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Exclusive GZERO Poll: What will Trump do first in office?
Donald Trump has promised a laundry list of things he will accomplish “on Day 1” in office. To name a few, he has vowed to immediately begin a mass deportation of immigrants, streamline the federal government, pardon Jan. 6 rioters, and roll back the Biden administration’s education and climate policies.
But Trump will face an uphill battle. While he will have a united Congress behind him, he will still need to circumvent budgetary, logistical, and political barriers – especially for some of his most ambitious goals, like deporting millions of immigrants.
With the help of Echelon Insights, GZERO polled over 1,000 Americans about what they think Donald Trump is likely to do first. The majority of respondents believed that Trump’s first priority in office will be deporting unauthorized immigrants, followed by pardoning Jan. 6 rioters and enacting tariffs on China.
What do you think Trump is likely to do first in office? Shoot us an email sharing your prediction here.Supporters of Democratic presidential nominee and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris cheer before the start of the golf cart rally in the retirement community of The Villages, Florida U.S. October, 14, 2024.
Harris and Trump take very different approaches in the homestretch
With exactly three weeks left before Election Day, both campaigns are battling it out on the ground for the handful of undecided voters who will decide the election. But the Harris and Trump teams seem to have very different assumptions about what will work.
According to a report by the New York Times, the Harris campaign is using a large, well-established party infrastructure to find, call, and knock on the doors of reliably Democratic voters from past cycles. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, is taking its base for granted and instead using scrappier, less experienced networks to find people who don’t vote regularly but who might be Trump-curious.
What does that tell us? That as we enter the homestretch, the Blue Team, despite the boost in enthusiasm that came after Harris entered the race, is still more worried about shoring up its reliables than about pioneering fresh supporters, while the Red Team is betting it has a message that can bring new voters into the fold.
Where do things stand? The latest polling shows Harris ahead of Trump 48.5 to 46.1 nationwide, and holding a razor-thin lead in key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Trump holds a similarly slim edge in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.Exclusive: Americans care most about this issue ...
Polls reflect an American electorate split over who should become the 47th president. So GZERO decided to dig deeper and partnered with Echelon Insights for some exclusive polling to find out what Americans think should be the first geopolitical priority for the next US president, regardless of who ends up in the Oval Office in January.
Our survey of 1,005 voters found that across the political spectrum, a majority of Americans believe the Israel-Gaza war is the most pressing issue for the White House, followed by the Ukraine-Russia war, US-China relations, and then climate change.
Interestingly, climate change was the second most pressing issue for Democrats, with 26% of respondents saying it should be the top priority. Meanwhile, among Republicans, only 5% of respondents answered it was the biggest issue. The Ukraine-Russia war, which Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to end within 24 hours of taking office, came in second among Republicans’ top priorities, at 24%, compared to third for Democrats, at 18%.
This could be a reflection that Republicans share Trump’s belief that immediate action needs to be taken to end the Ukraine war (even if that comes at the expense of Ukraine), whereas Democrats are more satisfied with the continuation of the current administration’s support for Kyiv.
We also polled Americans on who they trusted more to be alone in a room with Vladimir Putin and found that the responses were almost as equally divided as the polls on who should be the next president, as you can see below:
Democratic presidential nominee and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff visit a watch party after Harris participated in a presidential debate with Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., September 10, 2024.
Harris won the debate, but will it matter on Election Day?
The presidential debate marks the unofficial point of the race when the majority of Americans start paying attention. As the dust begins to settle from Tuesday night’s showdown, early polls show Kamala Harris winning the debate 63% to 37%, according to a CNN poll, while YouGov’s poll has her winning 54% to 31% among registered voters who watched at least some of the debate, with 14% unsure.
Both Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton beat Donald Trump by even larger margins in 2020 and 2016, but only one of them went on to beat him in the electoral college on Election Day. So the question remains: Will the debate matter?
