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Arizona Is Ready to Toss Trump -- and the Rest of the GOP
New York Magazine“I always thought it would be difficult for him,” Jeff Flake, the former senator from Arizona, told me. “Before corona and before the economy went south with the coronavirus, I thought it would be difficult.” A Goldwater Republican and devout Mormon, Flake did not get along with the president for obvious reasons. Flake sees now in Hunter’s laptop the problem that Trump’s personality poses for his party. “Boy, it’s not broadening the base,” he said.
In the four years since his narrow defeat of Hillary Clinton in Arizona, Trump has suffered among regretful white suburban voters here as he has nationwide, throwing the state into play for Democrats as it hasn’t been since Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole by 31,215 votes in 1996. “If you go to a Trump rally, that’s what gets the applause lines, gets people chanting ‘Lock him up!’ or ‘Lock her up!’” Flake said, “That’s affirmation to the president, but it’s not appealing to people that they’re trying to move. This whole campaign just seems an exercise in affirmation.”
As far as demonstrations go, it wasn’t much, just three white women on the side of the road in Scottsdale, Arizona. One waved an American flag. One held nothing at all. But had Donald Trump asked God for a sign of encouragement, he couldn’t have done better than the third woman, who raised above her head a halo of red poster board on which she’d scrawled three words that, for the president and his supporters, amount to the most hopeful message of the campaign: “HUNTER’S LAPTOP MATTERS.”
If Trump is to win reelection, the three women of Scottsdale Road would have to represent an army of clones. There must exist beyond the reach of pollsters many more such voters in places like Maricopa County for whom Hunter’s laptop matters a great deal. The complex tale of Rudy Giuliani, the Democratic nominee’s son, and a device supposedly full of private photos and evidence of potential corruption or certain nepotism in Ukraine and China must outweigh in importance the pedestrian issues that tend to consume Americans as they consider the choice before them on November 3.
“I always thought it would be difficult for him,” Jeff Flake, the former senator from Arizona, told me. “Before corona and before the economy went south with the coronavirus, I thought it would be difficult.” A Goldwater Republican and devout Mormon, Flake did not get along with the president for obvious reasons. Flake sees now in Hunter’s laptop the problem that Trump’s personality poses for his party. “Boy, it’s not broadening the base,” he said.
In the four years since his narrow defeat of Hillary Clinton in Arizona, Trump has suffered among regretful white suburban voters here as he has nationwide, throwing the state into play for Democrats as it hasn’t been since Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole by 31,215 votes in 1996. “If you go to a Trump rally, that’s what gets the applause lines, gets people chanting ‘Lock him up!’ or ‘Lock her up!’” Flake said, “That’s affirmation to the president, but it’s not appealing to people that they’re trying to move. This whole campaign just seems an exercise in affirmation.”
Steve Schmidt agreed: “Trump’s coalition is in a state of collapse.” Schmidt advised the 2008 presidential campaign of the late John McCain, Goldwater’s successor as the senior senator from Arizona. More recently, Schmidt co-founded the Lincoln Project, the group formed by exiled Establishment Republicans to torment the president through brutal television advertisements. So he has plenty of reasons to root for a big Trump loss. “McCain had his enemies in Arizona for sure, but he was deeply admired in the state and reflexively, even for people who didn’t care for McCain and didn’t like him, there’s a sense of, ‘I can say that about him but you definitely can’t.’” When it comes to attacks on McCain’s valor, Schmidt said, it inspires particular “revulsion.” But on a less personal level, as a strategist, Schmidt is more awed than gleeful as he observes the reversal of Trump’s once remarkable political luck. “This is ending the only way it could end: in farcical tragedy,” he said. “All of his race-baiting and the appeals to non-college-educated white men, primarily targeted to voters in the upper Midwest where he’s behind, have turned off in profound numbers suburban women and Sun Belt voters in the New South.”
The Trump campaign’s path to a second Electoral College victory requires repeating the miracle he pulled off in 2016. Then, the race was closer and his opponent’s lead was less stable. Then, voters could think only of how he might govern or of what could go wrong, not of a pandemic yet untamed, not of jobs lost, not of 220,000 coronavirus deaths. It’s a record that no incumbent would want, that no marketing genius even of Trump’s skills could spin his way out of. Now, he must worry not only about the swing states where he barely won in 2016, including Arizona, but also about places like Texas and Iowa, where he won by almost ten points but now is just four points ahead and one point behind in polls, respectively.
