Exclusive polling suggests the protests changed Americans’ minds so quickly, and so profoundly, that Trump planted himself even further on the wrong side of public opinion than previously understood.
BY PETER HAMBY JULY 24, 2020
BY BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES.
If Donald Trump loses in the fall, the first week of June might have marked the beginning of the end. 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. His path cleared by the National Guard and D.C. police who used chemical agents on lawfully assembled protesters and roughed up journalists, Trump walked across the street to stand in front of St. 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. “We have a great country,” Trump said. “That’s my thoughts.” The moment was an emblem of Trump’s presidency: attention-seeking, bereft of empathy, gut over strategy. 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. 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.
Politically, it was a disaster. 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. The first two weeks of June also saw Trump fall even further behind his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. 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. 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.
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Trump’s reaction to the protests was not the only reason for his summer collapse. 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. 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. 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. 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. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished!” blunder. 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.
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. 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. 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. It organized respondents into five segments: Vote Trump, Lean Trump, Mixed Feelings, Lean Biden, and Vote Biden.
Avalanche found resounding support for the protests not just among Biden supporters, but among persuadable voters and even soft Trump supporters. The hardcore Vote Trump respondents were against the protests, with 56% opposing them. But among the softer Lean Trump set, an eye-opening 59% said the protesters were “completely right” or “somewhat right”—probably not what the president had in mind when he commandeered Lafayette Square. And 72% of Americans with Mixed Feelings about the presidential race—precious undecided voters—said the protesters were right too. “There’s not a lot of issues where you get even a strong majority of Americans on the same page,” said Michiah Prull, the CEO of Avalanche. “It speaks to that historic moment, and it speaks to a degree of national alignment on something that's honestly pretty rare these days.”
But just as remarkable were the shifts among those persuadables in the 10 days between June 1 and June 11, a window that opened with burning cities and Trump’s march to St. John’s Church, but concluded with mostly peaceful demonstrations nationwide. During that period Avalanche found that support for the protests grew 10 points among Mixed Feelings voters, 14 points among Lean Biden voters, and a head-spinning 25 points among Lean Trump voters. “I had never in my research career seen public opinion shift on the scale in this time frame,” Prull said. “When we look at this from electoral context, when you see a 25-point swing in Lean Trump supporters from disapproving of the protests to at least somewhat agreeing with them, that’s just a scale of public opinion shift you don’t see in this line of work very often.”
The reasons persuadables moved from opposing to supporting the protests, Prull said, can mostly be attributed to the demonstrations growing and becoming largely peaceful by their second week, with human stories of everyday police brutality saturating the media environment. Trump’s strongman performance on June 1 did almost nothing to turn public opinion against the demonstrations. Instead it likely backfired. “Between those two dates, the big driver that I see is the protests becoming larger and even more peaceful each day,” Prull told me. “The story was being told by people who are being hurt by police every day, and the empathy with that, and frankly the reasonableness of that, was breaking through. And then the president tear-gassing protestors outside the White House lawn, I think, was a nontrivial part of this. You had the draconian response of the government, and then the protests just seemed even more reasonable when it was a bunch of regular people being tear-gassed in the middle of Washington D.C. for the sake of a photo op.”
Avalanche’s data bear this out. The firm marries polling with what it calls “deep listening surveys,” using a language-processing system that analyzes written responses to open-ended “listening” questions, as a way to extract more depth and texture about public opinion. They operate like focus groups at scale, performed online. The purpose, Prull told me last year, is to get beyond hard numbers and better understand the emotional undercurrents of politics. “We, as Democrats, have a really bad habit of bringing facts to an emotional battle and getting our asses kicked,” Prull said. In the case of the protests, Avalanche’s survey asked if protesters were doing the “right thing or the wrong thing,” with the responses analyzed using the firm’s listening tools. The idea that the protesters were “completely right” was most pronounced among Vote Biden respondents, Black respondents, and young Americans between 18-35. Those supporters described the protests using terms related to ending police brutality, achieving justice, and the urgent need to address racism.
The persuadables—the Lean Trump and Mixed Feelings segments—were more inclined to say the protests were “somewhat right,” describing them using hazier terms like “equality” and “change.” But at the same time, they expressed unease with rioting, looting, and property destruction. So when the demonstrations became almost completely nonviolent and penetrated even the smallest American towns, public opinion came their way—even among soft Trump supporters. “Even among voters who say they will probably vote for Trump, there are still more than 40% of people who talk about this as being a moment about racial equality,” said Tovah Paglaro, Avalanche’s cofounder and COO. “So when you're talking about what's going on with those persuadable voters, and figuring out spaces where they're more aligned with Biden, for them this moment is about racial equality. And 20% of them also cite that it's time to create change. That's a surprisingly large percentage of soft Trump supporters saying something's got to happen here. They’re saying, ‘I don't like rioting and looting and I'm not crazy about the tactics, but I do acknowledge that there's a problem with racial equality.’ It connects to police brutality and a need for change.”
