At the beginning of the year, President Trump’s ticket to reelection was simple. While voters still disliked Trump on a personal level, all he had to do was appeal to the ways in which they liked Trump’s America: the lowest unemployment in a half-century tightening the job market so real wages grew for the first time in a decade (disproportionately in favor of minorities and women), some foreign policy victories, and the slow steps to dismantle the anti-growth regulatory bureaucracy thanks to Republican judicial appointees.
Half a year, a pandemic, and a summer of riots later, the calculus is much different. After posting record personal satisfaction and economic confidence at the beginning of the year, voters now overwhelmingly believe the nation is on the wrong track. Trump can no longer campaign on what has happened under his presidency and must make an affirmative case of what will happen if given the chance of a second term. But Trump has utterly failed to change the single most damaging dynamic of the race for his odds: namely that the overwhelming majority of voters are motivated by how they feel about him, not Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Biden had one job at this week’s Democratic National Convention: to make it easy for voters to go to the polls for him. And his team’s decision to remain mum on policy and engage in a full-scale campaign to appeal to decency succeeded. Save for a few rhetorical olive branches extended by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the Left, the bulk of the convention was dedicated to painting Biden as a family man, a bipartisan statesman, and the paragon of ethical fortitude standing between a nation in crisis and four more years of being subjected to Trump, defined less as an ideological extremist and more as a moral monster.
Trump’s entire celebrity, from his Manhattan heyday to his political reincarnation, has been built by the sort of brash and gildedly opulent machismo that invites negative partisanship. That’s a great way to score a magazine cover or even break out of a pack as an insurgent claiming to revolt against an establishment seen as complacent in the face of the suffering of the masses. That tonally doesn’t work while running for reelection after already having the keys to the castle for the previous four years.
Some 40% of the nation will never, ever vote for Trump. Trump doesn’t have to appeal to those voters, nor should he try. But what he absolutely must do is provide some cover, some veneer of effort, to the 10% of undecideds in the nation so that they can feel remotely good about themselves if they go to the polls and cast their vote for Trump.
Sure, Biden may want to nationalize California’s horrendous AB5 law that’s putting hundreds of thousands of freelance journalists, translators, and Uber drivers out of business, and his foreign policy may be very marginally less disastrous than that of Barack Obama. But that’s not salient in the minds of much of the country right now, which is instead looking at this election in highly emotional terms.
Trump cannot reverse voters’ opinions of him, but instead of creating nightmare news cycles for himself by celebrating self-described Islamophobes running for Congress and questioning whether the California-born Kamala Harris is eligible for the vice presidency on the basis of her immigrant parents, he can affirmatively use his record to explain how he will continue to help vast swaths of the country.
Mad about the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor? Well, just as Trump was the first president in generations to sign landmark criminal justice reform into law, he can be the first in generations to sign landmark police conduct reform into law. Worried about your business or your paycheck? Well, just as Trump’s fiscal agenda lowered unemployment to the point that three-quarters of new workers were pulled from outside of the labor force, he can do it again, especially as red states such as South Dakota are on pace to succeed. Feel like the rich are getting richer while this pandemic plunders the poor? Well, Trump succeeding in cutting taxes disproportionately for low- and middle-income earners, whereas Biden wants to remove Trump’s SALT deduction cap that would give upper-middle-class earners a tax break.
Furthermore, this tact would only require minor tweaks to Trump’s favorite tag lines. Maybe instead of talking about China screwing over our big businesses, Trump focuses on the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide against the Uighurs and use of technology to surveil people in the United States. Rather than beckoning his supporters to abandon blue cities burning to the ground, he expresses remorse that their mayors didn’t take him up on his offer for federal assistance in peacekeeping and protecting public safety. Instead of framing the conflict as red voters versus blue voters, how about framing it between the good, law-abiding residents in urban and rural areas versus the few rioters who hate everything America stands for?
Owning the libs isn’t just an increasingly tired sport. It also does nothing to remove the sticky framing of Trump as an unfeeling narcissist who doesn’t care for the little guy. No one wants to feel like they’re voting for someone primarily identified as a racist or a misogynist, so instead, Trump must make his actions and agenda (and perhaps more importantly, their benefits for the average person) more salient. Trump has a tall order for next week, but after Biden’s speech far outperformed the lesser sideshows of his convention, Trump must follow through if he wishes to salvage his reelection odds.
