How Trump is alienating swing voters

Donald Trump is in a pickle. It doesn’t seem to matter what he does or doesn’t do. According to 538’s national polling average tracker, the former president’s share of the electorate was at 43.5 percent on the day Joe Biden dropped out of the running. Today, in his race against Kamala Harris, his share of the vote is 43.5 percent. All the new movement, as the pollsters say, has been on the Democratic side.

To put this another way, the vice president is the fluid candidate. She can move voters, with good performances and bad. Trump, however, is the static candidate. He can’t move voters at all (perhaps because most Americans have made up their minds). There was no bump after the Republican National Convention. There was no bump after his attempted assassination. There was no bump after Biden became the first incumbent in half a century to decline his party’s nomination.

What can Trump do?

According to Republican strategists and MAGA fans like “Charles in Charge” sitcom actor Scott Baio, the solution is “policy, policy, policy.” “That’s it,” Baio told Fox host Jesse Watters last week. “There’s no name-calling. There’s no making fun of anything. When he gives a speech at these rallies, policy. Period. Once he goes off the rails, it becomes confusing. I wish I could talk to him and say stick to policy.”

Baio is in good company. Former presidential candidate Nikki Haley said the same thing. If Trump has any chance of winning over independent voters, wayward Republicans and even conservative Democrats, he has to stick to policy. He has to talk more about the economy, inflation, immigration and other issues that are typically seen as bipartisan. Otherwise, Haley told Fox host Bret Baier, Trump won’t grow his stagnant voter base, and if he can’t do that, he loses.

“I want this campaign to win, but this campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes,” Nikki Haley said last week. “It’s not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is. It’s not going to win talking about whether she’s dumb. You can’t win on those things. The American people are smart. Treat them like they’re smart.”

I think the fundamentals here are correct. If Trump does not expand his base to include swing voters and at least some Democrats, he’s not going to win by honest means. So advising him to stick to policy is shrewd. The voters Trump needs are prudes. Bragging about crowd sizes, calling Harris dumb and other trash-talk is likely to backfire.

But the choice between policy-talk and trash-talk might be a false one. It’s missing something, namely, it does not matter what he’s talking about, whether policy or trash, because he doesn’t make any sense. The next paragraph is a sampling of Trump’s big “economy speech” in North Carolina last night. In it, he appears to “go off the rails,” as if he can’t help but trash-talk his enemies. That, however, is an interpretation that gives him too much credit. When you read this, resist the temptation to make it make sense. Let it be what it is – total gibberish – to conclude the man is habitually incoherent, so much so that, in practical terms, he’s speaking a language no one understands.

“This isn’t a rally,” he said, “but this is a different type of thing today. We are going to talk about one subject and then we will start going back to the other, because we sort of love that, don’t we? No, it’s important. They say it is the most important subject. I am not sure it is, but they say it is. Inflation is the most important, but that is part of the economy. Kamala Harris wants to be in charge of the entire US economy, but neither she nor her running mate – another beauty, isn’t he? He signed a bill. He wants tampons in boys bathrooms. I don’t think so. But they’ve never held a private sector job … It’s no wonder they are both socialists. They are actually beyond socialists. I think they skipped over socialists. … When people find out who they are, they don’t do well in the election. They have destroyed this country.”

It’s not that he “goes off the rails” and away from policy towards trash. It’s that he “goes off the rails” and away from reality towards la la land. As Scott Baio said, “it becomes confusing,” and guess what? When Trump goes to la la land, he loses swing voters he must have to defeat Kamala Harris by honest means. He doesn’t need to stick to policy.

He needs to stick to coherence – to making sense.

Alienation by gibberish is one of the biggest unexplored facets of the election, but there are signs of it coming to the fore. Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today. He quoted a Republican participant in his latest focus group, who said, “I just feel like we need to take the party back, and it's not going to happen if Trump or another Republican is in office right this second."

She said her reasons for voting for Harris included the fact that JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential pick, is “probably the most unlikable American I can possibly think of to run our country,” that “the RNC looked like a wrestling match,” and that “the debate was a disaster.”

That’s it right there. Think about it. Every time I read about the June 27 debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the assumption is that the event was a disaster for Biden, not Trump. But he was a mess. Now that Biden is out of the picture and the possibility of a second Trump term is clearer in voters’ minds (and Kamala Harris is an appealing alternative), there appears to be room to rethink what happened.

People are ready to admit Trump was a disaster.

Every public event since has made the point – Trump’s habitual incoherence is getting worse, and the worse it gets, the more he alienates voters he must have to break through the ceiling of 43.5 percent of the electorate. His acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, his interview at the meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, his press conference last week at Mar-a-Lago, his “economy speech” last night in North Carolina, and today’s presser at his New Jersey club – all of them featured gibberish so acute that he may as well have been speaking a foreign language.

His trash-talk isn’t alienating swing voters.

His gibberish is.