For those who don’t know, the WSJ (a Murdoch paper) opinion section is notoriously conservative, so this is pretty significant.
I would post a link to it directly, but none of the paywall bypass options worked for me, so there wouldn’t be much point.
I think he’s shedding voters. I think he’s crossed lines for a lot of people who were on edge to begin with. They probably won’t for Harris, they just won’t vote. I doubt he’s gaining voters.
Don’t bet on that. He may have lost in 2020, but he still had more votes than any prior losing (or winning!) candidate, ever.
Even after all the stuff that happened, the only candidate with more votes than Trump in 2020 was Biden in 2020. There are probably at least 60 million voters who think Trump is their guy.
(Maybe he’s hoping for 69…)
I don’t think you can assume that all of the people who didn’t vote for Biden also wouldn’t vote for Harris.
And I don’t think we can assume that the lower bound to Trump’s support is just the hard-core MAGAts.
There are also the die-hard Republicans who treat their political affiliation like a sports team. They will reflexively vote R no matter what, even if they don’t approve of Trump’s behavior.
Then, paradoxically, there are also the low-information voters who actively avoid politics. In prior years, these tended to lean Democratic, but this year is a bit different. We are finding that many of these people are in much worse shape vs 4 years ago financially, and since they never paid attention to political stuff to begin with all they know is Biden was President for all of that. We know the economy is in decent shape, and we avoided a post-pandemic recession. But the benefits are extremely uneven, and there is a large base of people who are still screwed (and doubly so if they ever want to buy a house).
It doesn’t have to be the lower bound. It just has to be enough to swing the Electoral College in Harris’ favor. That really doesn’t take a lot of voters.
Yeah our only hope is the people who pay so little attention to politics that they are leaning Trump will put that level of effort into voting and not do it.