This is “the major unknown,” says Eurasia Group’s US analyst Noah Daponte-Smith. “I tend to think it won’t matter very much.”
“There are very few ‘gettable’ voters left, and polling has been remarkably stable in the race so far, with very little movement since Harris’ post-nomination ascendancy ended,” he explains.
Early polls also show that Harris didn’t change minds on the big issues. Despite her win, debate watchers still preferred Trump by 20 points on the economy and 23 points on immigration.
The real determining factor in a race this tight will be turnout. Harris may have won a few more supporters with a shining debate performance, but she needs to convince them to show up on Election Day. Meanwhile, Trump’s camp will be mobilized by the motivation to vote Democrats out of the Oval Office. With early voting kicking off next week in key states like Pennsylvania, we will be watching which candidate can drive more of their voters to the polls.
What’s better than a poll? A projection. What’s that?
Between now and the fall of 2025, both the United States and Canada will hold general elections with the incumbents up against the odds. President Joe Biden is in a tough reelection campaign against former President Donald Trump. It doesn’t help that calls for Biden to step aside are mounting, casting doubt on his capacity to run and serve another four-year term.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is also facing calls to stand down — a former cabinet minister has said it’s time for him to go, as has a member of his caucus and at least three former Liberal MPs. Meanwhile, there are rumblings that some incumbents might bail on the next election, and there’s a significant chance that MPs, current or former, are keeping their true feelings to themselves, at least for now.
Trudeau’s Liberals trail their Conservative opponents by double digits, with some polls putting them 20 or more points behind.
With the drama of electoral uncertainty and breathless media coverage, these contests can sometimes look more like reality television than high-stakes democratic exercises. The horse race coverage of polls doesn’t help. Individual polls get reported as final words, definitive predictions of what will happen. But single polls are snapshots in time, subject to margins of error and the risk of being an outlier or of not telling the whole story.
But there’s a better way to predict election outcomes: projections. Made up of an aggregate of polls and complementary data, such as electoral history, current trends, and even economic data, projections give observers a broader sense of what’s going on in a race and what’s likely to happen. Of course, projections aren’t crystal balls — things can change, and campaigns can and do make a difference. But good data interpreted properly can give us a good sense of the likely result.
Canada and the US have various election projection resources, with 338 Canada, run by poll analyst Philippe Fournier, the mainstay up north, while Nate Silver’s 538 is a go-to in the US.
In the case of 338, Fournier is projecting bad news for Trudeau and Biden. As of this week, the site gives the Conservatives a greater than 99% chance of winning the most seats in the next Canadian election and a 99% chance of winning a majority government with a range of between 179 and 234 seats.
It also gives Trump a 69% chance of winning, taking 312 electoral college votes to Biden’s 226. That stands in stark contrast to 538, which, as of writing, features a simulation projecting Trump edging out Biden 271 to 267.
For his work on elections in Canada, Fournier’s methodology relies on weighted polls and draws on demographic data that includes age distribution, education level, population density, and immigration level riding-by-riding. Fournier notes that the data he draws on is available through the census and from Statistics Canada. His model for the US presidential race, however, is comparatively pared down, going state by state, drawing on polls and past results, and relying far less on demographic data.
The 2024 presidential election model at 538 uses polls, but it also adjusts its predictions by “correcting” poll bumps around convention time, connecting and correlating poll movements across states. “If President Joe Biden improves his standing in Nevada,” as 538’s G. Elliott Morris explains, “our forecast will also expect him to be polling better in states such as Arizona and New Mexico, which have similar demographics and are part of the same political region.”
Fournier and 338 have a solid record of correct predictions. In 13 general elections in Canada, federal and provincial, covering over 1,600 individual districts, 338 has managed to pick the winner 90% of the time, while 6% of their misses were within the margin of error. In an enterprise marked by the uncertainty of human behavior, and with countless data available, being accurate 9 out of 10 times is impressive. In the 2020 US election, Fournier correctly projected 48 of the 50 states.