Beyond the presidential race, the Avalanche survey picked up a treasure trove of detail about the anti-racism moment. As seen in other national polls, the intensity of feeling was stronger among Black Americans, who were more likely to talk about the protests in the context of racial justice and reforming police departments, compared to white Americans and undecided voters, who responded with more abstract terms like “equality” or “opportunity.” “When Black respondents talk about what’s happening right now, their response is twice as likely to be about racism or racial justice as it is about equality generally and good treatment,” Paglaro said. “Fear,” “anger,” and “bad” were the terms most used to describe police among Black respondents, who talked about personal experiences with bias and excessive force. White respondents, meanwhile, were more likely to use terms like “good,” “safe,” and “proud” when referring to their local police. Despite those differences, 75% of Americans in the survey favored some kind of policing reform, with respondents expressing a desire for better officer training, increased diversity, and more police accountability. Among both Black and white respondents, there was almost no support for fully defunding police departments, an idea that turned off the persuadable voter segments. There was even less support for hiring more police and raising officer pay.
But according to Prull, the biggest story of early June was the widespread support that rapidly emerged in favor of the protesters, people of all races and ages, who took to the streets to make a statement about racism in America. The protesters, he said, were winning a values argument with Americans of all races, backgrounds, and political persuasions at the very moment President Trump was trying to paint them as an angry and radical minority. “Trump could not be more on the wrong side of this issue for anyone except for a very isolated group of his base, and that’s what he’s stuck with,” Prull said. “He’s taking a line of messaging that works for 34% of his base in our survey. It’s not even that big of a part of his base. He’s really alienating folks. There’s a compelling argument here that Trump’s negatives can be driven up even further among some of these Lean Trump folks, based on his behavior and relationship with the protests,” Prull said, suggesting that NeverTrump groups like the Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump could take up that work.
Yet Trump seems to be doing the work on his own in recent days, by dispatching federal troops to cities like Portland, Chicago, and even Albuquerque to tangle with protesters who, for the most part, have been behaving peacefully for more than a month. As with Lafayette Square, Trump is perversely creating mayhem in the name of law and order, clinging to the apple-pie idea that the “silent majority” of 1968 is still hiding out somewhere. The country will “go to hell” if Biden wins, Trump said this week, as if people don’t understand that he’s the one presiding over the chaos. But if Avalanche’s research is correct, the silent majority of 2020 is firmly on the side of Biden when it comes to issues of race and justice, and its members walked out of Trump’s community theater Richard Nixon impression many weeks ago.
If Donald Trump loses in the fall, the first week of June might have marked the beginning of the end. 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. His path cleared by the National Guard and D.C. police who used chemical agents on lawfully assembled protesters and roughed up journalists, Trump walked across the street to stand in front of St. 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. “We have a great country,” Trump said. “That’s my thoughts.” The moment was an emblem of Trump’s presidency: attention-seeking, bereft of empathy, gut over strategy. 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. 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.
Politically, it was a disaster. 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. The first two weeks of June also saw Trump fall even further behind his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. 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. 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.
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Trump’s reaction to the protests was not the only reason for his summer collapse. 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. 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. 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. 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. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished!” blunder. 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.
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. 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. 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. It organized respondents into five segments: Vote Trump, Lean Trump, Mixed Feelings, Lean Biden, and Vote Biden.
Avalanche found resounding support for the protests not just among Biden supporters, but among persuadable voters and even soft Trump supporters. The hardcore Vote Trump respondents were against the protests, with 56% opposing them. But among the softer Lean Trump set, an eye-opening 59% said the protesters were “completely right” or “somewhat right”—probably not what the president had in mind when he commandeered Lafayette Square. And 72% of Americans with Mixed Feelings about the presidential race—precious undecided voters—said the protesters were right too. “There’s not a lot of issues where you get even a strong majority of Americans on the same page,” said Michiah Prull, the CEO of Avalanche. “It speaks to that historic moment, and it speaks to a degree of national alignment on something that's honestly pretty rare these days.”
But just as remarkable were the shifts among those persuadables in the 10 days between June 1 and June 11, a window that opened with burning cities and Trump’s march to St. John’s Church, but concluded with mostly peaceful demonstrations nationwide. During that period Avalanche found that support for the protests grew 10 points among Mixed Feelings voters, 14 points among Lean Biden voters, and a head-spinning 25 points among Lean Trump voters. “I had never in my research career seen public opinion shift on the scale in this time frame,” Prull said. “When we look at this from electoral context, when you see a 25-point swing in Lean Trump supporters from disapproving of the protests to at least somewhat agreeing with them, that’s just a scale of public opinion shift you don’t see in this line of work very often.”
