Want some good news?

I do, and I found some in this article for CNN by Rich Thau. He is the president and co-founder of a research firm called Engagious. Thau writes:

Pollsters are consistently telling us [that] Democratic nominee Joe Biden is far ahead. I’m not looking to pick a fight, as their sample sizes are much larger than mine. That said, as a focus group moderator, I’m hearing strong support for President Donald Trump from a critical sliver of the electorate.

[E]ach month for the past 17 months, I’ve had a unique window into the Americans largely responsible for giving the president his slim Electoral College victory: so-called “Obama-Trump” swing voters across the upper Midwest. Our Swing Voter Project has uncovered that many of these people, who live in places such as Canton, Ohio; Davenport, Iowa; Erie, Pennsylvania; and Macomb County, Michigan, prefer Trump over Biden. In fact, 22 of 33 respondents in these four most recent locations feel this way.

And over the first year of the project, from March 2019 through February 2020, more than two-thirds of the “Obama-Trump” voters said they would take Trump over Obama in a hypothetical match-up.

(Emphasis added)

Why do these voters support Trump? Thau explains:

They think a businessman is best suited to turn the country around economically. They feel Covid-19 was not Trump’s fault, and he’s doing the best he can to contain it. They conflate the Black Lives Matter protesters with the rioters attacking federal buildings and retail shops [Note: Or maybe they make the distinction but are appalled that Democratic mayors let rioters run rampant]. They don’t want historic monuments torn down. And they dismiss defunding the police as ridiculous.

These voters tell me they want America finally to be put first; they oppose immigration and trade policies they say give benefits to foreigners at their expense. And they want a non-politician who relentlessly fights back, after witnessing too many office holders fold in the face of special interests.

Thau finds that the mainstream media’s anti-Trump drumbeat has virtually no impact on these voters:

Many are, instead, people who get their news disproportionately from local television, regional websites and Facebook. Compared to the kinds of people who seek out news from national cable channels, many swing voters reside in a national politics desert.

In short, while America’s political media generate a pipeline’s worth of information daily, these swing voters consume merely a trickle.

They appear, though, to have consumed enough information to have serious doubts about Joe Biden:

[S]everal told me Biden would be a “puppet” of others if he were elected. That’s because many are convinced he has “dementia,” and they mocked him after seeing videos of his misstatements online.

What I’d really like to see is polling that shows Trump ahead in key battleground states. But these days, I’ll take good news anywhere I can find it.

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