Projections are powerful, but they aren’t oracles. In the context of the US presidential race, Noah Daponte-Smith, an analyst at Eurasia Group, says, “No forecast should be taken as definitive, especially five months out from the election.”
Daponte-Smith also points out that since different projection models rely on different methodologies and data — how they weight individual polls, which (if any) economic indicators they use, or how they manage polling error — their results may diverge from one another.
“These differing sets of assumptions mean that it is possible the forecasts move in opposite directions at some point in the race, potentially if polls are pointing in one direction while economic fundamentals are pointing in another,” he says.
The data, on aggregate, doesn’t tend to lie. But it has to be chosen, collected, and interpreted, and not all collection and interpretation is created equally. Fournier says that social media, right now, is “flooded with amateurs with spreadsheets.” Often, he says, election watchers will model a simple poll and draw conclusions, which he doesn’t do since there’s so much uncertainty from poll to poll.
“Using only one poll at the time, and projecting one poll at a time,” he says, “would be like rolling in the streets of Montreal or Ottawa without shock absorbers. You need shock absorbers. If a poll says, let's say, the Liberals are at 25 and the others say they’re at 20 a day later, they haven't lost five points in a day; they're somewhere between 22 and 23.”
By the time you aggregate polls — add the shock absorbers — you start to get a good picture of what’s likely to happen. The trick to understanding projections is to keep in mind that they’re probabilistic, which means they deal in probabilities, not certainties. As Fournier points out, “When you say that a candidate has a 90% chance to win, it sounds overwhelming. It sounds like, ‘Oh, it’s in the bag.’ But it also means that there’s a 10% chance that he doesn’t win, and 10% is 1 out of 10.”
A 1-in-10 chance might not sound like a lot, but imagine if you were told there’s a 10% chance that you’ll suddenly lose your life savings one day. Or drop dead. You’d quickly appreciate how significant small chances can be. Indeed, much of the US was reminded of that lesson in 2016 by watching the New York Times’ probability needle, which pointed to a probable Hillary Clinton win, until it didn’t.
While the Canadian election race isn’t close, the US contest is much closer. Fournier says that the large electoral vote lead he has projected for Trump is built on Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania historically voting as a bloc, stretching back to the 1988 presidential election, and currently sitting as a toss-up that Biden must win to have a chance.
“It’s still a very close race,” he says. Nonetheless, “The favorite right now, undoubtedly, is Trump with the numbers that we have.”
US President Joe Biden waits to welcome President William Ruto of Kenya to the White House in Washington on May 22, 2024.
It’s Biden’s economy, stupid
The United States is plagued with a “vibecession” — where confidence in the economy is at stark odds with the actual data.
A new Harris poll forThe Guardian shows nearly three in five Americans believe the economy is shrinking and in recession. Nearly half of those polled also believe US unemployment is at a 50-year high.
But none of that is true.
So why the disconnect?
Much of the bad vibes are lingering from America’s post-COVID economic recovery. The US generally bounced backbetter than its peers, but inflation is still squeezing average Americans while the Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates high. Even if the stock market and GDP reachnewheights, so is Americans’ cost of living — and at a time when it costs more to borrow.
Another vibecession culprit: politics, baby. OneYouGov poll shows the percentage of Republican respondents who thought the economy was improving dropped from 64% in November 2020 to 6% after Biden’s inauguration in January 2021. Unsurprisingly, Democrats’ views on the economy also shot way up after Biden took office, without much changing economically.
If Americans’ perceptions of the economy are deeply entrenched with their political affiliation, is there anything Biden can do ahead of November’s election? His administration is working to bring downgas prices and slashstudent debt. But as long as prices and interest rates stay high, he may have a hard time swaying voters’ historically low confidence in his ability to do the right thing for the economy.
Reading the US midterm election tea leaves
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics.
What is polling telling us three weeks before the midterm elections?
