Instead of feeling confident with Joe Biden leading battleground polls, amassing a huge fundraising advantage and surviving a debate in which President Trump went after his family, some Democrats are flinching.
To them, it resembles the final days of the 2016 campaign.
It's not, analysts said.
"The only similarities I see are that Trump is trying the same tactics as four years ago," said Amanda Renteria, who was a political director of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. "But everything else is different."
The biggest difference, said Kelly Dittmar, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, "is now you have four years of a Trump presidency. When he says, 'Make America great again, again,' people can ask, 'Why didn't that happen?'"
Nevertheless, the trauma of 2016 has turned Democrats into "the neurotic party," said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who has worked on three GOP presidential campaigns but is now advising Republican Voters Against Trump, a super PAC that supports Biden.
"They wake up every day and read (polling analyst) Nate Silver and say, 'Oh my God. Biden was up nine points yesterday and he's up eight today. He's going to lose!'" Murphy said. "They think Trump is going to blow into a ram's horn to summon a zombie army at midnight who are going to swoop in and win the election. They can't forget 2016."
That's because virtually every top pollster pointed to a Clinton victory in that campaign's closing days. Trump was trying to recover from the leak of the "Access Hollywood" tape where he bragged about grabbing women's genitals. His prospects seemed so dire after the tape dropped that then-Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus suggested he drop out of the race.
About a week before election day, longtime Democratic strategist Chris Lehane told The Chronicle that for Trump to win, he would have to make the equivalent of a miniature golf shot that goes "off the wall, through the waterfall, under the windmill and into the hole."
Trump sank that shot.
He could nail that shot again, too. But it will be harder. Here's why:
Trump has a record now: Four years ago, Trump campaigned as a political outsider. He promised to "drain the swamp" of moneyed interests in Washington, build a wall on the southern border that Mexico would pay for, and bring back manufacturing jobs from overseas.
While Trump fulfilled some promises — he has appointed conservative judges and signed a tax cut that largely benefited wealthy Americans and corporations — he broke nearly half of them, according to the nonpartisan Politifact. Seven former advisers who worked on his campaign or at the White House have been indicted.
While battleground voters still rate him highly for his handling of the economy, polls indicate they're leaving him because of how he has managed the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 223,000 Americans.
"Now voters aren't just looking at what they think is possible, they're looking at a record of achievement or failure," Dittmar said. "What he's talking about isn't just aspirational anymore. Some of the things he promised didn't happen."
Murphy said the act isn't novel the second time around.
"It's like going to see the comedian Gallagher," Murphy said. "Do you ever hear anybody say, 'I'd like to see that again?'"
Trump's closing message is scattershot: Part of Trump's success down the home stretch in 2016 was that he had a focused message. The wealthy New Yorker won white voters without a college degree by portraying himself as the voice of the common man.
"I have visited the laid-off factory workers and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals," Trump said when he accepted the GOP nomination. "These are the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice. I am your voice."
But in recent weeks, Trump's focus has been elsewhere. He spends far more time railing on the media, which excites few beyond his base. Last week, he abruptly ended a "60 Minutes" interview after what he called unfair questioning.
"Look at the bias, hatred and rudeness on behalf of '60 Minutes' and CBS," Trump wrote in a Facebook post of footage the White House shot of the interview.
He even has even taken potshots at people in his administration, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General William Barr and FBI director Christopher Wray. At Thursday's debate, he said that "deep down in the IRS, they treat me horribly."
"The grievances have gone from being about us to being about him," Murphy said.
A more united Democratic front: The split never healed four years ago between supporters of Clinton and her primary rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. On election day, 12% of Sanders primary voters backed Trump, according to a Tufts University study.
Some asked for more detail on how Sanders primary voters behaved in general. This graphic shows this, including small % who abstained 2/n pic.twitter.com/iOjKr7eoYJ
— Brian Schaffner (@b_schaffner) August 23, 2017There is little animosity this year. Biden and Sanders formed a unity coalition to reach consensus on policy issues, and progressives vowed to support Biden.
Plus, there are few viable third-party options for disgruntled Democrats. In 2016, Green Party candidate Jill Stein's vote total was greater than Trump's margin of victory in three longtime Democratic states that he flipped— Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Jill Stein is now officially the Ralph Nader of 2016.
Stein votes/Trump margin: MI: 51,463/10,704 PA: 49,678/46,765 WI: 31,006/22,177
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) December 1, 2016New left-leaning organizations like Swing Left and Indivisible tapped into grassroots anger that Trump's victory created. Their organizing helped Democrats take the House in 2018.
"That election brought in a lot of new voices like AOC (New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) who are attracting a lot more new voters," said Renteria, the former Clinton political director. "There is a whole new ecosystem that has been preparing for this election for almost four years now."
The October surprises haven't stuck: Four years ago, FBI director James Comey damaged Clinton's campaign by reopening the investigation into her use of a private server for government emails less than two weeks before the election.
Trump has tried to re-create that scenario by flogging unsupported accusations about the former vice president being paid by foreign countries. But those attacks haven't resonated with swing voters.
Part of the reason is that there are fewer undecided voters. Four years ago, 1 in 5 voters didn't like either candidate, but most ultimately backed Trump. That is unlikely to happen this year, said David Binder, a Democratic pollster who worked on Barack Obama's and Clinton's campaigns.
"Trump has galvanized the opposition against him," Binder said. "And it has also galvanized that hard-core base that has been with him since the beginning."
Gender isn't on the ballot: Binder said he underestimated "the visceral hatred" for Clinton among swing state independent voters.
"Even after the debates, where she showed how smart she was, people talked about how they didn't like her voice or her style or something else," Binder said. "There were some gender issues that held her back."
There is a likability bias against female candidates, said Dittmar, who is the director of research for the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.
Biden benefits from "white male privilege," she said. "And one of the benefits is the expectation that he is seen as more electable."
Biden made his gender part of his pitch to voters when he campaigned in Iowa in January. He said that although Clinton was the victim of sexist attacks, "that's not going to happen with me."
And yet ... Despite all this, analysts say Trump still has a chance to win.
Although the national polling gap is daunting, Trump has a plausible path to an Electoral College victory. He could lose two of those three longtime Democratic states he flipped in 2016 — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — and still prevail, as long as he wins all the other states that went his way. State polling indicates that is far from impossible.
Legal impediments to voting, mostly the work of GOP lawmakers, in some of those states could blunt Democratic turnout. So could fears about contracting the coronavirus. But, as Murphy pointed out, more than 53 million voters — roughly one-third of the expected turnout — have already cast their ballots.
"Trump's ability to change the trajectory of this race," the longtime Republican strategist said, "shrinks a little bit more every day."
Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle's senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
"can" - Google News October 24, 2020 at 06:00PM https://ift.tt/2FVqvFQ
Can Trump repeat his 2016 magic? Not impossible, but also not likely - San Francisco Chronicle "can" - Google News https://ift.tt/2NE2i6G https://ift.tt/2zR1XdH
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