The polls pointing to a Trump 2024 win

Sam Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal land. This is ABC News Daily. This week, Donald Trump gave testimony in a civil fraud trial in New York, where the judge had to order his lawyers to control the former president. It’s just one of a string of lawsuits he’s facing. But while he might be in trouble legally, politically, he’s on track to become president for a second time today. Senior political correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Molly Ball, on the latest polling that has Trump out in front in key states. A year out from a US election, and how the domestic and international stage will dramatically change if he succeeds. Molly. There are an avalanche of charges against Donald Trump. And this week he had his day in court in New York for one of them.

News Journalist: Mr. Trump, are you looking forward to testifying today?

Donald Trump: I am, I am.

Sam Hawley: So just remind me what that relates to.

Molly Ball: Well, interestingly, while the former president does face 91 criminal charges in his various cases, this is not one of those criminal cases. This is a civil trial over charges that he committed fraud by allegedly inflating the value of his properties over the course of his long business career prior to becoming president in New York City. The valuation of the property, obviously, is what determines how much tax a person pays. The judge in this case, who is a Democrat, has already reached the conclusion that fraud was committed. And so this is actually only the penalty phase of the trial, where what’s being decided is how President Trump will be punished for the fraud he’s been judged to have committed, although his lawyers have signalled that they also plan to appeal that verdict. So it’s all very confusing and cameras are not allowed in the courtroom. So we’re all hearing from the reporters who’ve been there, what’s been happening. But it’s been quite a spectacle.

Sam Hawley: It sure has. And after he appeared in court, Donald Trump, he did address the press, as did one of his lawyers, Alina Habba.

Alina Habba: But I was told to sit down today. I was yelled at. And I’ve had a judge who was unhinged, slamming a table. Let me be very clear. I don’t tolerate that in my life. I’m not going to tolerate it here.

Sam Hawley: They were pretty worked up by that point, to say the least.

Molly Ball: That’s right. And it’s interesting that Trump has chosen to appear and has been clearly very angry about these proceedings.

Donald Trump: While inflation is eating our country alive. I’m down here, and these are all political opponent attack heads by the Biden administration.

Molly Ball: He’s also used it as something of a political platform, going after the prosecutors, going after the state, trying to weave this into his his long standing narrative that he’s a victim of what he calls a witch hunt. The idea is that he can use it to gain sympathy in his presidential campaign.

Donald Trump: In the meantime, the people of the country understand it, they see it, and they don’t like it. They don’t like it because it’s political warfare, as you would call it, or political lawfare.

Sam Hawley: So, Molly, we know that Donald Trump is in a world of legal pain. But the thing that I guess is a little hard to comprehend is that none of this seems to be hindering him politically. So just a year out from a US election, tell me what the polling is showing.

Molly Ball: Well, he’s probably never been in better shape politically. He is the overwhelming favourite for the Republican presidential nomination in the general election as well. He’s never been in better shape. There have been many polls now, including a very influential group of polls from the New York Times over the weekend showing that he could beat President Biden in a general election and potentially decisively so this is someone who has never won the popular vote in an American presidential election. But the current president is so weak, is so unpopular, that voters may be starting to look back with some nostalgia on the Trump administration and think, maybe it wasn’t so bad. So at the same time as his legal peril continues to intensify, his political prospects look better than ever.

Sam Hawley: The New York Times polling that you mentioned shows that he’s ahead in five of the six swing states, which is pretty incredible. So tell me, is it a matter of President Biden’s popularity is plunging or Trump’s is rising, or is it a bit of both?

Molly Ball: It seems to be much more a function of Biden’s weakness than of any strength by Trump, who remains pretty unpopular broadly with the electorate and what we have seen over many months of polls this year. Even though Republicans overwhelmingly want to renominate former President Trump, even though the Democratic establishment has rallied around President Biden and there are no major challengers to his renomination, voters overall really wish they were not facing a rerun of the 2020 election. They’re very dissatisfied. And in those battleground states, all of which President Biden won last time around, states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada… in all of the states except Wisconsin, Biden is losing to Trump and in some cases, by a pretty sizeable margin. Not, it seems, because voters have decided they like Trump any better. But just because they view the country as off track, they don’t like how things are going, particularly with the economy. Trump is much more trusted to handle the economy than Biden. And I think with a new war breaking out overseas, people have a feeling of instability, and feel the current president is not the proverbial steady hand on the tiller.

Sam Hawley: And it seems Biden’s age is also a problem now.

