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Whether you followed the Republican convention or not, there was likely one sentence that you may have heard widely across the media: Trump saying that he wanted “to be president of all of America, not half of America”.
The reality looks a lot different than the typical GOP vs Democrat - blue vs red - binary version of America that Trump is touting. That color blindness by our leadership may be the root of the problem for most Americans regarding the political parties today.
First, the majority of Americans aren’t Democratic or Republican.
In fact, if you were to choose a party affiliation that best defines Americans, you’d have to call us ‘independent’. Gallup’s recent party identification tracking shows that a majority, 51%, of Americans identify as independent:
Only when you manipulate the data taking away the option of being independent, the Republican and Democratic numbers bulk up.
But that distortion is exactly the problem: adjusting the data to fit a dated and problematic partisan dichotomy. That’s like me saying “ok, you “SAY” your favorite flavor of ice cream is strawberry, but, if you had to choose between vanilla and chocolate, which would it be?”
For the sake of the argument, let’s take the numbers where they stand: only 25% of people in America self-identify as Republican. As a pollster, I can tell you that these numbers are probably fairly close to the actual political affiliation sentiment in America. In fact, in my recent poll, State of the Nation: We Can Do Better, we had to extend our polling by a day with ‘registered voters’ (not adults, like in the Gallup data) to fill quotas on political self-identification.
What I mean by this is that we were shooting to study roughly 31% Democratic, 39% Independent, 30% Republican registered voters.
The problem for the political parties in today’s America: our pollsters can’t find enough people to self-select one of the two parties to have a national sample that looks like 31% Dem / 39% Independent / 30% GOP. You can imagine my surprise when, no joke, I received an email from my field house telling me we needed another day of fielding because we couldn’t close some of the quotas.
This is 1-of-2 problems facing the political parties in America.
People either do not want to tell pollsters that they are affiliated with either the Republican or Democratic parties but are willing to tell us they’re independent (which, is a brand problem no matter how you cut it for everyone EXCEPT independents), or there aren’t enough people that affiliate with either party anymore (also, very problematic if you’re a party).
Regardless, it shreds Trump’s point about being president for all Americans, not just half.
It’s just plain wrong when over half the country doesn’t fit the typical thinking that the country is red or blue. Trump’s logic demonstrates how out of touch the Republicans – and Democrats – are with today’s independent reality.
The most recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll that was in the field last week asked whether adults nationwide believe Donald Trump should or should not be the Republican candidate for president this year. From that, 54% said he should not be the Republican candidate for president, including 13% of Republicans who said he should not be the Republican candidate. Looking at the 45% that said he should be the candidate, only 9% of people supporting Biden on the ballot want Trump to ‘be the candidate’ possibly because some want to face Trump instead of a different Republican candidate come November.
Before all the Republican readers leave because of the ‘rigged’ NPR/PBS nature of this polling, more people (56%) actually said they don’t think Biden should be the Democratic candidate for president this year. I don’t think you can look at this as some lopsided sham poll.
To look at this data one final way with regard to the presidential race the most recent Economist/YouGov nationwide survey asked registered voters who they plan on voting for in the election. Trump narrowly edged out Biden 43% to 41%(either way, 50% of the nation isn’t supporting either candidate).
But, of the 43% of people that are voting for Trump, 19% say that they aren’t ‘voting for Donald Trump’ but rather ‘against Joe Biden’.
With the withdrawal announcement we are already seeing significant changes that are upsetting these numbers - and we will be updating our analysis soon with new data. Regardless if you take away those who ‘vote’ for Donald Trump, but don’t actually support him, we’re looking at only about 1-in-3 registered voters in America actually voting FOR Trump. This is a far cry from being supported by 50% of all adults.
If Trump were to win, I do hope he remembers his pledge to govern for all Americans, including the majority – us independents.
