Amendment No. 22 was ratified in 1951, mainly due to the election of Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt for four consecutive terms, an unprecedented matter that raised fears at the time that presidents who remain in office for long periods would acquire too broad powers, which might undermine the principles of Democracy.
The amendment later aroused the dissatisfaction of a number of popular presidents and their supporters in both parties. In 1987, Ronald Reagan said in a television interview with David Frost that he wanted to “launch a movement” to repeal the amendment, which he saw as diminishing citizens’ right “to vote for somebody as much as they want.”
Democratic members of the House of Representatives had submitted a bill to repeal the 22nd Amendment during Bill Clinton’s term, and then again during the term of Barack Obama, but the two bills did not achieve any progress.
Amending the Constitution is extremely difficult. It requires a two-thirds majority vote in the House of Representatives and the Senate or a constitutional convention convened by two-thirds of state legislatures, after which any amendment must be ratified by three-quarters of the states. Even Trump’s staunchest supporters do not see this scenario as realistic, and they consider that talk of nullifying the amendment is primarily aimed at angering the former president’s critics.
“The whole point of this is to annoy liberals,” Bannon said. “It will be very difficult to convince the states to approve the amendment, although some in the Make America Great Again caucus will be happy if we do.”
However, the possibility of Trump attempting to abolish presidential term limits if he is re-elected in November poses a serious threat to a significant portion of voters, despite his denials of this. This seems to be pushing them towards Biden. An NBC News/Public Opinion Strategies poll found that 16% of registered voters consider “threats to democracy” the most important issues facing the country. Among these voters, Biden led Trump by 67 points, 81% to 14%.
Ms. McCammon of Wisconsin, who previously voted for Trump, counts herself in this group. “I will vote for Biden even if he is in a coma,” she said.
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