Is voter ignorance Trump’s superpower or his future kryptonite?

Donald Trump has a superpower and it is voter ignorance according to a new report that made some startling discoveries regarding what the former president’s supporters know about the GOP’s presumptive 2024 presidential nominee. 

MSNBC Columnist Charlie Sykes walked through a lot of evidence from surveys and polling that indicated the Republican Party and its voters really don’t understand the man that they will likely vote for in November, and the findings are quite concerning. 

One example Skyes pointed out was from a YouGov poll conducted between June 3rd and 6th that found only 35% of Republicans knew the former president was indicted on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election. 

Even more concerning was the finding that 34% of Republicans polled reported Trump was not indicted for conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election, a fact that has not been true since being indicted on August 1st, 2023 by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Trump’s indictment document pointed out he was accused of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election by using claims he knew were false to “obstruct the government function” that “collected, counted and certified" the election’s results.

Sykes noted Trump’s election charges were being held up by a Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity but explained that despite that fact the former president’s charges “do not exist” for a majority of Republican voters, and that wasn't the only issue that doesn’t exist for some these conservative voters. 

Polling from Marquette Law School in July 2023 found that 50% of Republicans surveyed said that Trump didn’t have classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. This was only a month after Trump’s indictment on 37 felony counts in the case was made public on June 9th.  

A more recent example of voter ignorance can be seen in the YouGov polling from June that found 79% of conservatives thought Trump’s New York hush-money charges were brought on by direction from the Biden administration rather than prosecutors.

Sykes pointed out that there was no basis to the claim that Joe Biden’s administration had a hand in guiding New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s decisions and noted the message being pushed that Biden did was one that favored the former president. 

Even more worrying than the previous example may be the survey results from a CNN poll in August 2023 that discovered 69% of Republicans and Republican-leaning individuals thought Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate compared to 63% in the previous fall. 

A concerning poll from the Democratic-leaning group Blueprint in 2024 found that half of those aged 18-30 hadn’t heard of Trump’s call for a Muslim ban, his 2017 Charlottesville neo-Nazi comments, nor his remarks about John McCain not being a war hero because he was a prisoner of war. 

Younger voters also have little knowledge of the former president’s derogatory remarks about women, minorities, and immigrant communities according to Sykes' analysis of Blueprint’s polling, which was conducted between April 27th and 29th.

“It might shock those of us who eat, sleep, and breathe politics, but young voters really don’t remember the daily controversies of the Trump years and grew up understanding this kind of rhetoric as politics as usual,” Blueprint pollster Evan Roth Smith explained.

Sykes called the ignorance pointed out in the many examples that were provided a kind of superpower for the former president. However, that superpower could also turn into his kryptonite once the 2024 presidential campaign season moves closer to November.  

Analysis from the New York Times in late May reported that Trump’s polling leads were being driven by voters who weren’t paying close attention to the election and who “don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.”

“What happens when the disengaged voters become engaged or when tuned-out voters start to pay attention?” Sykes questioned, adding that the Biden campaign and the news media had an opportunity to remind voters about Donald Trump. 

“If Biden’s camp plays its cards right, Trump may find out that a campaign that relies on ignorance and amnesia is far more fragile than it looks now,” Sykes concluded. Whether or not that will come to pass has yet to be seen. 

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