In recent focus groups consisting of voters who once supported Donald Trump in Wisconsin and Arizona, majorities supported prosecuting the ex-president in connection to January 6 and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election outcome. In the Wisconsin groups, 10 of 14 voters said Trump should face prosecution. Out of 13 participating Arizona swing voters, 10 also supported prosecuting Trump.
The 14 Wisconsin voters who participated voted for Trump in 2016 but Biden in 2020. Their choices track with their state’s general direction: although Trump eked out a victory in Wisconsin in 2016, Biden was victorious there four years later. Wisconsin was among the states highly contested by Trump and certain allies of his over false election fraud claims, but as elsewhere in the country, that never panned out: Biden’s win was consistently upheld. No evidence subverting it emerged. Most of the participating Wisconsin voters were independents. “Those who thought Trump should face criminal prosecution didn’t relent even when the moderator pushed back and said doing so would be unprecedented, potentially putting future presidents at risk of being prosecuted for political reasons,” Axios summarizes.
Participants who supported prosecuting Trump cited the possibility for it to be a deterrent. Jaime M., a 36-year-old Wisconsin participant, said the events of January 6 were “too extreme, and something needs to be done about it to prevent it from ever happening again.” Not taking such a step “just opens a floodgate for what anybody else is allowed to do,” as that voter summarized it. That “anybody” could include Trump himself: what if he runs for president again and wins, taking the victory as some kind of metaphorical green light to use the powers of the federal government to target and oppress his opponents to a greater extent than previously seen? What if he runs again, loses again, and provokes another attack on the Capitol that reaches an even more devastating level of violence than previously seen?
Most of the participants in the Wisconsin focus groups indicated opposition to the prospect of Biden running again — although he recently helped meet one of some of the voters’ stated priorities, federal gun legislation, with the signing of a bipartisan gun policy reform deal. Wisconsin again rose to the forefront of the national political conversation with the recent decision by the Wisconsin state Supreme Court to block the use of most ballot drop boxes in the state, despite the lack of evidence that such boxes were involved in any systematic fraud issues — which themselves, to be clear, don’t exist in connection to any other source either. Going forward, the Wisconsin Senate race in which Republican Ron Johnson is running for re-election against a soon-to-be determined Democratic challenger (the primary is in early August) will be among those critical to determining control of the Senate. The Cook Political Report calls Johnson’s race a toss-up. Read more at this link.
