Polling has its problems, but at least it still serves to check the faulty assumptions so often reinforced by the deafening cacophony of online demagoguery.
Those of us who overindulge in our internet consumption occasionally run the risk of succumbing to the misapprehension that the phenomena that captivate online audiences are just as relevant in the world beyond screens. That’s not exactly the news, but it’s not something which we appear to be capable of correcting. The temptation to generalize our own experiences and project them onto everything and everyone around us may be psychologically irresistible.
Just take the last several weeks of online discourse, on social media and in legacy press venues alike. The sufficiently plugged-in have been bombarded with the claim that the Trump administration’s reluctant admission that there is no such thing as the “Epstein list” would shatter the MAGA coalition. In fairness to the Trump critics who retailed this narrative, MAGA influencers did their best to promote that very notion, both to inflate their own authority and to popularize the object of their obsession. The campaign, however, was largely a contrivance of Democrats and their media allies.
Don’t take my word for it. Politico’s Dasha Burns chronicled the extent to which political media’s “all-consuming Epstein coverage” is driving the president nuts. According to sources, he is “paralyzed,” “furious” over the saturation coverage of the scandal into which the press has sunk its teeth. Democrats have embraced the Epstein coverage as the latest Brahmastra that will once and finally vanquish their MAGA tormentors, according to the New York Times. In reporter Michael Gold’s estimation, “The deep GOP fissure over the Trump administration’s refusal to release files on Jeffrey Epstein despite promises to do so has shaken that focus, giving Democrats an opening they have eagerly seized to gum up the works at the Capitol and stoke public anger about how Republicans are governing.”
Indeed, “Democrats are running circles around Republicans on Epstein,” Politico reported yesterday morning. And the play seemed to have been paying off: “Republicans are breaking with Trump over Epstein files,” the Times eagerly reported that same day. The paper cited a Quinnipiac survey, which found over one-third of Republicans disapprove of Trump’s handling of this contretemps.
Well, we finally got some numbers via Fox News Channel’s bipartisan polling unit to help us assess the damage that has been done to Trump’s coalition over three consecutive weeks of online caterwauling and media myopia. The results suggest that Trump’s coalition is . . . unchanged.
Trump’s job approval rating in Fox’s latest survey isn’t great. No president would brag about a poll that shows him eight points underwater with registered voters, although that remains unchanged from Fox’s June survey. But among the 54 percent who disapprove of the president’s performance, the Epstein fracas barely registers. “Only 1% mention ‘Jeffrey Epstein case,’” Fox reported, “and all of that comes from Democrats and independents.”
In retrospect, it seems intuitive that a scandal promoted by Democrats in Democrat-leaning media venues to Democratic audiences would mostly be internalized by Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters.
That is not to say that voters across the political spectrum don’t smell a rat. Two-thirds of all respondents in the Fox poll don’t believe the administration has been “open and transparent” in this case, including 60 percent of Republicans and a majority of self-described MAGA voters. Indeed, only about one-fifth of respondents reported not having paid attention to the case.
But interest is not the same thing as salience, and those who contended that the Epstein scandal would fracture the GOP coalition based their misapprehension on the notion that the rank-and-file GOP’s relationship with Trump was conditional and transactional. There has just never been much evidence to support that assertion.
Likewise, Democrats who cocoon themselves in online venues probably led themselves to believe that the GOP’s fixation with investigating the Biden administration and the former president’s competency was a bugbear exclusive to conservative information silos. After all, they only ever hear about congressional Republicans’ investigations through tightly edited clips served up for mockery on soon-to-be-canceled TV shows. The Fox poll suggests the online left’s co-partisans in the world outside are not nearly as convinced that there’s no there there.
Sixty-two percent of voters “don’t think former President Joe Biden was particularly involved in making important decisions during the final year of his presidency,” Fox reported. That includes 41 percent of Democrats, 42 percent of self-identified liberals, and a staggering 72 percent of independents. When asked if Congress is justified in investigating who was making decisions in the Biden White House — e.g., “whether advisors used the autopen to sign documents for President Biden without his awareness” — a majority of the public says it’s “important to investigate.” That includes 30 percent of Democrats, 35 percent of liberals, and half of independents.
Those aren’t massive numbers. But when roughly the same proportion of Republicans told Quinnipiac pollsters that they were leery about the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files, it was cause for blaring Times headlines declaring that the end of MAGA was nigh. There is no “Biden coalition” left to fracture, but there are plenty of Democrats in positions of authority who continue to shield the president and his functionaries — many of whom continue to populate positions of authority in and outside government — from scrutiny. Do rank-and-file Democrats resent that? We may never know.
At least, we may never know if we limit ourselves to online forums and media venues when attempting to take a nuanced survey of the political landscape. Polling has its (many) problems, but at least it still serves to check the faulty assumptions that are so often reinforced by the deafening cacophony of online demagoguery.