The reasons persuadables moved from opposing to supporting the protests, Prull said, can mostly be attributed to the demonstrations growing and becoming largely peaceful by their second week, with human stories of everyday police brutality saturating the media environment. Trump’s strongman performance on June 1 did almost nothing to turn public opinion against the demonstrations. Instead it likely backfired. “Between those two dates, the big driver that I see is the protests becoming larger and even more peaceful each day,” Prull told me. “The story was being told by people who are being hurt by police every day, and the empathy with that, and frankly the reasonableness of that, was breaking through. And then the president tear-gassing protestors outside the White House lawn, I think, was a nontrivial part of this. You had the draconian response of the government, and then the protests just seemed even more reasonable when it was a bunch of regular people being tear-gassed in the middle of Washington D.C. for the sake of a photo op.”
Avalanche’s data bear this out. The firm marries polling with what it calls “deep listening surveys,” using a language-processing system that analyzes written responses to open-ended “listening” questions, as a way to extract more depth and texture about public opinion. They operate like focus groups at scale, performed online. The purpose, Prull told me last year, is to get beyond hard numbers and better understand the emotional undercurrents of politics. “We, as Democrats, have a really bad habit of bringing facts to an emotional battle and getting our asses kicked,” Prull said. In the case of the protests, Avalanche’s survey asked if protesters were doing the “right thing or the wrong thing,” with the responses analyzed using the firm’s listening tools. The idea that the protesters were “completely right” was most pronounced among Vote Biden respondents, Black respondents, and young Americans between 18-35. Those supporters described the protests using terms related to ending police brutality, achieving justice, and the urgent need to address racism.
The persuadables—the Lean Trump and Mixed Feelings segments—were more inclined to say the protests were “somewhat right,” describing them using hazier terms like “equality” and “change.” But at the same time, they expressed unease with rioting, looting, and property destruction. So when the demonstrations became almost completely nonviolent and penetrated even the smallest American towns, public opinion came their way—even among soft Trump supporters. “Even among voters who say they will probably vote for Trump, there are still more than 40% of people who talk about this as being a moment about racial equality,” said Tovah Paglaro, Avalanche’s cofounder and COO. “So when you're talking about what's going on with those persuadable voters, and figuring out spaces where they're more aligned with Biden, for them this moment is about racial equality. And 20% of them also cite that it's time to create change. That's a surprisingly large percentage of soft Trump supporters saying something's got to happen here. They’re saying, ‘I don't like rioting and looting and I'm not crazy about the tactics, but I do acknowledge that there's a problem with racial equality.’ It connects to police brutality and a need for change.”
Beyond the presidential race, the Avalanche survey picked up a treasure trove of detail about the anti-racism moment. As seen in other national polls, the intensity of feeling was stronger among Black Americans, who were more likely to talk about the protests in the context of racial justice and reforming police departments, compared to white Americans and undecided voters, who responded with more abstract terms like “equality” or “opportunity.” “When Black respondents talk about what’s happening right now, their response is twice as likely to be about racism or racial justice as it is about equality generally and good treatment,” Paglaro said. “Fear,” “anger,” and “bad” were the terms most used to describe police among Black respondents, who talked about personal experiences with bias and excessive force. White respondents, meanwhile, were more likely to use terms like “good,” “safe,” and “proud” when referring to their local police. Despite those differences, 75% of Americans in the survey favored some kind of policing reform, with respondents expressing a desire for better officer training, increased diversity, and more police accountability. Among both Black and white respondents, there was almost no support for fully defunding police departments, an idea that turned off the persuadable voter segments. There was even less support for hiring more police and raising officer pay.
But according to Prull, the biggest story of early June was the widespread support that rapidly emerged in favor of the protesters, people of all races and ages, who took to the streets to make a statement about racism in America. The protesters, he said, were winning a values argument with Americans of all races, backgrounds, and political persuasions at the very moment President Trump was trying to paint them as an angry and radical minority. “Trump could not be more on the wrong side of this issue for anyone except for a very isolated group of his base, and that’s what he’s stuck with,” Prull said. “He’s taking a line of messaging that works for 34% of his base in our survey. It’s not even that big of a part of his base. He’s really alienating folks. There’s a compelling argument here that Trump’s negatives can be driven up even further among some of these Lean Trump folks, based on his behavior and relationship with the protests,” Prull said, suggesting that NeverTrump groups like the Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump could take up that work.
Yet Trump seems to be doing the work on his own in recent days, by dispatching federal troops to cities like Portland, Chicago, and even Albuquerque to tangle with protesters who, for the most part, have been behaving peacefully for more than a month. As with Lafayette Square, Trump is perversely creating mayhem in the name of law and order, clinging to the apple-pie idea that the “silent majority” of 1968 is still hiding out somewhere. The country will “go to hell” if Biden wins, Trump said this week, as if people don’t understand that he’s the one presiding over the chaos. But if Avalanche’s research is correct, the silent majority of 2020 is firmly on the side of Biden when it comes to issues of race and justice, and its members walked out of Trump’s community theater Richard Nixon impression many weeks ago.
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