USA. Biden tries to regain popularity (and Trump escapes justice)

A Most polls indicate a slight advantage for Trump (the best positioned to win the Republican primaries, with a wide gap to all other opponents), but respondents also say they could abandon their voting preference for the former President if he comes to be convicted in one of the four legal proceedings in which he is involved.

The same polls also say that Democratic voters are not very confident in Joe Biden’s ability to repeat his victory over Trump, pointing to his advanced age (81 years old) as one of the reasons for reservation.

Biden’s team believes that as the effects of the economic recovery (after the downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic) are felt in the pockets of Americans, the President’s popularity — which is currently at 55 percent disapproval, against 39 percent approval — will return to positive 2021 levels.

“But there is a problem that continues to afflict North Americans and that could be as decisive as the behavior of the economy: the migration crisis, which is knocking every day at the doors of the borders in the south”, Barbara Lake explained to Lusa, Political Science researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

This analyst recalls that Biden has been tightening his policy against illegal immigration, entering territory that until now had only been explored by Trump, who recovered his promises to build a wall on the border with Mexico.

“With the new policies, the President achieves two effects: stopping the serious crisis at the borders and addressing voters who don’t like Trump, but agree that the current situation is becoming unsustainable”, comments Lake, referring to the thousands of migrants who head towards the southern USA from Central America every day.

When Biden arrived at the White House in 2021, he began by reversing some of Trump’s immigration policies, promising to “restore humanism and American values ​​to the migration system.”

However, opinion polls quickly indicated that American voters are seriously concerned about the avalanche of illegal immigrants crossing the borders and causing chaos in social security systems, an issue that Trump has explored.

The former Republican President’s problem is that, at the same time that he has received support from a relevant part of the electorate in his immigration policies, he has increased his levels of rejection among those who are not comfortable with the justice cases in which he is involved. .

Polls indicate that four out of every 10 voters who intend to vote for Trump will stop doing so if the former President is found guilty in any of the four legal cases that pursue him, in particular the one in which he is accused of having motivated the invasion of the Capitol, on January 6, 2021, to try to prevent the validation of Biden’s victory.

Polls also indicate that one in three Republican voters also disapprove of the threats that Trump has made to take revenge on the leaders of the Democratic Party, for what he considers to be an “unacceptable political persecution”, if he is elected.

These numbers could prove to be essential, especially in the so-called ‘swing states’ — the states whose electorate easily moves between the two main parties — which in these elections should be Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The bad news for the White House team is that, at the moment, Biden only has an advantage over Trump in the state of Wisconsin, losing to Trump in all the others.

Biden’s team therefore hopes that the court cases will affect Trump’s image, that the promises of tougher measures in immigration policy will halt the decline in popularity and that the issue of access to abortion will also be attractive to voters in those States.

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