In the four years since his narrow defeat of Hillary Clinton in Arizona, Trump has suffered among regretful white suburban voters here as he has nationwide, throwing the state into play for Democrats as it hasn’t been since Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole by 31,215 votes in 1996. “If you go to a Trump rally, that’s what gets the applause lines, gets people chanting ‘Lock him up!’ or ‘Lock her up!’” Flake said, “That’s affirmation to the president, but it’s not appealing to people that they’re trying to move. This whole campaign just seems an exercise in affirmation.”
As far as demonstrations go, it wasn’t much, just three white women on the side of the road in Scottsdale, Arizona. One waved an American flag. One held nothing at all. But had Donald Trump asked God for a sign of encouragement, he couldn’t have done better than the third woman, who raised above her head a halo of red poster board on which she’d scrawled three words that, for the president and his supporters, amount to the most hopeful message of the campaign: “HUNTER’S LAPTOP MATTERS.”
If Trump is to win reelection, the three women of Scottsdale Road would have to represent an army of clones. There must exist beyond the reach of pollsters many more such voters in places like Maricopa County for whom Hunter’s laptop matters a great deal. The complex tale of Rudy Giuliani, the Democratic nominee’s son, and a device supposedly full of private photos and evidence of potential corruption or certain nepotism in Ukraine and China must outweigh in importance the pedestrian issues that tend to consume Americans as they consider the choice before them on November 3.
“I always thought it would be difficult for him,” Jeff Flake, the former senator from Arizona, told me. “Before corona and before the economy went south with the coronavirus, I thought it would be difficult.” A Goldwater Republican and devout Mormon, Flake did not get along with the president for obvious reasons. Flake sees now in Hunter’s laptop the problem that Trump’s personality poses for his party. “Boy, it’s not broadening the base,” he said.
In the four years since his narrow defeat of Hillary Clinton in Arizona, Trump has suffered among regretful white suburban voters here as he has nationwide, throwing the state into play for Democrats as it hasn’t been since Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole by 31,215 votes in 1996. “If you go to a Trump rally, that’s what gets the applause lines, gets people chanting ‘Lock him up!’ or ‘Lock her up!’” Flake said, “That’s affirmation to the president, but it’s not appealing to people that they’re trying to move. This whole campaign just seems an exercise in affirmation.”
Steve Schmidt agreed: “Trump’s coalition is in a state of collapse.” Schmidt advised the 2008 presidential campaign of the late John McCain, Goldwater’s successor as the senior senator from Arizona. More recently, Schmidt co-founded the Lincoln Project, the group formed by exiled Establishment Republicans to torment the president through brutal television advertisements. So he has plenty of reasons to root for a big Trump loss. “McCain had his enemies in Arizona for sure, but he was deeply admired in the state and reflexively, even for people who didn’t care for McCain and didn’t like him, there’s a sense of, ‘I can say that about him but you definitely can’t.’” When it comes to attacks on McCain’s valor, Schmidt said, it inspires particular “revulsion.” But on a less personal level, as a strategist, Schmidt is more awed than gleeful as he observes the reversal of Trump’s once remarkable political luck. “This is ending the only way it could end: in farcical tragedy,” he said. “All of his race-baiting and the appeals to non-college-educated white men, primarily targeted to voters in the upper Midwest where he’s behind, have turned off in profound numbers suburban women and Sun Belt voters in the New South.”
The Trump campaign’s path to a second Electoral College victory requires repeating the miracle he pulled off in 2016. Then, the race was closer and his opponent’s lead was less stable. Then, voters could think only of how he might govern or of what could go wrong, not of a pandemic yet untamed, not of jobs lost, not of 220,000 coronavirus deaths. It’s a record that no incumbent would want, that no marketing genius even of Trump’s skills could spin his way out of. Now, he must worry not only about the swing states where he barely won in 2016, including Arizona, but also about places like Texas and Iowa, where he won by almost ten points but now is just four points ahead and one point behind in polls, respectively.
