Aug.14

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

Seven Dynamics That Should Have the Trump Campaign Worried

It's been a bad month for the Trump campaign. And, as a result of everything that's happened, some trends have emerged that are not good signs for the former president. Here are some things that his campaign leadership, in particular, should be very nervous about:

1. Trump Gone Wild: Donald Trump has been fanatical about winning in each of this three presidential campaigns. But he's particularly fanatical this time around, because winning isn't just a matter of being a winner or a loser, it's also very closely tied to his legal problems (or lack thereof) and his finances (which are very much reliant on the value of Trump Media stock).
   
   There are at least two other dynamics worth noting here. The first is that whatever cognitive or psychological conditions he might have, they are clearly getting worse. He's less focused, more prone to random outbursts, more unhinged than he has ever been. It is entirely plausible that the assassination attempt has hastened this process.
   
   The second dynamic is that he appears to be in the position of coming from ahead to lose. To explain what we mean, consider a basketball game. If a team begins the fourth quarter trailing 80-60, and they outscore their opponent by 16 points (say, 36-20), they will lose by 4 (100-96). If a team begins the fourth quarter leading 80-60, and they are outscored by 24 points (say, 40-16), they will lose by 4 (100-96). Same final score, same margin of defeat, but sports psychologists have demonstrated many times that the second loss is a lot harder to bear. It's one thing if you never really thought you could win; it's much worse if you thought you had the win safely in hand, and then it slipped away. Trump thought he had Biden beaten, and now everything has changed.
   
   The upshot is that Trump might very well be in as psychologically delicate a position as he has ever experienced. And, as is invariably the case with him, he is now operating on instinct and on id. This is problematic for Trump '24 in a number of ways. Most obviously, it means that he's talking about the things that anger and upset him (and that anger and upset much of his base), but that don't resonate with the swing voters he needs. To be more specific, he's focusing on Kamala Harris' race and gender, and on the "stolen" election of 2020, and on how stupid Joe Biden allegedly is, and is not talking enough about things where he might make up ground on his Democratic opponent, like the border and the economy. All sorts of Trump-friendly people are begging him to stop with the personal attacks and to focus on the issues, including Frank Luntz, Kellyanne Conway, Peter Navarro, Kevin McCarthy and pretty much everyone at Fox. But, thus far, he just can't do it.
   
   Another problem with unhinged Trump is that he tends to do, well, weird things that are off-putting to voters. To take an example from just this week, he sued the Department of Justice for $100 million, claiming that the warrant-supported raid on Mar-a-Lago was "illegal political persecution." Nutty lawsuits are rarely a good look for a political candidate.
   
   To take another example from this week, Trump managed to come up with something that never even occurred to us. We've written a number of items about AI, and even put together a quiz in which we invited readers to guess which images were and were not AI-generated. Our concern was, and is, using AI to create fake images, video, sound, etc. that appear real. Trump's new innovation is to flip the script, and to use the existence of AI to make the claim that real images, video, sound, etc. are actually fakes created by AI. Specifically, Kamala Harris' plane landed in Detroit, and was greeted by a huge crowd. Trump hates that his opponent might draw crowds as large as, or larger than, his. It's doubly offensive to him that it would happen at an airport (as opposed to a formal rally). So, he quickly embraced a conspiracy theory that there was no crowd, and that it was AI-generated. Needless to say, there are literally thousands of people who were there in person, and who say otherwise. And this kind of kookiness just is not helpful for a campaign. Put it this way: Do you want someone whose sense of reality is so... subjective to have their finger on the nuclear launch button?
   
   Those are the things that unhinged Trump is already doing. There are at least two other things that are becoming increasingly likely. The first is that his instinct is to use slurs to refer to Harris. We are not sure which would be more damaging, a slur based on gender, or one based on race, but he's edging closer and closer to doing either (or both) publicly. He's taken to calling her a "bi**h" in private conversations; how long until one of those slips out in public? And at least one of his affiliated websites issued forth with a racist bullhorn yesterday (thanks to reader J.P. in Glenside, PA, for the heads up):
   
   
   
   These things make Trump feel better about his lot in life, but they do not help his electability.
   
   Another thing that makes him feel better, and that hasn't happened yet, but that his staff should be nervous about, is scapegoating one or more people. Remember Trump's 2016 campaign, and the constant churn of high-ranking campaign officials? It would not be a surprise at all if the heads of one or more prominent members of Trump's 2024 campaign roll in the next couple of weeks. Chris LaCivita? Susie Wiles? J.D. Vance? Project 2025 creator Paul Dans was already thrown under the bus, of course, and it didn't do any good at all.
   
   
2. The Act Has Grown Stale: We have been making this observation for at least 7 years. Trump's career as a reality star, which made possible his career as a politician, went into decline because eventually he ran out of gimmicks. His show got boring, and the ratings went downhill.
   
   It was inevitable that this would eventually happen in his political career, and now it has. He and his team have not been able to come up with much of anything to hit Kamala Harris with. And so, he's just re-using the same things he used against Joe Biden in 2020, and that he was going to use against Biden in 2024. You should really watch this supercut from Jon Stewart's monologue on The Daily Show this week:
   
   
   
   The relevant portion (from 12:15 to 13:00) is less than a minute, so it won't take much time. It's almost eerie how Trump uses not only the same words for Biden and Harris, but also the same body language.
   
