Donald Trump is Too Online
And the polls prove it.
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A programming note: I’ll be out with another edition for Election Day tomorrow morning.
First, here’s where we stand with one (1) day to Election Day:
National poll averages: Biden +8.3 (via 538) (-0.2 from last week)
Florida: Biden +2.3 (+0.5)
Pennsylvania: Biden +4.8 (-0.4)
Michigan: Biden +8 (no change)
Wisconsin: Biden +8.2 (-0.7)
Arizona: Biden +2.6 (-0.2)
Georgia: Biden +1.3 (-0.5)
North Carolina: Biden +1.9 (no change)
Texas: Trump +1 (-0.5)
Ohio: Trump +0.8 (-0.8)
And now, some final pre-election analysis.
For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about this tweet from the summer:
Note the June 26 timestamp. Fast forward to October 14, with just fewer than three weeks to Election Day, as President Donald Trump riled up a rally crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, and that parody tweet became real life.
“Did you hear the news?” the president said. “Bruce Ohr is finally out of the Department of Justice!”
If you haven’t heard the name Bruce Ohr, you are not alone. (Sadly, it doesn’t appear that any firm has done polling on Ohr’s favorability.) I consider myself at least Pretty Online when it comes to politics, and I barely know who Bruce Ohr is.
I bring this up because as we head into Election Day with the president significantly trailing his opponent, Joe Biden, it has become clear that Trump’s campaign has been way Too Online, detached from issues that matter to most Americans—or even standing in outright opposition to the popular view.
This is a pretty massive shift from 2016, when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign was very reactive to Twitter and online culture. If, as looks likely, Biden prevails on Election Day (or over the subsequent few days), a major reason will be that he and his campaign used online culture to their advantage while being a candidate for average people, while the sitting president spent days and weeks talking about things like statues and the 1619 Project.
Bruce Ohr might be a throwaway line at a rally, but it’s also a microcosm. From Bruce Ohr and the entire Russia investigation to insane conspiracies about Seal Team Six and, yes, even Hunter Biden in the waning days, the president is now more than ever talking to an extremely small subset of people.
COVID, COVID, COVID
Sarah Longwell is a Republican political strategist who founded the group Republican Voters Against Trump. As part of her work, she regularly conducts focus groups with 2016 Trump voters—in 2020, she has focused those groups on women in swing states.
Longwell says almost all of these voters are part of the 78% of Americans who do not use Twitter.
“They don’t watch cable news,” Longwell told me recently of these voters. “They don’t watch a lot of news, period. They want to know what’s going to get done about healthcare and what’s going to get done to improve their lives. They just don’t hear that.”
Let’s focus on one issue a lot of Americans still care about: the coronavirus. It’s really important, because in many ways, it tells the entire story of the campaign. For most of the last two years—and, really, most of his presidency—Trump’s approval rating has ranged somewhere between 39 and 44 in the FiveThirtyEight average. His disapproval rating average has hovered above 50 since the third month of his presidency. There has been one notable exception to each.
That was in March, when the pandemic first began ravaging the United States. In the average, Trump’s approval rating shot up to nearly 46 percent, while fewer than 50 percent disapproved. It was the beginning of what at least looked like a “rally around the flag” effect, and it’s effectively been proven in almost every other country.
In August, the Pew Research Center did a global survey to measure how respondents in different countries felt about their own country’s response to the pandemic. Only two out of 14 countries’ respondents felt their country had done more of a bad job than a good job: the US and United Kingdom. Respondents in the US were also the only country to say the pandemic had divided them, rather than united them.
Across the world and even the US, leaders who managed even an adequate response to the pandemic have reaped political benefits. A few weeks ago In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s party romped to a landslide election victory. In the US, governors of both parties who eschewed Trump and imposed stricter containment measures—like Ohio Republican Mike DeWine and Michigan Democrat Gretchen Whitmer—saw their approval ratings surge.
With time, as more Americans reacted to what they saw in the president’s mismanagement of the pandemic, his approval fell back to its typical levels. But it’s not hard to imagine a world in which a president who oversaw even a semi-decent pandemic response would be in much better position to claim a second term.
Longwell asks the same opening question to each of her focus groups: How do you think things are going in the country? In 2020, one word has become most prominent in the lexicon: The country, Longwell credits at least one person with saying every time, is a “shitshow.” Longwell thinks that if Trump had taken the pandemic seriously, we would be having a very different conversation today about his chances.
“People are so fair-minded,” she told me. “COVID was going to be hard for anybody to handle. But as it drags on, they’ve grown increasingly frustrated that more hasn’t been done. They know other countries have been able to get it under control.”
The Not Online candidate
Donald Trump has always, and always will be, Extremely Online.
But even though I quibble with portions of this narrative, it is clear that Trump benefited from the contrast between candidates in 2016. Even though he was Online, a lot of what he talked about was not. My former colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty laid this out well in a recent piece titled “The Missing Populist” over at National Review:
Trump’s slogan, his policies, and his rhetoric about the “forgotten man” and “American carnage” all helped him connect with an independent type of voter who doesn’t like a GOP that seems too dominated by politicians who are comfortable in loafers and seersucker in the summer. Trump talked compassionately and forcefully about drugs in American communities, blending it with his message of economic and cultural populism. Voters rewarded him for it. If Trump loses this race, it will be because he was too self-obsessed and forgot the forgotten man that he campaigned for in 2016.
On the other hand, it is worth noting that Joe Biden is perhaps the most Not Online candidate Democrats could have nominated. It’s not necessarily because of that, but more people just like him, including in that group of independent voters.
Will Jordan, a Democratic pollster at the firm Global Strategy Group, has noted the unique trend of how Biden has seemed to get more popular as the campaign has progressed.
“With Clinton, the attacks were fundamentally about her character … and specifically her honesty and trustworthiness,” Jordan told me by email.
“For Biden, the Republicans have seemed much less interested in character attacks—it could be they found they didn’t resonate, but that only compounds the dynamic—and their focus on his mental acuity and willingness to do what other more nefarious Democrats wanted him to do actually leaves voters a lot of room to think he is a decent man even if they don’t support him.”
Trump is not only deeply unpopular personally, but also touting unpopular issues and/or policy proposals. Let’s bring it back to the coronavirus and how it has hit people’s economic situation. Last month, there was a lot of back and forth over a new stimulus proposal. Spending is an area on which Trump has broken from his 2016 campaign promises, as his instincts about what’s popular have proven correct.
But on the spending proposal, he was all over the place. First he wavered, abruptly cutting off talks with Democrats. Then he caved, and then he demanded even more money than Republicans (or even Democrats) had put on the table. But as many smart people have pointed out, there’s no reason he shouldn’t have been leading talks on such a proposal over the summer. Indeed, according to a recent New York Times poll, 72 percent of respondents favored a new $2 trillion stimulus package.
Moreover, Biden’s preferred policies are striking a chord with the majority of Americans. For instance, 67 percent of people favored a public health insurance option, a policy Biden has championed, while 66 percent back his climate plan. A majority also favor the Affordable Care Act, the law that Trump prefers the Supreme Court eliminates.
I haven’t seen Trump bring up Bruce Ohr again, but he did spend part of his penultimate day on the campaign trail tweeting about critical race theory.
Thanks for reading Margin of Error. If you have any tips, comments, or insights about polling, email me at bplogiurato@gmail.com, or find me on Twitter @BrettLoGiurato.
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