16 Dec What Swing Voters in MI Say… HOT: #AndrewYang, NOT: #Impeachment

This presidential election cycle we’re seeking out swing voters in swing states to find out what they’re thinking and feeling—about the president; about the people who want to take a turn at his job; about impeachment; about the economy, trade, healthcare, and anything else that might be on their minds.

Our team was in Saginaw, Michigan, last week, with ten respondents who voted for Obama in 2012 and then Trump in 2016. What we uncovered was surprising, and not surprising. Surprising in relation to typical media coverage. But not really surprising, because it tracks with what we’ve been hearing in our past swing voter groups.

Here are some highlights:

Buyer’s remorse? Nope. They would vote for Trump over Hillary all over again.

But they voted for Obama. Yes, they did. But in a hypothetical (constitutionally impossible) matchup between Obama and Trump, eight of them would vote for Trump.

Are they better off than they were four years ago? Yes. The economy is booming, and they are personally seeing the benefits. They like what the president is doing on trade, healthcare, and immigration.

Would a recession erode their support? They don’t think there’s going to be a recession in the next year, but it wouldn’t matter, they’ll still support the president.

But don’t they watch the news? They don’t trust mainstream media coverage of what’s going on.

So, impeachment . . . A waste of time and a big waste of money. They want the attention to be on them and their needs, and they want government resources (their tax dollars) spent on America. In a word: they resent it. (“Resent” is an . . . interesting emotion, but we’re skipping the psychology sidebar in this post.) (Maybe just a footnote.[1])

Anybody exciting on the Democratic side? Not really. They only really recognized three of the 10 we showed them. When we dial tested segments from the last debate, Andrew #Yang rated highest while talking about the importance of early childhood education. Despite this group’s general disinterest with the candidates, they had a lot of positive comments about this one segment. See that here: https://youtu.be/1EviMd22Ms8

They want to keep their health insurance. Most of them (eight of 10) said they can’t vote for a candidate who supports Medicare for All.

For the full report go here; for clips and commentary go here. 

[1] See Ressentiment, Max Scheler; also https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/whats-ressentiment-got-do-it