Donald Trump won a second White House term in November’s election thanks to voters’ attaching higher priority to having an effective president than one who was trustworthy, fresh polling has suggested.
A post-election survey conducted by Schoen Cooperman Research, in conjunction with George Washington University’s graduate school of political management, has concluded that voters believe Trump’s second presidency will be more effective in getting things done – even though they trust his administration less to share accurate information. Those polled also think Trump not only failed to deliver on some of his more prominent campaign promises during his first term from 2017 to 2021, including a southern US border wall for which Mexico would pay – he also botched the federal response to the deadly Covid-19 pandemic.
The findings suggest that Kamala Harris, the defeated Democratic nominee, erred in fighting a “values-based” campaign that depicted Trump as untrustworthy and “dangerous”.
“Our poll suggests that Democrats ran the wrong campaign,” the pollsters Douglas Schoen and Carly Cooperman wrote in the Hill.
“Whereas they ran a ‘values campaign,’ focused on a government Americans could trust, what voters really wanted was an effective government, and on that, they preferred Donald Trump.”
The assertion is backed up by data. Whereas a plurality of American voters said Trump’s victory made them less trusting of government (39%) and less confident that it “will share fair and accurate information” (41%), more also felt that his second administration would be more effective than the outgoing Joe Biden’s in getting things done, 40% to 36%.
The dichotomy was even more pronounced with independent voters, among whom 39% believe Trump will be more effective against 29% who think he will be less so. At the same time, an even wider margin – 39% to 26% – say they will be less trusting of government under Trump.
The pollsters say their findings back up those of a recent CNN poll, which showed voters expressing a “cautious optimism” about prospects under Trump – with 54% “expect[ing him] to do a good job upon his return to the White House” and 55% approving of how he is handling the transition so far.
More than two-thirds, 68%, feel he will bring change to the country, according to the CNN survey. The finding is telling following a campaign in which both candidates vied to present themselves as the “change” candidate – a challenge for each of them given that Trump had been president before and Harris has been vice-president under Biden since he took office after defeating Trump in the 2020 election.
Confidence in Trump’s effectiveness might be a bitter pill for Biden, whose supporters have extolled him as the most successful president in terms of passing legislation since Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. Both he and Harris depicted Trump’s previous presidency as a period of chaos and ineffective governance.
And historians validated their perspective, ranking Trump in February as the worst president in US history and Biden the 14th greatest.
But Biden also framed his 2020 campaign as a battle for America’s soul, a message he reprised in a 2024 re-election campaign that he aborted in July.
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He cast the race as being about US democracy itself. However, Biden, now 82, stepped aside and endorsed Harris as the Democrats’ nominee following his disastrous June debate performance and concerns over his advanced age, even though Trump – now 78 – ultimately became the oldest person ever elected US president.
While Harris initially veered away from that script when she became the nominee, she returned to it late in the campaign, casting Trump as a “threat to democracy” as his rhetoric became darker and more threatening.
Trump, for his part, focused his campaign on the economy and immigration, issues that successive polls showed were top priorities for voters.
The lack of trust in government, according to Schoen and Cooperman, can be attributed to a broad recognition of the proliferation of online misinformation and disinformation. Some 69% of voters said the trend made it harder to access “fair and truthful news during the 2024 election campaign”, the poll found. A similar figure, 71%, voiced concern about the role so-called deepfakes played in the election.