It took all of two weeks for Donald Trump’s support to collapse. In mid-to-late July he began to pull ahead nationally. The last three major national polls have shown him trailing Hillary Clinton by 9, 10 and 15 points.
The RealClearPolitics polling average has Trump 6.8 percentage points behind Clinton nationally. In the Huffington Post average, it’s 7.5 points. Many supporters are wondering went wrong after he beat 16 other Republicans in the primaries, suspecting that perhaps the anti-Trump media has skewed the polls now that he is up against Clinton.
But we’re not in the primaries anymore and here a few reasons what worked for Trump then isn’t producing the same success now.
1. In Republican primaries, Trump was a big fish in a small pond. When the New York businessman and reality TV star was first considering a presidential bid, he was advised he could not run on earned media alone. He said he could and he bet correctly — in the primaries, at least.
Trump faced an uphill battle convincing Republican voters to like him. But in a field of 17, he was easily able to flood the zone and suck up media oxygen that might have otherwise gone to other candidates. When he acted up in debates, he made the whole process look silly and shallow, not just himself.
Sure, Jeb Bush’s allies were able to raise over $100 million and also-rans like John Kasich outspent Trump in conventional advertising. But by March, Trump had earned nearly $2 billion worth of free media. That put him in a league with other major celebrities, not mere politicians.
Clinton is one opponent, not 16. Like Trump, she enjoys near-universal name recognition. While Trump has been able to saturate the airwaves with earned media, since clinching the nomination not all publicity has been good publicity — a lesson the creature of the New York City tabloid culture has been slow to learn.
2. Trump had a perfect foil in Jeb. The only person in the early Republican presidential field who could rival Trump’s star power was Jeb Bush. But the former Florida governor was a star in name only. He neither had a domination television personality nor the affection of Republican primary voters weary of his family.
So Trump mocked him relentlessly. Bush, the son and brother of the last two Republican presidents, became “Low Energy” Jeb. Trump used him whenever he wanted to look tough. He rhetorically punched Bush whenever he needed to recover from a bad moment in the debates.
Bush was used to symbolize everything Trump was running against: the party establishment, the moneyed special interests, a system so “rigged” it resembled a political dynasty, past Republican failure. Tired of lost wars, lost elections and lost opportunities? Vote Trump, not Jeb.
Clinton has similar vulnerabilities but Trump has had limited success exploiting them. He probably can’t get as far belittling a women as he could a befuddled and bespectacled middle-aged man, as fellow New Yorker and former 2000 Clinton opponent Rick Lazio quickly learned. And while he calls her “Crooked Hillary,” he has not been as relentless in pushing his critique of the Clintons as many expected.
3. The general electorate is more diverse. Republican primary voters are more than 90 percent white. That isn’t true of the wider electorate. Trump was able to improve his favorability numbers with Republicans over time, but that hasn’t been the case with minorities.
According to one poll, Trump is 48 points behind Clinton among Latinos, many of whom believe he said categorically that Mexicans are rapists and too biased to judge his Trump University case fairly. He may be below 20 percent among Hispanics in Florida, where the voting bloc is more GOP-friendly than in the rest of the country.
The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found Trump receiving just 1 percent support among black voters. Clinton leads him by a full 90 points. Recent statewide polls in Ohio and Pennsylvania, two must-win swing states, found him with literally zero black supporters.
Even Trump’s support among white voters is narrow. To eke out a 3-point lead over Clinton in a CNN/ORC poll, Trump needed to win non-college-educated whites by nearly 40 points. Once that number came back down to earth a bit, his lead evaporated.
In Pennsylvania, one poll showed Trump losing the white collar Philadelphia suburbs by 40 points. Obama only beat Mitt Romney there by 9. Trump bonded tightly with a core of blue collar Republicans big enough to win primaries, but at the expense of being able to win other groups of voters.
4. The general electorate is much bigger. Trump likes to point out that he won more raw Republican primary votes than anyone else in history, including Dwight Eisenhower (who didn’t compete in the modern primary process) and Ronald Reagan. But that only entailed winning more than 13 million votes.
To put this in perspective, Ross Perot won 18.9 million votes to finish third in a presidential election 24 years ago. Trump is going to have win closer to 60 million votes to win November.
During the primaries, Trump could also reset after each state voted, helping him put whatever controversy might have hurt him in a place like Wisconsin in the past. He could put losses in the rear-view mirror and quickly move on, likely to some state where he was starting out with a huge lead in the polls.
5. The lack of advertising may be catching up to Trump. Clinton has run roughly 14,000 paid ads targeting battleground states, spending half a million dollars a day. Trump has responded with zero, although he has done some YouTube and Instagram ads.
As Romney discovered in 2012, it is not good to let your opponent define you. As mentioned previously, Trump has managed to get a lot of out of earned media. But it isn’t giving him much control of his message.
Interviewers can ask him whatever they want and (frequently hostile) reporters can write whatever headlines they choose about his mass rallies, which are often discursive and focused on entertaining the people in the room rather than reaching a wider audience.
Based on the polling after the Republican convention, it’s possible that a tightly controlled version of Trump’s message could win over voters. Left to his own devices, Trump too often wanders while everyone else is focusing on his negatives.
Trump did well in the minors but winning the Republican nomination put him in the big leagues. The general election really is a different ballgame.
