ANALYSIS
Trump's blueprint for victory
It was a bracing, brazen and at times downright
bizarre spectacle. But the president unveiled a strategy this week that could
win back the White House.
By RYAN
LIZZA
08/28/2020
06:10 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/28/trump-2020-rnc-campaign-404212
After
watching President Donald Trump’s inaugural address in January 2017, George W.
Bush reportedly turned to Hillary Clinton in bewilderment and uttered a phrase
that has come to define much of the Trump era: “Well, that was some weird
shit.”
Bush, who
was not invited to the 2020 GOP convention this week, probably speaks for a lot
of people watching this week’s 10 hours of Trump TV programming.
There are
two ways to think about what happened over the last four days. The first is
that this event was notable for its clear break with precedent. Cabinet
secretaries previously declined to show up and make convention speeches, but
Trump’s secretary of State spoke from Jerusalem on Tuesday and his secretary of
Housing and Urban Development spoke Thursday night. Also on Tuesday, Trump
appeared onscreen from the Blue Room in the White House and issued a pardon to
a shocked former bank robber, the way Oprah used to give away cars.
The
shattering of some of the last vestiges of keeping American government separate
from electoral politics was accompanied by a frenzy of disinformation. Top
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow talked about the coronavirus pandemic
in the past tense. Vice President Mike Pence suggested that Joe Biden backs
defunding the police (he doesn’t). The president took credit for a law
reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs that Barack Obama actually signed
in 2014. (See fact checkers here and here for many examples just from Trump’s
Thursday speech.)
So without
being too alarmist it makes more sense to think about the past four days as an
exercise in state propaganda, built around a cult of personality, than as a
party convention. (Republicans suspended basic party business, like the
creation of a platform.)
But it’s
still worth considering what the point of the messaging was.
It fell
into three baskets: There were the speeches for the MAGA faithful; a concerted
effort to appeal to Black voters; and a bundle of messages aimed at suburban
swing voters, especially women.
Trump might
have maxed out on the first group, though his campaign is working hard to
increase white working class voters, especially those who haven’t been regular
voters. But Thursday was largely about the latter two groups, which make up the
core of the Biden coalition.
The
Democratic data analyst David Shor recently noted two surprising trends since
Trump’s election. One is that college-educated white voters have become
resistant to racist appeals. Some analysts predicted that Trump could continue
to make gains among whites of all education levels, but this group has proved
to be increasingly disgusted by Trump. They have rejected what they see as
Trump’s coarseness and bigotry, swung firmly to the Democrats in 2018 and are
the key to Biden’s lead.
Shor’s
other observation is much less widely shared. “Black voters trended Republican
in 2016,” he said recently. “Hispanic voters also trended right in battleground
states. In 2018, I think it’s absolutely clear that, relative to the rest of
the country, nonwhite voters trended Republican. In Florida, Democratic senator
Bill Nelson did 2 or 3 points better than Clinton among white voters but lost
because he did considerably worse than her among Black and Hispanic voters.
We’re seeing this in 2020 polling, too. I think there’s a lot of denial about
this fact.”
The Trump
campaign does not deny it. It used Thursday’s program, before Trump’s speech,
to show a series of vérité videos featuring Black voters explaining why they
back Trump.
There is a
massive policy contradiction at the heart of this GOP strategy: Sometimes
Biden’s record is described as too pro-prison and he’s allegedly responsible
for thousands of young Black men going to jail because of the harsh provisions
in the 1994 Crime Bill, which Biden helped draft. At the same time Trump said
Thursday that Biden will increase crime by “immediately releasing 400,000
criminals onto the streets and into your neighborhoods” and then “defund police
departments all across America” until “no one will be safe in Biden’s America.”
But despite
this inconsistency — not to mention the difficult-to-fathom idea that Trump
could win a higher percentage of Black voters in the current climate — there
are serious analysts, like Shor, who see the defection of some working-class
Blacks to the right as in line with trends in other democracies where the
education divide can be more determinative of voting patterns than racial or
ethnic divides.
To add yet
another contradiction into this strategy, Trump’s pitch to the first group,
white suburbanites, is based on an explicitly racist narrative about Black
protesters. So far it hasn’t worked. But over the past two weeks, and especially
since the unrest in Wisconsin after the shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old
Black man who was paralyzed after he was shot in the back seven times by a
white police officer in Kenosha, Democrats have been increasingly fearful about
the trends. (One recent poll of Wisconsin voters found that approval for Black
Lives Matter protests dropped from 61 percent in June to 48 percent in August,
and all of the change came from whites.)
Sarah
Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, a conservative anti-Trump site, captured
the conflicted views of white female suburbanites in a pair of focus groups
with soft Trump voters from North Carolina and Arizona. The North Carolina
group, she wrote this week, “was sympathetic to the protesters and said there
was a need to reevaluate America’s relationship to race.” They had heard little
about any violence accompanying anti-racism protests, partially blamed Trump if
there was violence, and one of them attended protests and used progressive
buzzwords like “privilege.” They appeared to be the epitome of the suburbanites
at the center of 2020’s most surprising narrative about race: white
college-educated women who stand with BLM.
But in
Arizona, Longwell’s group “was a mirror image.” Those women knew all about the
violence in Wisconsin and “five of the six women were in complete agreement
that what was happening was not peaceful protesting, but looting, rioting and
violence for no good reason.” They wanted Trump to send in federal troops, and
despite the fact that the unrest was happening on Trump’s watch, it made them
more likely to support Trump.
Over the
past week, and especially on Thursday, Republicans tried to press that
potential advantage in a more heavy-handed but disciplined way than Trump has
all year in his rage tweeting and meandering news conferences. Trump is good at
creating narratives that stick even when they defy reality. He was just given
10 free hours of prime-time programming to do it. There was a lot of weird
shit, but it could work.
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