Transcript: Obama’s Brutal New Trump Takedown Reveals an Awful Truth

Podhorzer: That’s absolutely right. And even beyond that, when you survive something, it’s pretty easy to try to put it in the rearview mirror if you can. That’s why it’s especially important that alarm be raised right now to pull people back there. One of the things that is easy to not see is that the voters we’re talking about really have no interest in paying attention to politics. They’re interested in other things, they have their lives to do. There’s a way in which we unconsciously expect others to tell us when it’s a break-glass moment, right? They may hear some of the things that Trump’s saying and actually think, Well, boy, that sounds pretty dangerous. But then no one else is agreeing with that. And so they just figure, Well, maybe not. That’s a big part of the dynamic that’s been going on. 

Sargent: For sure. I do think we’re also talking about a fairly large number of voters who did live as adults through Trump’s first term.

A lot of resources are going into getting right-leaning independence, Republican-leaning women, who still seem to think Trump was better on the economy—I don’t know why they think that, but they do. They seem to have forgotten what happened in Trump’s first term, and seem to have erased from their minds 2020, in which Trump drove the economy into the ground, something that was directly linked to his derangement. How did voters forget that part of it? 

Podhorzer: To be fair, part of human nature is a thing called recency bias, which is that you really over-index on what just happened over what happened in the past. For many, what happened recently was rising prices. So it’s not rational, but it is pretty wired into human nature that you are much more cognizant and care more about what just happened than what happened in the past. The other part of it is that the people you’re talking about, that you’re bewildered at that they think Trump was better on the economy, only think that because a survey-taker asked them.

It’s not like those people spend their time analyzing who was better on the economy. And even with that, and this is an important criticism of polling in general, there’s not even a follow-up question to think, Well, do you think Trump was good, as opposed to just better than whatever you think Harris is, and do you think that being better on the economy in this vague question actually matters.