Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby. Tonight, some fascinating results from our latest poll in partnership with Echelon Insights, painting the portrait of an electorate that is at once confused, tuned out, and rabidly partisan. President Biden just isn’t reaching voters with the messages—and facts—he wants them to hear. And as for Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, well, it seems the media is far more obsessed with it than voters are…

🚨 A quick programming note: On May 29 in D.C., Puck will host a screening of For Love & Life: No Ordinary Campaign, a film chronicling the life and times of attorney-turned-activist Brian Wallach and his wife, Sandra, in the aftermath of his A.L.S. diagnosis at age 37. Following the screening, our very own Julia Ioffe will interview the filmmaker, Christopher Burke. You can RSVP here.

Now, here’s Abby Livingston with the latest chatter from the Hill…

• The ongoing G.O.P. pilgrimage: House Republicans Andrew Clyde, Mary Miller, and Keith Self made their way to downtown Manhattan on Monday, the latest G.O.P. cohort to venture up from D.C. to demonstrate their fealty to Trump. While these field trips have captured local and national attention, there were no major repercussions to this particular pilgrimage. After all, there are no Monday votes this week, and Tuesday votes are held later in the day. This differs from last Thursday, when a delayed Oversight meeting full of cranky members went completely off the rails.

  Of course, House Republican leadership is constantly navigating its tiny margin, and a handful of House Republicans pulling a Ferris Bueller could disrupt the Capitol this Thursday, which is the next—and probably last—voting period that overlaps with the trial. The potential for chaos is thankfully circumscribed. But one annoyed House Democratic chief of staff braced for the worst and grumbled: “It’s gonna be a shitshow.”

• Trone’s diminishing returns and the Vegas big spenders: The D.C.C.C. once again outraised the N.R.C.C. in April. According to their public announcements, House Democrats have a significant $16 million cash-on-hand advantage as the general election looms. This number is becoming an obsession for House Democrats, who are looking to secure lower TV ad rates by booking early.

  But the Senate numbers are even more astonishing: Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, for example, reserved almost $42 million worth of ads. In 2018, when he was first up for reelection, Brown spent $16.5 million on media. It’s one thing for super PACs to spend this kind of money, but it’s quite another for candidates, who are constrained by donor limits. However, campaigns also don’t have to pay as much for the ads they do buy. Brown, an old school workhorse who remains popular with retirees and rank and file voters, is deploying a substantial portion of his war chest.

  Then there was Congressman David Trone’s decision to light $60 million on fire in his unsuccessful bid to win the Maryland Democratic Senate primary, which raised intriguing questions about the limits of ad spending’s effectiveness. The burgeoning question in some television markets is not how expensive ads will be (they increase in price by the week), but whether there will be any inventory left in a few months. The most overwhelmed market could be Las Vegas, where the presidential race and Jacky Rosen’s reelection are highly competitive, along with three House seats that Republicans are eager to pick up.

To wit: A new poll this week from Puck and Echelon Insights confirms that a lot of voters right now are simply choosing to believe what they want to believe—on issues like crime, the economy, and the legal perils facing Donald Trump. Maybe these voters are underinformed, maybe they have partisan blinders on, or maybe they’re tuned out and are just telling pollsters what they think they want to hear. Whatever the case, a string of recent polls reveals a frustrating gap between perception and reality. It’s a big reason Joe Biden could lose in November.

For instance, likely voters now remember the Trump administration more fondly than they did when he left office. The Echelon poll, which surveyed 1,023 likely voters from May 13-16, found that 49 percent of voters strongly or somewhat approve of how Trump handled his job as president. That means a lot of voters have changed their minds about his presidency in the last three and a half years. Trump was averaging a 38 percent job approval rating when he left office, and never had an approval rating over 45 percent during his actual term.

