Donald Trump is not doing anywhere near as well as he should be doing and his campaign knows it. In all presidential elections, the economy is the biggest voting issue. The 2024 election won’t be an exception. With regard to Trump, Americans remember his pre-COVID economy in which there was low inflation, low mortgage rates, and relatively low unemployment. A majority of voters trust Trump on the economy and thus he should be up by 5-10 percentage points.
Yes, that sounds exactly right. Until you remember that this is Donald Trump and he can’t transform great economic polling into great polling numbers because he’s utterly stunned about the change from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris. The economic numbers lay deader than whatever fish goes in a tuna salad. But there are some definable explanations.
On the economy thing? Trump did inherit a shooting economy from Obama (Remember the Great Recession at the very beginning to the end?), the pre-Trump rolling economy is forgotten but is the major reason that Obama went out with a 59% approval rating . So, the public tends to forget Trump had a good economy coming in and a bad one under COVID going out. Given they only remember the Trump “good stuff,” he should be winning by 5-10 general election points on the economy alone. Except, he is not. So this requires some other explanations, kind of like why the refrigerator smells, it’s not one thing.
Trump apparently spent over two years contemplating going to bat again with Biden and Biden’s tough global economy post-COVID laying at his feet. Plus, there was Biden’s undeniable and impossible to argue age issue, Biden would’ve been 86 by the end of his term. So Trump was definitely ready to roll and kind of punch down. But Trump was not ready for one Kamala Harris to very suddenly succeed Biden, and get exponentially tougher by catching fire to generate a stunning amount of enthusiasm, then riding a wave to the debate. She planted a flag on wavy blond hair at the debate.
Harris’s ability to pull all this off might well go back to the fact that Trump was seething mad when Biden dropped out, only to seethe harder post-debate with a blue flag pole planted on his pointy head. It threw the guy off, perhaps in part because he has no idea how to handle an adversarial woman. According to Politico, Trump’s team both knows something is wrong, and then are somewhat blind in their summation of the situation:
It’s not that he’s going backwards,” said one Trump ally. “But he should be doing better.”
Right. Except not really. Trump does seem to be going backward and apparently one has to be a true believer to be blind to it. Nate Silver’s old gang at 538 now have Harris more likely to win than not. That (!) is sliding back hard core to just weeks ago when Trump was 66% pre-debate. Back to Politico:
“Trump is strongest when he is talking about what people care about the most: the economy, immigration, crime, trade, the Trump core messages,” said Republican strategist David Urban. “When he gets distracted and goes in different directions, it’s less helpful. Every day we’re not talking about those issues, we’re letting Harris go untouched.”
They mean talking about the economy more, with immigration coming in a close second. But Trump isn’t talking about those two issues. He’s talking about pets, he’s talking about protecting women in creepy ways, he’s talking about crowd sizes, and he’s talking incoherently at that. This might be all because he has to talk about this matched up against a younger woman. It is almost enjoyable thinking about the fact that the only thing standing in the way of Donald Trump and a second term is a much younger, smarter, woman.
So, he’s seething. But that’s what he does, that’s his baseline. Why does it matter now?
We only need to think back to Trump’s glory days, sitting in the White House at 01:30 and tweeting out insults to celebrities or “Crazy Nancy” or “Crying Chuck” over and over, to know that Trump’s sweet spot. Trump used to self-soothe by focusing his fury on a singular situation. But it’s now all a mess, like an apartment that smells a little catty, a tiny bit of urine in the air.
Moreover, unlike many points along Trump’s glory road, this one has real consequences that could be his legacy into the future. Will it be that Trump is known as a successful president supported by the American people? Or did he scowl away, seethe in anger, go incoherent on the stump, dropped by a sharp woman, as history remembers only a diminished man, one who caught lighting in a bottle once, only to then have Americans reject him twice.
We will see. No matter how the election turns out, there is the guarantee that one side will surely be seething. Oh, and it’ll be hard afterward, kind of like getting the smell out of the refrigerator post-cleaning.
God Bless: I can be reached at [email protected]
“…the economy, immigration, crime…”
How’s that workin’ for ya, donnie?
The economy is great, thanks to Biden/Harris.
Immigration is now a dead issue because everyone by now knows the Melon Felon killed the immigration bill.
Crime? Waaay waaaay down.
Yeah, he’s got nothing left. Not that he had anything to begin with…
Trump is accomplished at being incompetent. He’s also is an irreparable declining mess. This makes him both oppositional and angry, and so, to feel better, he’ll routinely blame others … ‘It’s always someone else’s fault’. No Trump, it’s you and you alone, no one else. The sooner he’s winkled out of this ongoing political tragedy, the better for the country, for the people and for it’s model of democratic politics.
“Them Democrats CHEATED!!!!! They made me spend FOUR YEARS getting ready to beat Joe Biden – then they pulled a last minute switch and ran a WOMAN instead!!!!!! I want a RESTART!!!!!!”