Politicians who are behind in the polls frequently try to change the subject. Sometimes they say the polls shouldn’t be believed, and other times they say they have unpublished internal polling that looks much better for them. But a well-financed campaign should know where they actually stand with the voters. A presidential campaign should not only know if they’re winning or losing, but which issues are helping or hurting them.
For example, the Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday shows Trump trailing Joe Biden 40 percent to 47 percent. Trump is losing in part because 78 percent of voters are concerned about COVID-19, and 60 percent assign blame to Trump for both the high death count and the school and business closures.
Meanwhile, fewer than one in ten survey respondents listed crime as their top priority, and “62% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans, said crime was not increasing in their communities.” A small majority (53 percent) is sympathetic to protests for racial justice, including calls for fairer treatment of minorities by the police. This also holds true in the suburbs:
While support for the protesters has declined overall since the immediate aftermath of the police killing in May of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which sparked a national conversation on race, the poll showed more than half of suburban Americans and more than half of undecided registered voters are still sympathetic to them.
The Trump strategy flies in the face of these numbers. He constantly dismisses people’s concerns about the novel coronavirus and instead focuses on the traditional suburban aversion to urban crime and disorder. He demonizes protests that the people narrowly support, argues that the economy is actually good when millions of people are out of work and small businesses are going bankrupt every day; and he has almost nothing to say about health care, which is listed in the Reuters/Ipsos poll as people’s number one issue.
To be fair, the Trump campaign seeks to move these numbers. They want to make people focus on crime instead of police shootings. They want to drive a wedge between the Democrats’ suburban and urban supporters. They want to convince people that the economy was great before the COVID-19 outbreak and that the president is best positioned to help it recover.
However, as things stand, they’re just reinforcing issues where they have a disadvantage. When he talks about crime, he’s not talking about an issue at the top of people’s minds. When he talks about protestors, he’s attacking people who have the public’s sympathy. When he downplays the impact of the global pandemic, he reminds people why they blame him for school closures and persistent unemployment.
The campaign has to know that this isn’t a winning strategy and that voters are not responding, but they can’t convince Trump to adopt a strategy that meets his actual weaknesses or that effectively exploits Biden’s soft spots.
Trump appears to be running the campaign he wants to run, without much concern for whether it has a good prospect for success. Maybe this is because Trump is crazy, or maybe he’s not capable of anything else. Personally, I believe the explanation is simpler. Trump is running a white nationalist campaign because he’s a white nationalist. He wants to inflame racial feeling, on the theory that whites are still a majority in this country and will eventually rally to their own defense if they feel sufficiently threatened. He think this will win him reelection, but more importantly, this is his true purpose for being president in the first place. If he doesn’t try, it’s not worth having the position anyway. His ambition is to roll back nonwhite immigration, whether legal or not, with the purpose of enhancing and preserving white power.
So, the president doesn’t have internal polling that shows his strategy is working. He’s not poll-driven but goal-oriented. Fortunately, so far there is no majority supportive of his goals.
There is another possible, more sinister, explanation. Trump’s strategy doesn’t make sense if he wants to win a fair election. But it makes perfect sense if he wants to install himself as an autocrat. To survive as an autocrat, you don’t need the support of the majority of the population. All you need is the support of a large enough minority to make it impossible for the people as a whole to unite in opposition against you.
Too pessimistic? Maybe. But I think we can be certain that if there is anything Trump can do to stay in office, he will do so. After all, he has a strong motivation–the alternative for him is (most likely) prison. Ask yourself: what do you expect to happen on election night? Right now, most republicans are planning to vote in person, while most democrats are planning to vote by mail. So on election night, what do the tallies look like? They look like a massive Trump victory. And what does Trump do then? He’s already told us (and we saw a precursor in Florida in 2018)–he declares victory and declares any results from the mail-in votes to be the result of massive fraud. What does the republican party do? They all get behind him–after all, the “red mirage” promises them victory in the House and Senate. How does this get resolved? Bush vs. Gore 2 if we are lucky. Civil War 2 if we are not.
In many of the states that count, aren’t the governor’s Democrats? Surely they are the ones responsible for the tally and they aren’t going to roll over …
Yeah, I think Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, all have Democratic governors. Moreover, I think they all have Democratic secretaries of State who actually run the elections. The Republican always try to overrule them by going to the Supreme Court but I doubt that would work. So at least this gives me some solace.
Trump is not a politician and he’s never succeeded through traditional political methods – eg tailoring his message to the polls. What’s always worked for him? The methods of the huckster and the mobster. There has never been a president like Trump, why would he start to act like the candidates he has trounced up to now?
I think this gives him too much credit. The position is worth having because he likely understands it is the only thing that will keep him out of jail. Cletus and the rest of the grifters in the gallery are not going to get amped up over health care and infrastructure like they do when demonising minorities and beating up the media, so campaign rallies wouldn’t be fun anymore and what would be the point?
I also suspect that he doesn’t care about the polls because he is going to claim victory regardless of the outcome. If he loses and it’s close it’s because of fraud, and if he loses in a landslide that’s just evidence of more fraud.
Hate to be so pessimistic but I don’t think we are ready for how bad things are going to get.
I think its partially this and partially that he recognizes that he may very well lose. So he going to fan the flames of potential violence so that an incoming administration has no choice but to grant him blanket immunity from prosecution. Once received, he’ll tell his followers that the election was legitimate and for the good of the country he must step aside.
Trump didn’t win with a national majority position. He didn’t need to.
He won by going after rust belt high-white population states. Trump doesn’t care about winning California or Virginia. He cares about winning Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. And those are the only states that matter.
Vote in-person, early if you are able. Believing that Red state Governors and SoSs won’t be throwing every mail-in ballot away that they can is hilariously naive.
Somewhere recently I either read, or maybe just heard it while some news show was on as background noise, that there was data suggesting that in person voting (using Wisconsin’s primary election during the early days of the pandemic as a case study) appeared to be low risk as far as contracting the novel coronavirus. So yeah, I’ll concur. Vote in-person and vote early. I’ve got my calendar marked.
I think it’s simply his best chance at this point. He won last time with the same strategy even when the polls made clear he was losing. Going to a new strategy won’t be effective. It’s too late for that. I think if he had changed strategies right after the election and reached across to Democrats to cut deals while threatening to throw Republicans to the wolves if they didn’t stand down, he’d be riding to victory on the crest of a huge wave. If he had strengthened Obamacare, cut deals on things like infrastructure, etc. Heck, he probably could have traded with Democrats and gotten a deal to restrict immigration.
That was 3 1/2 years ago. Now if he tried to become someone else, he’d lose his supporters without winning very many over. So he’ll double down on what worked before and do everything in his power to suppress the vote.
I admit I also thought the opportunity was there for Trump to ride a populism wave. But then the insanity started almost instantly with the inauguration crowd lies and it has been non-stop since then. He showed us who he was, literally on day one – a delusional lying racist moron.
I wonder if it as simple – he sure likes doing business in India and China (more of a love hate relationship there – but he manufactures his ties, Ivanka got many favors, etc.), and for that matter even in the Gulf.
I assume that avowed white supremacists like Stephen Miller would not be caught doing business with any non-white populace countries. But Trump has not been that pure.
Perhaps he compartmentalizes – for US politics he can only behave one way. For business outside, all is fair game?