Another confounding stat: Even though federal and city-level data shows that violent crime has been trending downward across the country since 2022, 59 percent of likely voters—and 52 percent of independents—say violent crime rates are much higher or somewhat higher than they were four years ago. Yes, some cities are exceptions to the downward trend in violence, and some nonviolent crimes like car thefts and property crimes are up, but it’s clear that a majority of Americans believe Trump’s message that “violent crime has skyrocketed in virtually every American city” under Biden’s watch. (My other take here is that Americans are moved more by the scary anecdote—the murder of Laken Riley, or whatever smash-and-grab robbery leads the local news—than they are by egghead arguments over decimal points and data.)

Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan is also a source of confusion for voters. Asked if voters have heard or read anything about Trump’s hush money trial in New York, 85 percent of voters said they had heard “a lot” or “some” news about the case. That’s probably not surprising. According to a quick search of the TV News Archive, the words “Trump” and “Trial” have been mentioned across U.S. television news networks 4,621 times since proceedings began a little over a month ago.

At the same time, most Americans are apparently having a hard time sorting through the noise, a dynamic reminiscent of the Trump presidency, when the constant din of outrage in the media seemed to blur together. Only 45 percent of the voters who had heard at least some news about the trial were able to correctly identify the actual legal charges in the case: falsifying business records. A majority of those voters, instead, said they were uncertain about the specific charges (though 27 percent were at least able to recall that the case had “something to do with an adult film star”) or incorrectly identified them as tax evasion or obstruction of justice.

What’s more, the case appears to be having little effect on their electoral prerogatives. A large majority of voters (72 percent) said the case has done little or nothing to change their opinion of Trump. Among some Trump supporters, though, a guilty verdict could actually serve as a motivator in the election.

Most Trump supporters and voters open to Trump (52 percent) said a conviction in the case that was not accompanied by a prison sentence would not influence their vote—and only 6 percent said it would make them less likely to vote for Trump. That number goes up slightly if Trump is sentenced to prison: 13 percent of Trump supporters said a prison sentence would make them less likely to vote for Trump. But no matter what the sentence is, 34 percent of Trump supporters and voters leaning in his direction said a simple guilty verdict would make them more likely to vote for Trump.

As with crime, it seems that data-driven arguments about positive macroeconomic trends are little match for people’s personal experiences or partisan identity. In an interview on CNN last week, Erin Burnett asked Biden about how he plans to turn around the economy. “We have the strongest economy in the world,” Biden said, veering into typical D.C. speak, pointing to G.D.P. growth, the hot stock market, job creation, and bringing down inflation. Then he pivoted to the “I feel your pain” message voters probably need to hear, saying that Americans have a right to be frustrated about the economy, before mentioning his administration’s efforts to fight junk fees from banks and credit card companies.

Biden himself must be confounded by the mixed data: In the CNN sit-down, he went out of his way to cite polls showing that majorities of Americans feel good about their personal finances even as they express worries about the national economy. That dynamic cuts to perhaps the defining challenge of the Biden presidency: His policies are popular, but the man is not, and he has struggled to communicate his wins to voters.

The Echelon poll asked voters which of Biden’s economic messages they had heard, and which were the most effective. The most resonant was Biden’s record on jobs: “More people are working than at any point in history—and the unemployment rate is at a historically low 3.5 percent.” Most voters said they had heard some version of this message, and 42 percent called it “somewhat” or “very effective.” After that was the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, named by 36 percent of voters as a very or somewhat effective talking point from Biden.

But two of Biden’s biggest accomplishments remain little-known to voters: The bipartisan gun control legislation he signed in 2023 after the Uvalde shooting, and the CHIPS and Science Act to boost manufacturing and semiconductor capacity. About a third of voters said they either hadn’t heard of the bills, or had no opinion about them at all. That’s gotta sting, considering the gun law would almost certainly appeal to younger voters, and the CHIPS bill means good news for manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.

Unfortunately for the president, when voters think about the economy, they keep coming back to inflation. Biden’s most ineffective message? The argument that the Inflation Reduction Act has lived up to its name, lowering the cost of everyday expenses for American families. Almost everyone surveyed had heard of the bill, but 50 percent called Biden’s messaging on inflation ineffective.