Public opinion polling is taking election watchers on quite an exciting ride this year, from showing Republicans with a massive advantage early in the year, to demonstrating a surge and support for Democrats over the summer. Most election watchers think that surge is fading now in the final weeks before the election. But today, we wanted to focus on a few numbers that matter for forecasting the election results.
But first is the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they would prefer to vote for in an upcoming election. If you have to look at one indicator to make a forecast about congressional elections in the US, this is it. Particularly in the House of Representatives. This indicator has shown Republicans with an unusual advantage for most of this year, which they lost over the summer as abortion climbed in importance for voters. While Democrats lead in this indicator right now by about half a percentage point, because of the way districts are drawn, they would need to have a several-point lead in order to be thought of as favorites in taking the House. So this is telling us that the general environment is good for Republicans at the moment.
The second data point to watch is presidential approval. This is far more important in presidential elections than midterm elections, but it does give an indicator of how voters feel about the party in power. In this case, the Democrats. Biden's approval has trended steadily downwards since his inauguration, going from a high of 54% in January of last year, to a low of 37% in July of this year. But he's staged a bit of a comeback as energy price increases reversed over the summer. Biden currently sits at about 43% if you average together different polls, which is almost exactly where President Trump was before he faced a major setback in his first midterm election, and about four points behind where President Obama was just before the Tea Party wave that cost Democrats control of the House in 2010. So this suggests an advantage for Republicans, to the extent this election is a referendum on Biden.
Then the final thing you want to look at is issue polling. And what's interesting about this election cycle is that Republicans and Democrats are saying they prioritize very different things. Republicans are saying that inflation, crime, and immigration, are their top concerns. And coincidentally, those are all areas where polls indicate that voters trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle these issues. And at the same time, Democrats are telling pollsters that healthcare, abortion, and gun policy, are top issues in this election, and Democrats tend to have a lead in who would handle those issues better. So this is really a mixed picture of who has the advantage in the national environment.
But perhaps most importantly, the top issue for independent voters is the economy and inflation, where Republicans have the overall advantage. So if this were a national referendum, the data tells us that you'd have to favor the Republicans, but of course, it isn't. And while control of the House is affected by national trends, the Senate tends to be much more idiosyncratic, and the outcomes will vary on candidate quality. And of course, we have to be cautious when looking at polls given the sizable misses in catching Republican voters in the last several election cycles.
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What do Russians really think of the war?
When Vladimir Putin took the decision to send his armies into Ukraine, he claimed to be acting on behalf of the Russian people. Defending them, he said, from the threat of “Nazism.”
But after two weeks of war — or the “special military operation,” as it’s called in Russia — how do Russians feel about what’s being done in their name?
According to Lev Dmitrievich Gudkov, director of the Moscow-based Levada Center, the last independent pollster in Russia, some 60% of Russians currently support the invasion, while only a quarter oppose it.
But given the increased censorship and tightly controlled Kremlin narrative, can polls even be trusted? We sat down with Gudkov to discuss that question, along with how the population is responding to the country’s sudden isolation and economic crisis, and what it all may mean for Vladimir Putin in the future.
Lev Dmitrievich, how does Russian society in general view what is going on in Ukraine?
Public opinion is divided. The less well-educated, older part of the population, those out in the provinces, the people whose sources of information are extremely limited, this part of the population basically repeats what comes through propaganda channels, that is, through the television channels. So two-thirds of the population approve of the war.
The other, smaller part of the population, just over a quarter of the population, is much younger. They are mostly in large cities where a completely different information environment and a different understanding have already developed. These people are extremely negative about what is happening in Ukraine and naturally have a negative attitude towards Putin’s policy there.
But overall, people are very afraid of the war and still support Putin’s approach because, from their point of view, Putin is protecting his people from the "Ukrainian Nazis", from "genocide", from what the television broadcasts.
Are Russians able to get alternative sources of information about what’s happening?