   
3. Messaging: While the Trump/Vance messaging is not landing, at least in part because it's old and stale, the Harris/Walz messaging actually IS landing. The latest poll from Semafor puts a particularly fine point on it. They asked, in particular, about what words best describe J.D. Vance. And the top three choices were "conservative," "anti-woman," and "weird," which outpaced "young," "smart," and "businessman." Clearly, the Democrats are winning in the battle to define him.
   
   
4. Vance Can't Dance: Speaking of Vance, he's currently the face of the Trump/Vance campaign because Trump is holed up at Mar-a-Lago. And, in short, he's not very good at the job. Part of it is that he's just generally off-putting. But part of it is that he doesn't deal well with tough questions. For example, Dana Bash asked Vance "Do you believe Kamala Harris is Black?" And Vance replied:

   I believe that Kamala Harris is whatever she says she is. But I believe, importantly, that President Trump is right that she's a chameleon. She pretends to be one thing in front of one audience. She pretends to be something different in front of another audience.

   That's not a very compelling answer coming from someone who is a hillbilly, a Yale-educated lawyer, a Marine, a tech bro, a U.S. Senator, and/or a Christian nationalist as events warrant. To give another example, ABC's Jon Karl asked about claims made by Trump that Tim Walz signed a law that lets the state kidnap children and change their gender without parents' approval. Vance tried to defend Trump, answering:

   What President Trump said, Jon, is that Tim Walz has supported taking children from their parents if the parents don't consent to gender reassignment. That is crazy. And by the way, Tim Walz gets on his high horse about mind your own damn business. One way of minding your own damn business, Jon, is to not try to take my children away from me if I have different moral views than you.

   Karl responded to this by remarking that the claim is clearly a lie, and that to say otherwise is crazy. And Vance said that, as far as he was concerned, what he described is "kidnapping."
   
   Incidentally, in case you are wondering what the truth is here, Walz signed an executive order prohibiting anyone from being extradited from Minnesota based on the claim that they sought gender-affirming care. He also signed a law in which the state granted its courts jurisdiction to rule in custody disputes, including disputes about gender-affirming care, when the child and one parent are resident in Minnesota and the other parent is not. None of this is in the same ZIP Code as kidnapping and forced reassignment.
   
   We do not know why Vance keeps making headlines with his clumsy answers. One possibility is that "Vance is a terrible running mate" is a dominant story right now, and so anything he does that fits in with that gets attention. A second possibility is that he subjects himself to a lot more interviews from non-right-wing journalists than Trump does, and so gets a lot more tough questions. A third possibility is that Trump believes his lies, whereas Vance doesn't, and it shows. There are undoubtedly other possibilities as well but, whatever is going on, Vance is not doing a great job as face of the campaign.
   
   
5. Change: Under normal circumstances, the sitting VP should be the "continuity" candidate and the major-party challenger should be the "change" candidate. And change is very often a winner; three of the past four presidential elections went to the "change" candidate. This election, needless to say, is not a normal presidential election. For most of the cycle, both candidates were presidents and both were in the neighborhood of 80 years old. So, when Harris replaced Biden, SHE became the "change" candidate. Maybe that won't last, since she is the sitting VP, after all. But that's what she is right now.
   
   
6. Because I'm Happy: On a related point, and we have written this many times as well, running a political campaign based on anger and resentment often works well in the short-term, but it always, always, always proves to be non-viable in the long-term. You can only keep people angry and resentful for so long.
   
   Donald Trump's 2016 campaign was built on a mix of optimism (e.g., Make America Great Again) and negativity (e.g., Build the Wall) and he won. His 2020 campaign was mostly negativity, and he lost. In 2024, and particularly in the last month, he's all-in on the negativity again. Meanwhile, Harris is focusing mostly on positivity and forward progress, including her slogan "We're not going back." Oh, and she's also got a jolly running mate, Tim Walz, who might be the most upbeat member of a major-party ticket since Hubert "The Happy Warrior" Humphrey (it must be something in the water in Minnesota). Happy is usually more effective than Angry, especially when voters are weary of years and years of Angry.
   
   
7. What Polls?: This one has got to have Trump's advisors turning to their industrial-sized bottles of Pepto Bismol. Over the weekend, Trump sent this message on his $23.98-a-share social media site:

   I'm doing really well in the Presidential Race, leading in almost all of the REAL Polls, and this despite the Democrats unprecedentedly changing their Primary Winning Candidate, Sleepy Joe Biden, midstream, with a Candidate, Kamala Harris, who failed to get even a single Primary Vote, and was the first out of 15 Democrat Candidates to quit the race. I did great in 2016, and WON, did much better in 2020, getting many millions more votes than '16, but this, 2024, is thus far my best Campaign, the most enthusiasm and spirit, etc. My team is doing a great job despite the constant 8 year obstacle of dealing with the Fake News and low self esteem leakers. We are going to WIN BIG and take our Country back from the Radical Left Losers, Fascists, and Communists. We will, very quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

   If Trump is getting to a place where he only believes the "REAL" polls (i.e., the ones that have good news), that is not a good thing for his campaign, because they'll have no good way to show him he's got to do something different.

Since there's never been an election like this, we just don't know what the shelf life of these dynamics is. Maybe a month from now, we'll be writing "Yikes! What a bad month for Harris!" pieces, just like everyone is writing about Trump right now. That said, we tend to doubt it. EVERYTHING is coming up roses for Harris/Walz right now, and THAT probably can't last. But for a lot of the things here, it's somewhat tough to see how they might change, especially with all the good news from the DNC next week. (Z)