WATCH: CNN Data Expert Says Americans Don’t Care About J6, Stuns Host
For all the huffing and puffing about the four-year anniversary of J6, American’s don’t seem to care all that much, one CNN data analyst told his stunned colleague on Monday.
Nearly every liberal politician and media figure weighed in on Monday, applauding Vice President Kamala Harris for certifying her own loss in front of a bemused House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). “They get to applaud. We had to evacuate,” Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) said after President-elect Donald Trump’s election had been certified. However, Democrats’ focus on Trump’s supposed threat to democracy rang hollow for a majority of American voters, CNN’s Harry Enten explained.
Four years ago, 56% of Americans believed that Trump should be ineligible for the presidency due to his role in the January 6th, 2021, breach at the Capitol. But from 2023 to 2024, that number fell to an average of 47%. “Part of the reason” why Trump won, Enten observed, was that “views on January 2021 have completely shifted.” The drop in nine points was “all the difference in the world, going from a majority to short of a majority. And of course, Donald Trump won the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of the other 53% who did not believe his role on January 6th would make him ineligible for the presidency.”
Beneath the topline result, the share of Americans who blame Trump most for J6 has fallen greatly. Even in January 2021, fewer than half of Americans polled considered the former president “greatly responsible” for the violence that occurred that day; by December 2023, that figure was just 37%, according to Enten. “But it’s not just that,” he continued, “it’s that people, simply put, didn’t care as much about the attack on the Capitol.”
He then showed a startling poll result: just 5% of all voters remember J6 as the defining moment of Trump’s presidency. Just 2% of Republicans feel the same. “As [J6] went into the rearview mirror, far fewer folks thought it was their number one memory,” Enten said.
WATCH:
As host John Berman notes in the clip, President Joe Biden spent an exceptional amount of his campaign attempting to position his opponent as an existential threat to American norms and institutions, a belief that wasn’t widely shared among the electorate. It was only after Trump won 314 electoral votes and became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years that Democrats began to reflect on their messaging. Far-left outlets like Jacobin rushed to excuse Vice President Kamala Harris’s central theme as “far out of touch” with the economic needs of Americans who experience daily pain at gas pumps and grocery stores.
With less than two weeks before Trump is sworn in, the Republican leader has made clear that he plans to offer pardons to a vast majority of those convicted for illegally entering the Capitol building that day. Sentences have ranged from months to years for various nonviolent offenses, and fellow America First politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have expended political capital seeking their freedom or pardoning after serving their time. In December, more than 100 defendants filed a $50 billion lawsuit against the Justice Department seeking restitution for what they allege is a politically motivated persecution by federal authorities.