In recent days, censorship has sharply increased. As you know, a number of popular alternative sites and internet portals have been closed, especially in the regions. Therefore, there is an information vacuum. Even Facebook is turned off, and it may very well be that, generally speaking, the internet will be turned off. Then we won’t get anything other than the official version. This is all being done in order to neutralize growing awareness of Russian aggression in Ukraine and, accordingly, of the casualties among the civilian population and the realization among Russian military personnel that Putin's blitzkrieg has failed. This is becoming more or less clear, but the consequences are not very clear yet.
Given that kind of environment, can we really trust polls in Russia? Aren’t people scared to tell the truth?
Well, this is a very old question, “can public opinion polls be trusted in authoritarian regimes?” My point of view is: definitely yes. What we measure is how people behave in the public sphere, not what they personally think. And this is much more important than the fact that, relatively speaking, say Ivan Ivanovich [aka “Joe Bloggs”] can talk in the kitchen with his wife, he can scold Putin, he can speak out against the war. But the public opportunism of conformity and the expression of loyalty – these are the important facts. Not what he personally thinks.
So what we see is passive adaptation to a repressive state. This is a fact that must be understood. It's not about the fear or sincerity of the people who respond to our interviews, but whether they have other sources of information and understanding. Most of all, the ones who are fearful and afraid to talk are the people who are opposed to Putin.
Why is the government leaning so hard on World War II imagery and slogans – “defeating the Nazis,” and so on – to sell this war to the population?
The cult of victory in the war of 1945 is one of the most important points of Russian national pride and national identity. There’s not much else that hasn’t faded into the past. The successes of space and pride in [Soviet cosmonaut Yuri] Gagarin's flight are already in the distant past. The state of Russian science is deplorable. The collective trauma from the collapse of the USSR and the loss of the status of a great power is also extremely painful for the collective consciousness. But this feeling of moral capital from victory in World War II remains. And it is with this topic that public opinion is being manipulated.
Russia is currently on the brink of an economic catastrophe. Who do Russians blame for that?
Well, roughly 60% believe that it is the United States that is to blame for the war between Russia and Ukraine, 14% blame Ukraine, and only 3% blame Russia.
But as for the economic crisis, so far the population has not realized all the consequences of a sharp deterioration in the situation. Only in the largest cities, cities with a million or more inhabitants, where people are more dependent on imports. But the bulk of the population, 60% or so, are residents of villages and small towns, and medium-sized towns. This situation has not reached them yet. These are poor, depressed provinces.
I think that in a few weeks or even months, the situation for the population as a whole will become more unambiguous and understandable. For the time being, of course, the majority blame the West, while the population of the megacities blames it on Putin's policy.
Putin famously got a 20-point approval rating jump from annexing Crimea in 2014. Will he get the same this time?
Putin's rating began to rise even before the war. In December, his approval rating was 65%, in January 69%, then in February 71%. But this is a very insignificant rise. And now the latest measurements show that it’s not growing further.
I think it will go down in the near future, when, on the one hand, the first economic consequences of the West's actual reaction to the war become clear, and on the other hand, when the picture of Russia's military losses becomes clear. For now, it's all being censored, or the officials are just lying about the troop losses. But when it becomes clear to the population, the situation will begin to change. Still, it would be a mistake to expect that this would be an immediate response.
You mentioned that youth are generally more critical. How are they responding?
Young people really, in comparison with other age groups, see all the recent events negatively. And in general, they are quite critical of Putin, especially those who are 25-35 years old.
But the social impact of this is insignificant, all the more so since repression has sharply increased. There’s not only this law that allows the authorities to put people in prison for a period of up to 15 years, but also there are everyday policing actions – the police go around to the apartments of those who have signed anti-war appeals or speak out against the war on the internet. There’s a whole so-called “cybercrime” department making a record of all these anti-war videos that are online and using them to open investigations. Not to mention the number of detainees in recent days, the number of arrests is approaching 5,000.
