There’s been a massive shift among the all-important independent voters when it comes to the rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
According to a new CBS/YouGov poll, Biden leads Trump among independent voters by two percentage points — 50% to 48%. It’s well within the margin of error, but amounts to a 17 point swing for Biden in June compared to March’s polling.
Roughly 7 in 10 of the voters in the GOP primaries and caucuses identified as conservative. But in 2020, conservatives were less than 40% of the general electorate; the rest were roughly split between liberals and moderates. Just 36% of moderates voted for Trump in 2020 and only 8% of liberals did.
And some potential weak spots for Trump are already showing, according to an AP survey. At least 2 in 10 of the voters in South Carolina’s Republican primary and the Iowa caucuses said they won’t back Trump in November, while approximately 3 in 10 in New Hampshire felt that way.
In each of the early states, Trump either lost or split voters with a college degree to Nikki Haley. Nor were the suburbs – where the plurality of general election voters live – particularly welcoming to him in the primary election. He split the suburban vote with his opponents in Iowa and New Hampshire and won the suburbs in South Carolina by a smaller margin than in the state as a whole.
Trump became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes in May after a jury found him guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex.
Judge Juan M. Merchan set sentencing for July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where GOP leaders, who remained resolute in their support in the aftermath of the verdict, are expected to formally make him their nominee.
The verdict was a stunning legal reckoning for Trump and exposes him to potential prison time in the city where his manipulations of the tabloid press helped catapult him from a real estate tycoon to reality television star and ultimately president. As he seeks to reclaim the White House in this year’s election, the judgment presents voters with another test of their willingness to accept Trump’s boundary-breaking behavior.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MatthewArco.