Molly Ball: That is the major factor that voters seem dissatisfied with. Besides, Biden’s handling of the economy is just how old he is. His birthday is coming up. He’s about to turn, I believe, 81, which is older than than any president has ever been even at the end of his term, much less at the beginning of a new one. And it’s not just his age, we should say, it’s his performance. Trump is only a few years younger, although those years can be significant when you’re in your upper 70’s. But people see how little President Biden appears in public in unscripted settings, how unsteady he sometimes seems in those situations, even when he’s reading off a teleprompter, often missing words, mangling names, not seeming to be able to remember things. So even though those who work directly with President Biden say that his faculties are intact, I think there’s a feeling on the part of the electorate that he’s just not showing the qualities of a strong leader in public.

Sam Hawley: And Molly, we’re still a year out from a US election. And of course, this is just opinion polling. But where does this leave the Democrats? I guess they’d be pretty worried about what they’re seeing here. Which voters are they losing and what can they do to get them back?

Molly Ball: That is a big part of the hand-wringing, I think it’s just short of panic at this stage, that is happening among the Democratic Party. They seem to be losing young voters who are a crucial part of the Liberal coalition. I think the war in the Middle East has exacerbated that. We have seen that while most of the public supports the president and supports him taking a stand in favour of Israel and its government, there are a lot of young voters who feel much more sympathy for the Palestinian cause. And we’ve seen that the president also appears to be losing a lot of ground with non-white voters, with minorities who tend to be more working class, who tend to be less college educated. It’s really a question whether Democrats will be able to win them back. I think to play devil’s advocate with myself here, the counterargument you hear from a lot of Democrats and particularly from president Biden in his campaign is those are Democratic base voters. They’re not going to vote for a Donald Trump at the end of the day when they’re facing a binary choice. Yes, they may wish that there were someone else on the ticket, but they like Trump less. And at the end of the day, they’ll come home. So we’ll just have to see.

Sam Hawley: Yeah, exactly. Well, it does seem extraordinary that if this polling is right, the US could end up with a president who could be convicted as a felon. Let’s think for a minute about what a second Trump term would look like. He talks about a second term of retribution. What does he mean by that?

Molly Ball: Yeah. Trump has really convinced a lot of his supporters that his victimisation by the legal system is is shared by them, and that attacks on him are attacks on his supporters.

Donald Trump: In the end, they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in their way. And now these radical left lunatics want to interfere with our elections by using law enforcement.

Molly Ball: He never conceded that he lost the 2020 election. He left office in disgrace in the aftermath of the January 6th, 2021 Capitol riot. And since then, far from being chastened by that outrageous event, he has tried to do some revisionist history and argue that that what happened was actually a fight for freedom, and that the people who’ve been arrested and imprisoned for their violent acts, in some cases on January 6th, are actually freedom fighters or political prisoners. And his advisers talk about how if he does win a second term, they are going to basically gut the civil service and replace them with more politically sympathetic appointees that he plans to sort of have his revenge on the entire what he terms the deep state.

Donald Trump: This is the final battle with you at my side. We will demolish the Deep State.

Molly Ball: It’s a quite extreme agenda, and it’s what he’s promising to do if he is returned to the White House.

Sam Hawley: What about internationally? What’s his agenda there?

Molly Ball: Well, that’s another interesting question. He’s refused to say that he wants Ukraine to to win the war against Putin and the Russian invasion. He initially, after the Hamas terrorist attacks a month ago, was critical of Israeli President Netanyahu, apparently because of a personal slight and even had kind words for Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorists. So, you know, while he was president, frequently had kind words for dictators, some of the world’s most brutal regimes the North Koreans, the Russians. And we see him continuing that out of office and promising to take, I think, quite a different tack, quite a more isolationist tack than the current president, who has long history in foreign affairs and has really worked to rebuild America’s traditional alliances at a time when there’s so much conflict going on internationally.

Sam Hawley: So the effects of a Trump presidency a second time around would reverberate around the world at a time that the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Molly Ball: I do think that again, in a second Trump term, you would see more American withdrawal from the world, less support for traditional alliances, certainly less support for NATO. And that would have effects on, on, on all of the international relationships.

Sam Hawley: What do you think, Molly? Do you think a second Trump term is a real possibility at this point?

Molly Ball: Everything’s possible. I’m a reporter. I do not make predictions, it’s a firm policy, but it certainly looks quite possible given given where the electorate is today.

Sam Hawley: Molly Ball is the senior political correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. The US presidential election will be held on November the 5th next year. This episode was produced by Nell Whitehead, Sam Dunn and Anna John, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is David Coady. Over the weekend, keep a look out for if you’re listening on the ABC listen app, with host Matt Bevin looking at whether Israel can save the hostages. I’m Sam Hawley. Abc News Daily will be back again on Monday. Thanks for listening.