Like most polls, Avalanche found widespread support for the protests by June 11, with 68% of respondents saying the protesters were “completely right” or “somewhat right.” But rather than measuring responses by self-identified partisanship-Democrat, Republican, independent-Avalanche measured by vote choice. Unlike most pollsters at the time, Avalanche surveyed two large back-to-back samples of 6,986 registered and unregistered total voters-one on June 1 and a second on June 10 and 11-allowing it to track how sentiments changed during what might have been the most consequential chapter of the protests. Shortly after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, the Democratic research firm Avalanche went into nine battleground states-Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, and Pennsylvania-to measure how segments of Americans were reacting to the protests. In fact, new polling and research provided to Vanity Fair suggests that the protests themselves changed America’s opinions about race so quickly, and so profoundly, that Trump unknowingly planted himself even further on the wrong side of public opinion than previously understood. Not just because they threw an exhausted nation into even more chaos, and not just because they forced Trump into the most astoundingly dumb photo op in presidential history, surpassing George W. But if Trump loses in November, the nationwide protests against racism and police brutality that erupted in early June have to be seen as a significant breaking point. And last week, for the first time, polls began to show Biden beating Trump on the question of who would best handle the economy, the only decent card left in Trump’s deck. Most pollsters say that Trump’s continuing inability to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, and the economic havoc that’s come with it, has been the dominant factor. Trump’s reaction to the protests was not the only reason for his summer collapse. Shortly after Lafayette Square, though, Biden began to open up an even bigger lead, a nine-point average lead over the president, with a Washington Post–ABC News poll this week showing Biden winning by as many as 15 points. Before June, Biden steadily held a four-to-six-point lead over Trump in national polls, fueled in part by massive support among the independent voters whom Trump won in 2016. The first two weeks of June also saw Trump fall even further behind his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. In the days that followed, Trump’s approval ratings tumbled to their lowest point in over a year, and their lowest point of the coronavirus pandemic, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker.
#TRUMP NOT EVEN WRONG TV#
Like so many of Trump’s decisions, it was a sugar-high tactic designed to please his base and get TV ratings, with almost no thought about the larger sweep of American history, let alone his reelection campaign. It was so embarrassing and borderline anti-American that one of his generals, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley, apologized for participating in the walk and reportedly considered resigning. “That’s my thoughts.” The moment was an emblem of Trump’s presidency: attention-seeking, bereft of empathy, gut over strategy. John’s Episcopal Church for an inscrutable and buffoonish photo op, in which he held up a Bible and said nothing much at all about the cities on fire and the country’s dismal legacy of racism. police who used chemical agents on lawfully assembled protesters and roughed up journalists, Trump walked across the street to stand in front of St. His path cleared by the National Guard and D.C. On June 1, with the country consumed by historic protests against racism and police brutality, some of them violent, Trump decided to position himself as the “law-and-order” president, made clear by his tweets and his now infamous march that evening across Lafayette Square, outside the White House. If Donald Trump loses in the fall, the first week of June might have marked the beginning of the end.