You don’t have to be a detractor of the campaign of Donald J. Trump to realize that it’s been a bad couple of weeks for the Republican nominee for President of the United States. From the controversy regarding the judge from Indiana to his self-congratulatory Tweet after the massacre in Orlando, Trump has been under siege from the media, the entire Democratic party and many members of his own party.
The wasted weeks of the Trump campaign came at the same time that most of the Democratic party finally started rallying around their inevitable nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The lack of discipline of Trump has started to irritate mainstream Republicans who had only reluctantly offered their support and endorsements. Simply put, establishment Republicans are agitated. And that agitation probably has led to a bump in whiskey sales to those party bigwigs as they’ve watched the Donald’s poll numbers plummet. Many are worried that, absent a significant change in direction, Trump will take the party of Lincoln down.
So, in a scene straight out of The Apprentice and a sign that Trump is attempting yet again to bring his campaign into a mainstream direction, the campaign announced a decision today regarding campaign manager Corey Lewandowski:
Corey Lewandowski
“Corey Lewandowski, You’re Fired!!”
Lewandowski was a Trump loyalist from the beginning, when most of chattering class viewed his presidential candidacy as little more than a comedy show. He was the ultimate champion of the “Let Trump be Trump” mantra, that it was his politically incorrect brashness that was the secret sauce behind the Donald’s rise to the top of the GOP field. However, many experienced hands felt that Lewandowski was in over his head with respect to actually running a first-rate presidential campaign and, when the Ted Cruz campaign started accumulating delegates outside of the normal primary process, in late March Trump hired the ultimate insider and delegate wrangler to be his campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
Paul Manafort
The hiring of Manafort was a signal to the Republican establishment that the bombastic billionaire was taking his campaign seriously. Manafort and Lewandowski engaged in a behind-the-scenes power struggle from the very beginning and ultimately, the experienced hand prevailed. Apparently it was Trump’s children, in particular Ivanka Trump (with help from her husband Jared Kushner) who convinced Trump to dump Lewandowski. Call me skeptical that this move signals that Trump himself will become “more presidential.” He keeps saying that he will be but he keeps putting his foot in his mouth (either verbally or by Tweeting). Call me slightly suspicious that a narcissistic but successful 70-year-old businessman, one who thinks that sliced bread is overrated compared to his own greatness, will suddenly change his stripes.
So the question on many minds of top GOP operatives now is whether Trump’s campaign can be salvaged at all. Think about the scope of the disadvantages his campaign faces in opposition to the well-oiled Democratic machine backing Secretary Clinton. Let me count the ways:
- After a brief post-clinching-the-nomination bump when the polls tightened to a statistical dead heat, Clinton has started to pull away from Trump in the more recent surveys. Hillary is beating the Donald in all eleven polls taken during the month of June, winning by as little as 2 points and as many as 12. In a Bloomberg poll released last week, 55% of respondents said they would NEVER vote for Trump.
- In the most recent poll (released today by Monmouth University), Clinton leads Trump by eight points in the ten “swing states” (defined as states in which the margin of victory was less than 7% in 2012).
- Trump is losing badly with women and Latino voters, two critical voting blocks. He’s behind 27 points with women and 55 points with non-white voters. He will need an extraordinary performance from white men to make up those gaps.
- While Clinton has the full-throat support of virtually the entire Democratic establishment, including President Obama. Trump does not have the support of either living Republican president (both named Bush) or the last nominee (Mitt Romney). His support among the top leaders in Congress (Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell) is tepid at best. In short, Hillary has an enormous surrogate advantage.
- Despite his boasts at being rich and self-financing his campaign, Trump doesn’t seem particularly interested in writing any checks to win the presidency. Clinton and the super PAC’s that support her have spent over $25 million in eight swing states during the month of June. Total spending by Trump and his supporters = ZERO. Look at this graph, courtesy of NBC News, on the disparity of swing state ad spending in 2012 and 2016.
