Firehouse Strategies:
As President Trump approaches 100 days in office, we took a closer look at voter sentiment in 4 swing states that Obama carried in 2012 and Trump carried in 2016: Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. There has been a lot of media coverage surrounding Trump’s false claims and stalled legislative agenda. We wanted to use data to dig deeper and learn what is really driving voters’ opinions.
We partnered with the super sharp data analytics team at 0ptimus to do a nice big segment read of likely midterm voters. We interviewed 3,491 likely midterm voters in Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, with a special interest in Trump’s honesty, the potential government shutdown, and how voters will respond in 2018 if Trump fails to deliver on his big promises.
Key findings:
- The vast majority (80%) believes Trump lies or exaggerates the truth — but even more voters (84%) think the same of Republican members of Congress. Notably, more Republicans and independent voters believe Trump never lies (26%) than believe Congressional Republicans never lie (21.5%).
- KEY POINT: Yes, voters think Trump is dishonest, but he’s not worse than other politicians. (Fig. 1)
- A majority of independents believe that Trump either never lies (17.3%) or that he only “exaggerates with good intent.” (34.1%) Among Republicans those numbers are even higher: 31.3% say he never lies and 51.6% believe he exaggerates only with good intent.
- KEY POINT: Voters know he’s often not telling the truth but a majority don’t care. (Fig. 1)
