From defending military base names such as Fort Bragg to stepping up his criticism of sometimes violent protests in major cities, President Trump is taking steps to shore up his base — and he may need to.
Through many ups and downs over the last four years, Trump’s support from the base has been rock-solid, but slight cracks seem to be forming in recent polls.
A large national survey by the Pew Research Center found Trump down 7 points since March in job approval from Republicans and Republican-leaning voters. His approval rating among white evangelicals, a key GOP demographic, is down 6 points.
That still puts Trump at 78% and 72%, respectively, with these voters. But in a tough race against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, even modest slippage with the base could be catastrophic. His overall job approval rating, according to Pew, stands at 39%. The RealClearPolitics polling average puts Trump’s approval at 41.5%, compared to 56.1% disapproval. That’s within Trump’s normal range but at the low end. Gallup and some other pollsters found Trump with an approval rating as high as 49% as recently as March.
While 76% of Trump voters told Pew their vote was affirmatively for the president, an important measure of enthusiasm, only 19% of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters say they are satisfied with the current direction of the country. That number was 55% as recently as April and has been above 50% for the entirety of Trump’s presidency.
“Trump has never grown at all beyond the base, so he really needs his voters to stay with him,” said a veteran Republican strategist who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “They mostly have, but mostly might not be good enough.”
The identity of the voters who have switched from approving of Trump’s job performance in March to disapproving in mid-June is a fundamental question facing his reelection effort. The campaign has been trying to win back some of the suburbanites who have abandoned the GOP and make modest inroads with black voters. “Joe Biden and his campaign are trying to rewrite the history of the impact of his 1994 crime bill on the black community,” reads an email the Republican National Committee’s Paris Dennard sent to reporters on Wednesday. On Thursday, Trump’s rapid response team circulated a clip of Biden praising longtime Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat who had been in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s.
Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has seen his viewership boom with nightly monologues saying Trump’s real problem is that he and congressional Republicans are not delivering for the base. “The moment Trump leaves, they will attack him. They’ll tell you that Republicans lost power because they were mean and intolerant, just like Donald Trump. And if you listen carefully, you can hear them say that even now,” Carlson said earlier this week. “It’s a lie. Republicans are failing for a much more obvious reason, a more fundamental reason. They’re failing because they haven’t done much that is worth doing. They haven’t tried very hard to improve your life. When the crisis came, they fled. They did nothing to defend you, they did nothing to defend the country, they were paralyzed.”
“Tucker’s passionate defense of liberty and our national history, coupled with his obvious anger at the establishment writ large has really resonated with a growing number of Americans,” said Republican strategist John Feehery, who described Carlson as “more than willing to disagree with the president on occasion, which endears him to his audience, who typically are supportive of Trump but not totally drinking the lemonade.”
The theory is that initiatives such as criminal justice reform and police reform do less for Trump politically than a strong law-and-order stance would. The White House may be listening to that message. Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany held a briefing when the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” was cleared out on Wednesday. “So I am pleased to inform everyone that Seattle has been liberated,” she said, calling it “a failed, four-week Democrat experiment by the radical left.”
“And the results are in: Anarchy is anti-American, law and order is essential, peace in our streets will be secured,” McEnany continued, later adding, “President Trump has always stood on the side of law and order, and we are pleased to report that law and order has prevailed, and Seattle has been liberated from the anarchists.”
“Lawlessness has been allowed to prevail,” Trump said in a video statement on Thursday, amid images of blood splattered on a statue of Ulysses S. Grant and other memorabilia being toppled. “We’re not going to let it prevail any longer.” He then touted his executive order protecting statues and monuments. “It started off with Confederate statues, but then it went to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “It went to people that were abolitionists, people that wanted to stop slavery.”
Meantime, rumors continue about a potential decline in influence for senior adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is perceived by some as antagonistic toward the base.
A base-pleasing strategy carries its own risks. The New York Times/Siena College battleground poll finds that many 2016 Trump voters who are defecting now dislike his tone and oppose his handling of everything but the economy. Even if a base strategy is successful, it could still leave Trump stuck in the mid-40s.
A Monmouth University poll out Thursday found Trump trailing Biden by 12 points.
