You post a survey showing how 'independents' favour Trump for President.
Well done for your Fox News headline paste.... but lets break this down.
Trump has never won a popular vote and got smashed by Biden in the popular vote in 2020 (i.e. independent voters intention is less important than Democrat voters being motivated to get out and prevent Trump from winning).
2020 election showed their are more Democrat voters than Trumpy voters (as did 2016) and that their are a nice little chunk of Republicans that are "never Trumpies" (the cherry on top in 2020).
Then we have independent voters worth under the EC system.
The State vote is mainly single-winner plurality voting (i.e. each voter is allowed to vote for only one candidate)and the winner of the election is the candidate who received more votes than any other candidate (i.e. independent voters rarely count except for taking votes away from someone).
As you point out, most of the independent voters (approx 8% of all voters) support Trump for President over Harris.
But a chunk of these will support the man below over both Trump and Harris.
Polling is showing Republican voters viewed him much more favorably (40 percent positive, 15 percent negative) than Democratic voters (16 percent positive, 53 percent negative), mainly because his anti vax and anti immigration stances.
Makes sense then that his support is more likely to be from Republican leaning voters and given single-winner plurality voting - guess who he shafts?
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