At a megachurch in Phoenix this week, Donald Trump regaled a crowd of mostly maskless students with a story about the moment he said he knew he would win a second term.
The president explained that he was in the White House recently and passed by a TV screen and saw the words “defund and abolish.”
“What are they going to defund and abolish?” Trump said he asked.
“The police,” he was told.
“Oh, great, I just won the election!”
The data suggest otherwise. In fact, since the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer on May 25 and the rise of protests against police brutality and systemic racism, including activist calls to defund the police, Joe Biden’s average polling lead over Trump has doubled from 5 to 10 points. The day after Trump's Arizona event, The New York Times published a poll showing Trump down by a staggering 14 points.
Trump might be forgiven for his misreading of the political situation. Some of Biden’s advisers had the same initial view of the politics of the protests. Biden’s campaign is led by an older and whiter group of operatives who came of age during a political era when many Democrats saw large-scale protests for racial equality as inherently alienating to many white voters. In some quarters of the party, street protest brought back the traumas of 1968 and Nixon’s 32-state landslide.
“The first thought of someone my age is Nixon and law and order,” said an adviser to Biden, who is white and in his late 60s and admitted concern early on that the protests could benefit Trump. The person was granted anonymity in order to speak candidly. “But as long as we don’t have a reversion to looting and lawlessness, as long as it’s peaceful and about the inequality of society and the treatment of African Americans, this has seen a shift in Biden’s direction—and more than we thought it would be.”
Biden did not endorse the controversial activist slogan, steering clear of Trump’s attacks. On June 10, he wrote an op-ed for USA Today laying out his views on police reform and stated unequivocally, “I do not support defunding police.”
The spasms of vandalism and theft that marked some of the early protests have diminished, replaced by the targeted toppling of statues memorializing the Confederacy. Mitt Romney marched in Washington and said, “Black Lives Matter.” Polls reflected a seismic shift in the electorate’s attitudes: 76 percent of the public say racism and discrimination is a major problem, up from 68 percent in 2016. Seventy-one percent of white people agree. The Black Lives Matter movement now has majority support.
The expected revolt of white suburbanites against the protests hasn’t materialized. Instead, they’ve joined them.
“This is no longer a traditional wedge issue because all of a sudden white Americans, particularly college educated whites, understand that racism is real,” said Cornell Belcher, a veteran Democratic pollster who worked for Barack Obama. “Those white suburban women now understand that they have skin in the racism game as well. And that changes everything.”