Hence the sharp increase in migration, the stampede of people abroad, partly to avoid being drafted into the army – there is talk of general mobilization. Therefore, young people of military age, of course, are doing whatever they can to leave, but also all the opposition-minded intelligentsia are trying to escape before the iron curtain falls.
How does Putin’s repression compare to Soviet repression?
Look, in Soviet times, it was total control and total repression. Therefore, the level of repressiveness one was accustomed to was stable, high, and unconditional. Today, after all, a generation has come into life that did not know all this. Therefore, this new wave of enforcement of fines, arrests, the closing of information channels produces a real shock. But in terms of scale and intensity, of course, this cannot be compared with what it was in Soviet times.
Are you afraid to do your work now?
No, we are not afraid, but there are external restrictions associated with our status as a “foreign agent.” [Levada was designated a “foreign agent” under Russian laws in 2016] First of all, these are financial restrictions, not restrictions on the topics of our surveys or the organization of surveys. I will say, however, that we decided not to publish the latest polls [on Russian support for the war] so as not to legitimize this war. I think that, when the acute phase of this crisis is over, we will publish both the analysis and the data themselves.
Years ago you and Yuri Levada, the founder of the Levada Center, coined the idea of the “Soviet Man”, who lived with a double consciousness, adapting himself to totalitarian structures of life. Can we speak about a “Putin Man” today?
No, this is still a continuation of the same type of person created by totalitarian (Soviet) institutions. Despite the fact that the communist system itself collapsed, many totalitarian-type institutions remained: the powers of the political police, a vertical of power that is not controlled by society, a court system completely dependent on the presidential administration, and so on.
Young people are more unconditionally tolerant, more pro-Western oriented people. They would like a democratic system in Russia, but what do the existing institutions do to them? When a person, regardless of what beliefs he had in his youth, begins to enter adulthood, he begins to work, start a family, becomes a part of the environment around him, he willy-nilly begins to accept those rules of behavior that apply to the elders. This forces him to demonstrate ostentatious loyalty to the state even while maintaining both his thoughts and his distrust and his sense of endless violence from the state and its lies. As we say in Russian, "he who lives among wolves learns to howl like them."
Russia's Future: Discontent, Economic Paralysis, End of Putin's System | Lev Gudkov | GZERO Mediayoutu.be
You are often accused of being a pessimist. What do you expect in Russia's future?
That depends on what the timeframe is. In the next two years, there will definitely be a sharp deterioration in the economic situation, a sharp tightening of the repressive regime, of course. Most likely, we will be dealing with the failure of the military operation and the war in Ukraine, and there may be a split in Putin's inner circle.
But the split, like all conspiracies, will be hidden. We can only judge the existence of tensions and conflicts, but not the conspiracies themselves. I think that this will lead to a strong increase in discontent, paralysis in the economy and, further, the beginning of the collapse of the system that Putin built.
But don’t assume that this will be a quick process. The inertia of this regime is quite large, and a lot depends on the position of Western countries and how rigidly and consistently they act [towards Russia.]
And will “Soviet Man” outlive that collapse of the system that Putin has built?
I think that for the next two generations at least he will survive. That is, these mechanisms of adaptation to power will survive – the hypocrisy, the fear, the anxiety, the imperial values and ideas, and so on. Because so far, it is precisely because of the castration of intellectual and cultural elites that no new ideas have arisen. This is the problem.
What is the thing that Western observers get most wrong about Russia?
Well, for a long time it seems to me that the concept of “democratic transition” dominated. It was clearly not so much a description of reality as a recommendation of what needs to be done, and thus wishful thinking was passed off as a real misunderstanding of how stable or inertial the existing structures of the Soviet type are.
Once again, I repeat: the Soviet system collapsed, but some of the institutions remained unreformed or unchanged: the power structures, the army, the political police, and so on. And the inertia of these structures was not taken into account by Western politicians. This seems to me to be a very big mistake.
This interview was translated from the Russian and edited for clarity.
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