Donald Trump’s Saturday evening rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a massive disaster on the scale of the Hindenburg. His campaign had said 1 million people requested tickets to attend, but the 19,000-seat arena wasn’t even close to being filled.
But it was something that happened before Air Force One ever took off for Tulsa that has Trump’s reelection team worried, and it has everything to do with numbers that don’t involve attendance.
According to The Daily Beast, for the past couple of weeks, the Trump team has been getting more and more concerned by the president’s overall poll numbers, which are slipping badly and have fallen to the mid-30s. In the political world, that’s considered the danger zone:
“Early this month, one senior White House official told The Daily Beast that their ‘nightmare scenario’ would be for the president to slip beneath 40 percent support in a sustained string of public and private surveys—thus signaling that a previously unshakable base was starting to grow a bit disillusioned. Trump’s consistent—though perhaps unenviable—standing in the low 40s had for years remained an illustration of his enduring base and iron Republican support.”
Since that official made those remarks, the polls have repeatedly show Trump in the 30s, exactly the scenario the campaign was most terrified of:
“Multiple polls have shown Trump sliding into the 30s. Asked this week about the change, the same White House official simply responded, ‘This is not where any of us wanted to be at this point [in the election], but there is still time… to make up the difference.”
As if that’s not bad enough, consider that Trump really can’t do anything to goose up his polling average. Rallies won’t do the trick and neither will endless spending on attack ads.
Trump is trying to run the very same campaign he ran in 2016, and it’s not working, mainly because so much has changed since then, and almost none of it for the better, especially with over 121,000 Americans dead from coronavirus and over 40 million still unemployed. Those two startling statistics suggest that Trump is woefully out of touch with voters and gives the appearance of a man who still loves to brag but now has nothing tangible to brag about.
The Trump campaign can feel the election slipping away, and with every rally, every added casualty, and every passing day, the current president falls further into a hole he began digging for himself on the day he took office four years ago.
Great article. Keep them coming.