Bill Kristol lays out how he thinks Trump could reverse the presidential polling tide

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published 27 June 2020

It's no secret the polls have not been kind to President Trump lately. If the majority of them hold true, former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, stands a strong chance of defeating Trump in November's general elections. But experts and Democtats are continually warning that polls, especially at this early stage, don't tell the story.

Bill Kristol, a neoconservative and Trump critic who served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, told The Guardian in an interview that "it's conceivable that the reluctant Trump voter from 2016 who's become a reluctant Biden voter in 2020 goes back to being a reluctant Trump voter" by the time the election rolls around. He thinks that could happen if Trump and his campaign implement tactics like suppressing minority voting, "colluding" with foreign governments, or spreading allegations of corruption against Biden and his son Hunter. "The special circumstances with Trump are his total abandonment of any constraints and even more important, perhaps, his having people around him who've abandoned any constraints on the way in which they'll use the federal government, the executive branch, to say things, do things, pretend to do things," he said.

Lawrence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, added that he could also envision Trump bringing a surge of voters back around by announcing "without any basis at all" that a coronavirus vaccine has been found shortly before the election and then "pressure" the Food and Drug Administration "to approve it." Read more about how Kristol, Tribe, and other experts think Trump could reverse the polling tide at The Guardian.