Undecided voters are concerned that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, he’ll never leave.
As the rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump draws nearer, political professionals are detecting an unusual concern among some undecided voters: that if Trump returns to the White House, he’ll refuse to step down when his term is up.
Seiji Carpenter, vice president at David Binder Research, noticed this fear in early April while conducting focus groups of people who had voted for Biden in 2020 but became disillusioned and were considering switching sides. “We were talking to Latino men and Asian American-Pacific Islander women in battleground states,” Carpenter recalls, “and they went straight to the issue of, what if Trump won’t give up power?”
Carpenter has a decade of experience running focus groups for Democrats, but he’d never encountered this fear in earlier cycles. “It’s not something we’d been testing for,” he says. “But what we’ve seen so far indicates a real concern there.”
Republican strategists have encountered the same thing. “It’s showing up in our focus groups,” says Sarah Longwell, the chief executive officer of Longwell Partners and publisher of the conservative website the Bulwark. “It happened just the other day.”
Longwell shared a video of a group of undecided swing-state voters who had been asked if they were worried that Trump might violate the constitutional amendment limiting him to one more term if he wins in November.
“Does anybody think he may not abide by the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution and leave office after the 2028 election? Anyone worried about that?” the moderator asked.
In response, seven of the eight participants raised a hand. A Pennsylvania man worried that Trump might go further and try to institute a dynasty. “I wouldn’t put it past him, now that he owns the RNC,” the man said, “to say, ‘Don Jr. is going to do the next term, and he’ll get two. And then Barron will get two.’ And we’ll just have some fake monarchy.”
By Joshua Green
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