- Obama’s sweeping victories in 2008 and 2012 were largely fueled by advanced data analytics and a robust ground game in the key states. Trump doesn’t believe in what he calls “data processing.” He believes that the massive rallies that fueled his win in the primary will carry through to the general election, but he won’t have the overwhelming free media advantage over one candidate as he did over a dozen candidates.
- Speaking of which, it shouldn’t be a shock to anyone that the mainstream media will flood the airwaves and newspapers with negative stories about Trump, far more than they did when he was a mere curiosity.
- Trump’s campaign organization is woefully understaffed compared to the Clinton campaign (or the Bernie Sanders campaign). Look at this stunning graph from the Washington Post:
Many Republicans have given up the idea that their party can reclaim the White House. The major worry now is that Trump’s coattails will be so short that they will lose the Senate (badly) and possibly even the House. The Senate in particular is in jeopardy, with 24 of the 34 seats up for grabs currently in GOP hands, including traditionally blue states (Illinois, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania), “lean blue” states (Colorado and New Mexico), and true swing states (New Hampshire, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida). Many feel that John McCain’s seat in Arizona is also up for grabs because of Trump’s position on Mexican immigration and the state’s heavy Latino population.
It’s because of the potential down-ballot collateral that the on-again, off-again panic in the GOP is starting to reach Code Red. More and more there is talk about delegates changing the nomination rules to “steal” the nomination from Trump at the Republican convention, which starts in four weeks. Considering that Ted Cruz and John Kasich have secured a significant percentage of the delegates on the rules committee, this scenario is entirely possible even if unlikely.
What would this theft look like? The delegates could simply change the rules to either allow delegates (who are real human beings) that are bound to a certain candidate to abstain on the first ballot (a “conscience” clause). The other potential rule change would require a super-majority (two-thirds) to support the candidate before granting the nomination. The reason I think this is unlikely is because of the obvious ramifications and backlash over a bunch of “establishment” folks overturning the will of the people. That’s a really bad precedent.
The reason it still could happen is to nullify another bad precedent, that of a celebrity nominee hijacking a party’s nominating process by manipulating the media, by lying, making ridiculous promises (even by politician standards) and by acting like a jackass in general. The question is whether that’s worse than the precedent of denying the nomination to the top vote-getter. What it boils down to is that the Republican party is damned if they do, damned if they don’t. In essence, the GOP is screwed.
Unless…
Yes, unless, I’m wrong, unless the pundits are wrong, as so many of use have been throughout this crazy, tortuous process. Unless Trump maintains his idiot savant, defy all conventions run of success. It’s possible. He’s defied all logic before and he’s going against a weak candidate who has unfavorable ratings and trust issues of her own and still has the FBI investigation regarding her emails hanging over her head. Maybe the Lewandowski firing is the start of seismic shift in the direction of the Donald’s campaign and he can turn the downward trend around.
I’m skeptical. In mid-May I cited five things that I personally wanted to see from Donald Trump that could turn me from a critic to supporter. Let’s see how he’s doing so far:
- Pick a great VP: incomplete, we don’t know yet.
- Display a greater knowledge of policy: not a shred of evidence that he knows anything more than he did before.
- Win over the majority of Republican lawmakers: he was doing well on that front until his attacks on the heritage of Indiana-born judge Gonzalo Curiel.
- Stop Tweeting: epic fail. The would-be commander chief is a teetotaler who has never smoked or consumed alcohol but he is still addicted to Twitter. His fourth tweet after the Orlando shooting was self-centered and self-congratulatory: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!” Yikes!
- Show his tax returns: this will never happen. The political damage of showing the returns would probably be more damaging than the damage he’s incurring by not showing them. It’s smart for him to hold firm on this. For me, it gives me more reason to distrust him.
Ultimately, follow the polls. While so many were “explaining” the polls in the Republican nominating process, postulating that the polls would change when more candidates dropped out, etc., the polls proved to be right almost every time. If Trump keeps plummeting in the polls in the next few weeks, the Dump Trump movement may feel like they have nothing to lose and figuratively blow up the convention. In this wild, wacky election season, anything can happen.
Thanks for reading!
Chris Bodig