Ezra Klein: Can anything change Americans' minds about Donald Trump?

[babylonsister]

https://www.vox.com/2020/9/2/21409364/trump-approval-rating-2020-election-voters-coronavirus-convention-polls


Can anything change Americans’ minds about Donald Trump?
The eerie stability of Trump’s approval rating, explained.
By Ezra Klein@ezraklein Sep 2, 2020, 7:30am EDT

snip//

Trump isn’t Teflon

I occasionally hear Trump described as the “Teflon president.” Many liberals are agog at how many scandals, disasters, and offensive comments Trump has survived. It can seem like nothing sticks to him.

But Trump isn’t Teflon. It’s simply that whatever will stick to him has already stuck to him. Absorbing this much damage and provoking this much loathing has not been a successful strategy. Stable poll numbers in the low-40s are hardly a political triumph. When the economy was strong, his approval ratings were far lower than the jobs and GDP numbers would predict. And while Trump’s approval ratings on the coronavirus are higher than what I think he deserves, they’re punishingly low in comparison to other world leaders.

According to Morning Consult data, France’s Emmanuel Macron is up 5 points since January, Canada’s Justin Trudeau is up 9 points, Germany’s Angela Merkel is up 16 points, and Australia’s Scott Morrison is up 25 points. Viewed in this way, Trump’s stability might be best understood as a tremendous political failure: He had the opportunity for a rally-round-the-leader effect that could have locked his reelection. His weak, erratic, ineffective response instead turned the pandemic into the central threat to his reelection: In Morning Consult’s polling, Biden held a 14-point advantage by the end of June when voters were asked which candidate they trusted on the coronavirus, up from a 3-point advantage in April.

It is also possible that the headline numbers hide smaller but electorally consequential shifts. “If there is one group Trump is leaking support from, it is older white people in Florida,” says Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina. “At least that is how I read the data coming out of Florida. The Covid-19 response is actually killing older people there. As this goes on, more and more of them actually know someone who has been affected in some serious way. According to our data, that appears to have the power to blunt partisanship. Republicans follow their leaders when they are not afraid of getting sick. They don’t follow those cues when they are afraid of getting sick.” Biden now leads by more than 4 points in Florida, up from a dead heat in April.

It is telling that Trump’s strategy for winning reelection doesn’t seem to be a new message or a new plan for controlling the coronavirus or restarting the economy. Instead, he’s running a racialized campaign against protests, riots, and disorder — even though that disorder is happening on his watch as president. “The GOP has no policies so they deal entirely in grievance and identity,” says Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland. That has been enough for Trump to hold a bit more than 40 percent of the electorate. But a bit more than 40 percent of the electorate is not a winning coalition, and it is far less than a capable leader might now hold.

So perhaps, compared to a hypothetical Trump response that was commanding and competent, the political cost of the path Trump followed has been significant, and it may lose him the presidency and discredit him in history. It’s worth remembering that even Herbert Hoover got 40 percent of the vote in the 1932 presidential election — more than three years into the Great Depression and not far off from where Trump is polling now. Sometimes it’s easier for the country in general, and partisans in particular, to admit a leader’s failures after he’s lost than it is when he — and they — are still fighting to keep power.

But still: Forty-two percent of Americans look at Trump and believe he’s doing a good job, or at least a good enough one. And nothing they’ve seen over the past year has shaken that view.

[Farmgirl1961]

1. Is there anything that would change tRump supporters' mind?

What would it take? Does he literally have to hold the gun and pull the trigger on white folks?

I am actually very curious to know what the threshold and turning point would be.

[EarlG]

4. Yes

What would make them change their mind would be if he turned away from the politics of white grievance, which is why he’s clinging to those politics so tightly.

He already lost regular Americans a long time ago. A last-minute Hail Mary pivot to suddenly attempt to appeal to mainstream voters, that involved looking conciliatory on issues of race, or suggesting that maybe there is something wrong with policing in this country, would do nothing but cause confusion and resentment among his own cult.

That’s why he’s not just going to ride that white grievance train all the way to the station, he’s going to stand on the footplate desperately chucking coal into the boiler.

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. nothing will change my mind about trump's supporters

suicide cult of ignorance

[genxlib]

3. Any analysis of his floor of support

Is inadequate without mentioning the propaganda network of Fox, Rush, radio, internet, social media etc.

They don't believe he is doing a bad job because he is bubble wrapped in support by those sources of "information". At least some of those are driven by bots or foreign influence.

Perhaps as important, that same network of "information" has demonized Democrats and progressive politics to a degree that they will support a deeply flawed Republican just to avoid the "evils" of BLM, antifa, socialism, etc.

[beachbumbob]

5. the ONLY inroads into trump support will be in the over 55 crowd as it dawns on them

that SS and Medicare WILL go away if trump is re-elected. We see that happening in Arizona and Florida already

[Poiuyt]

7. I'm a little surprised that his desire to kill SS hasn't resonated more

[beachbumbob]

8. it is as we see the numbers come out in Arizona and Florida and this before AARP and the

SuperPacs going up with ads in several southern states with significant level of older/retired residents. Trump/GOP really want this to cause a generational voting war and I think they really are giving democrats a huge landslide with this.

[BeyondGeography]

6. Klein is an excellent writer

And he puts his finger on something very dark here:

The stability unnerves me because it undermines the basic theory of responsive democracy. If our political divisions cut so deep that even 200,000 deaths and 10.3 percent unemployment and a president musing about bleach injections can’t shake us, then what can? And if the answer is nothing, then that means the crucial form of accountability in American politics has collapsed.

[Cartaphelius]

9. Group Lobotomies wasn't mentioned as an alternative.

Would be relatively cheap and 100% effective for all but Jim Jordan,
Mark Meadows and all other "former" Tea Baggers.

Strange how the TEA BAGGERS morphed into the Freedum Caucus.