Donald Trump's secret general election plan is...
Revealed!
On Monday, Donald Trump sat down with Fox News’ Bret Baier for an interview. And this exchange happened:
BAIER: And so to the female independent voter in the suburbs who struggled with family financing because of inflation, she's now against Biden, disapproves of Biden, but wasn't with you in 2020, and so far is a hard no for you in 2024, but what do you say to that...
TRUMP: You're not looking at the right poll.
BAIER: What do you say to that female independent suburban voter who feels that way to win her back?
TRUMP: First of all, I won in 2020 by a lot, OK?
BAIER: You know that...
TRUMP: Let's get that straight. I won in 2020.
BAIER: You know that this -- that's not what the vote showed.
TRUMP: And if you look at all of the tapes, if you look at everything that you want to look at, you take a look at Truth the Vote, where they have people stuffing the ballot boxes on tapes or...
BAIER: Mr. President, that was all looked into.
TRUMP: ... let's go to recent -- well, wait a minute. Let's go to recent.
FBI, Twitter, let's go to recent, the 51 agents, all corrupt stuff, Bret.
BAIER: Understand about Hunter Biden. All fair things, but...
TRUMP: All, Bret -- no, but that's cheating on the election. But that's cheating on the election.
BAIER: You lost the 2020 election.
And, scene.
Let’s start at the, um, start.
Baier’s question is a very good one — and one much on the minds of any smart Republican these days: What is Donald Trump’s plan to win back suburban independent women if he is the 2024 Republican nominee?
After all, the numbers are glaring.
In 2020, Trump lost women by 15 points. (He won men by 8 points.). He lost women by 13 points in 2016.
In 2020, Trump lost independent voters by 13 points after winning them by 4 points in 2016.
In 2020, Trump lost suburban voters by 2 points. He had carried them by 4 points four years earlier.
Given those data points, it’s not too much to say that female suburban voters who identify as independents were the swing group of the 2020 election. And those voters turned heavily against Trump.
Nothing that has happened since then has given those same voters a reason to reconsider Trump.
There was his refusal to accept that he lost the 2020 election. His fomenting of an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. His indictment on charges that he paid off a porn star with whom he allegedly had an affair. His being found liable on charges of sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll. And, of course, his most recent indictment on charges that he retained classified documents after leaving the White House.
Polling shows the damage done. Just more than 1 in 3 independents view Trump favorably in most surveys. A strong majority do not want him to be president again. And more than 6 in 10 — in a recent ABC News-Ipsos poll on the race — believe the classified documents charges against him are “serious.”
This is a problem. A big one. Especially when you consider that Trump is, quite clearly, the frontrunner to be the Republican presidential nominee.
And, what else is obvious — if you read that back and forth with Baier — is that Trump has zero plan on how to convince these voters who have left his side over the past eight years to come back.
In fact, Trump’s answer suggests he doesn’t even really grasp the nature and extent of the problem.
In response to Baier’s question about winning back female independent voters, Trump fixates on the disproven idea that he in fact won the last election.
Taken literally, Trump;’s message to these voters — as articulated by Trump himself — is: “I won in 2020 by a lot.”
Which is not a winning message. These swing voters are focused on the future, not the past. They want to know what Trump will do if he is elected again, not listen to a rehashing of why he actually didn’t lose the first time around.
What Trump unintentionally revealed in his answer to Baier is that either a) he doesn’t know he has a major problem with independent voters or b) he has no idea what sort of message can persuade them.
Which is it? I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter because either way he’s not getting any closer to courting the independents he desperately needs.
If Trump wants to win next fall, he desperately needs to get off talking about the 2020 election and find a message — especially on the economy — that can appeal to the voters he lost between 2016 and 2020.
The question for Trump — and for his party more broadly — is whether he can actually do that. Does he have the discipline to move away from the false election fraud narrative and start developing an actual answer to the question Baier asked him?
Based on everything we know about Trump, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical he can make that turn and find a good answer to the independent question. Which could well doom him in a general election.
It makes me incredibly sad and worried that millions of Americans still support this guy.
DJT does not try to win on policy, etc. He wins by degrading one opponent at a time, usually his closest pursuer. He wants each voter's decision to be a binary choice, and he is sure he will always look better than his closest competitor. If he gets the nomination, he will try to win back those voting blocks, like independent women, by trying to appear he is a better choice than his one competitor, the Democratic Nominee. DJT does not get lost on ideology - he will say what he needs to in order to look better than his alternative - his changing stances on abortion is one example, especially if you go back to his pre-republican days. It is also his litigation style - degrade all opponents so he looks, at worst, like the lesser of two evils, and at best, the winner.
Using this theory, my sense is he is betting that Joe Biden does not make it to the next election as the nominee, or will not be as attractive, either due to health or other issues, and DJT is convinced he will then look better than anyone else the Democrats might put forward to enough people to squeak by in the Electoral College, as he did in 2016.
It is one of the things which keeps me up at night...