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

Bill Kristol.
(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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.

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Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.