As the rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump draws nearer, political professionals are detecting an unusual concern among some undecided voters: that if Trump returns to the White House, he’ll refuse to step down when his term is up.
Seiji Carpenter, vice president at David Binder Research, noticed this fear in early April while conducting focus groups of people who had voted for Biden in 2020 but became disillusioned and were considering switching sides. “We were talking to Latino men and Asian American-Pacific Islander women in battleground states,” Carpenter recalls, “and they went straight to the issue of, what if Trump won’t give up power?”