Conservative details 4 main reasons Trump is losing — and they have nothing to do with Brad Parscale
16 July 2020
President Donald Trump announced that he was changing campaign managers on Thursday evening, but many consider the move to be nothing more than changing chefs while the cruise ship is on fire.
Writing for the Washington Post on Thursday, conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin explained that there are four major reasons that Trump is losing and it has nothing to do with his campaign manager.
First, Rubin explained that Trump has lost white women. Pollsters have noted the shift over the past several weeks, linking the fall to “his treatment of women and children at the border to his incendiary language to his lack of concern for the health of schoolchildren returning in the fall.” The general lack of empathy is something Trump’s niece, Dr. Mary Trump, has written about in her recently released book in which she diagnoses the president with narcissism and sociopathy. By contrast, Trump’s opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, is known for his care and empathy of others.
Biden leads Trump 59-31 among all women and 55-38 among white women.
Her second point was that Trump has lost older voters. Republicans flooding the airwaves of Fox News demanding that anyone over 65-years-old sacrifice their lives to the coronavirus so Trump can reopen the country and get the economy back up and running to save his presidential chances. Trump won this demographic by 9 points in 2016, but now he’s losing them by 14 points.
“Because these voters (like women) tend to turn out in greater numbers than other segments of the electorate, this is particularly bad news for Trump, especially in states with large numbers of seniors and surging coronavirus cases (e.g., Florida and Arizona),” Rubin explained.
Another group Trump is losing ground with is white non-college-educated voters. This demographic was Trump’s bread and butter in 2016, but in 2020 it’s slowly turned into soggy toast. He won the group by a whopping 36 points in 2016 and while he’s still winning the demographic, he’s doing it with just 13 points, losing enough ground with them that it will help Biden in close swing states.
“It may be that many of these voters are now suffering badly due to the economy, they resent him trying to take away health care or they are turned off by Trump’s racist appeals,” wrote Rubin. “They may have voted for him because he would shake things up or because they disliked Clinton more or because they thought his skills as a businessman would serve him well. Whatever the explanation, that critical group is falling away from Trump, and hugging the Confederate flag and bullying schools to reopen is not helping.”
Finally, Rubin explained that in swing states, Trump has dropped like a cartoon character falling off a cliff. States like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida picked Trump by a narrow margin in 2016, but now he’s losing by an even larger margin than he is nationally (12 points).
“Of the 11 battleground states the NBC-WSJ poll surveyed (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), Trump won six in 2016. A 12-point overall deficit in these states suggests he will do much worse in 2020,” said Rubin.
There has been a price for Trump appealing to the “far-right, white, evangelical and mostly male base.” It has ultimately “alienated everyone else,” Rubin closed.
“Even within core groups, he is not doing as well as he did in 2016. Lo and behold, the NBC-WSJ poll found that 50 percent of all voters say there is no chance they’d vote for him, while 52 percent say they’d be ‘very uncomfortable,'” she wrote. “Biden’s figures are both under 40 percent. If you cannot hold or expand your base and you enrage everyone else, chances are you will lose.”
As Republican strategist Amanda Carpenter said Wednesday evening, it isn’t the campaign manager that is the problem, it’s the candidate.