Polling consistently shows that suburban women have shifted against President Trump in significant numbers, creating a hole for him in key swing states.
Photo: Stefani Reynolds - Pool Via Cnp/Zuma Press
If President Trump, down in every significant national poll for more than four months, is worried as he heads into this week’s Republican national convention, he isn’t exactly showing it.
“We’re leading in a lot of places,” he declared in a phone conversation over the weekend. The situation, he said, is a lot like it was four years ago, “except we’re in better shape.”
He promised “a big surprise in a while.” And he isn’t just predicting a surprise in his race against Democratic nominee Joe Biden. He also offered this stunning prediction: “We’re going to take back the House.”
Just to be clear, Democrats currently have a 34-seat margin over Mr. Trump’s Republicans in the House, and most analysts expect them to add to their advantage, not lose it. Indeed, Donald J. Trump may be the only prominent political prognosticator predicting a Republican takeover.
It’s hard to know where bluster ends and real expectations begin in such a conversation, of course, but it’s clear that the precedent of 2016 is heavy on the president’s mind as his nomination for re-election is about to become official. The polls were wrong then, and they’ll be wrong now, he believes. His base of supporters—“the most incredible base” he calls it—is still there, undiminished.
A lot of the 2016 playbook is available to be replayed, Mr. Trump and his advisers believe. It’s not widely remembered, but here is a line Mr. Trump delivered in his convention acceptance speech four years ago: “In this race for the White House, I am the law-and-order candidate.”
The chances Mr. Trump will deliver basically the same line in his acceptance speech Thursday night are approximately 100%.
President Trump thinks that presenting a dystopian vision of an America under Joe Biden is a way to awaken previously dormant, disaffected voters.
Photo: kevin lamarque/ReutersThe Trump campaign believes its path toward re-election starts by replicating, as closely as possible, the 2016 electoral map. Oh, and one other thing is the same: Mr. Trump, even after 3½ years in office, and after having seared his brand hard into the side of his party, still considers himself someone glaring into the political system from the outside. “I feel like an outsider,” he said when asked if he’d be running as somebody outside the establishment. “I feel like an outsider in my own party sometimes.”
Corey Lewandowski, who was one of Mr. Trump’s campaign managers in 2016 and who remains an informal political adviser, sounds the same note: “We’re the outsider even though we’re the incumbent.”
But is that really possible? Can a sitting president, who has been in charge of, among other things, the response to a coronavirus that has left 176,000 Americans dead and pushed millions more onto unemployment rolls, claim that he’s the disruptor standing on the outside looking in, still attacking the system and the establishment?
Doug Sosnik, a Democratic strategist who was political director in Bill Clinton’s White House, says it simply isn’t. “In 2016, Trump was the candidate of change,” he says. “In 2020, he is the candidate seeking to maintain the status quo.”
Still, this view of himself—as the insider who still remains the outsider—is, in fact, central not just to Donald Trump’s campaign, but to his very political persona and history.
That was his profile in the brawling real-estate world of New York City, where he was always something of the intruder from the outer borough of Queens barging into the clubby world of Manhattan.
It was his profile when he ran for the 2016 nomination, when he campaigned as much as an independent as a Republican. When the entire Republican field was asked at an early debate whether any of them would decline to pledge to support the ultimate Republican nominee, no matter who that might be, Mr. Trump was the only one to raise his hand.
He continued to strike the outsider pose when, having vanquished his Republican competitors and shocked Democrat Hillary Clinton, he was inaugurated as president. In his inaugural address, he essentially declared war on the political leaders gathered around him on the Capitol steps: “For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.”
Mr. Trump is acutely aware that this is what his core supporters still want to hear. However much the president has challenged and bludgeoned and questioned the status quo, his most loyal supporters seek more. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll earlier this summer, seven in 10 of those who said they intend to vote for Mr. Trump said they preferred a candidate “who will confront and challenge the establishment in government” over one who “will bring competence and compassion to the way government operates.”
But does that approach really add up to a winning strategy in 2020? For all Mr. Trump’s outward confidence about replicating 2016, there is no doubt that he has lost ground with some key constituencies since then. In particular, polling consistently shows that suburban women have shifted against him in significant numbers, creating a hole for him in key swing states.
And, of course, Mr. Trump did lose the popular vote, by almost three million votes, so he has little room for error. His political survival may depend on finding more previously dormant, disaffected voters to energize, register and turn out. He clearly thinks that presenting a dystopian vision of an America under Joe Biden, in which he claims socialists in the Democratic party will be in charge and rioters will be on the loose in American cities, is one way to awaken such voters.
Democrats showed in their own convention last week that they believe the vote this fall will be a referendum on Mr. Trump in general, and on his character in particular. They will spend much of the fall portraying Mr. Biden as inclusive and soothing, with Mr. Trump as divisive and destructive.
In the weekend conversation, Mr. Trump signaled he will try to counter in part with an acceptance speech that he insisted will be “very positive.” It will surprise no one, though, that he said he also has a few shots to take as well.
Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com
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