In mid-August, a low point for Donald Trump, when he trailed behind Hillary Clinton by about eight points, one of his top advisers confronted the candidate during a meeting at Trump Tower. “Your biggest problem is temperament,” the adviser recalled telling Trump. “You remember Gerry Ford? He tripped a couple of times, and every time he misstepped the media made it into a big thing. Well, guess what? That’s what’s happening to you now. Don’t take their bait. You have to be careful what you say. So much of what people complain about is your temperament, because they want to know what you’re going to do. They don’t want to hear you brag. They want to hear what you’re going to do. And the type of voter you were going after in the primary is totally different than the type of voter we’re going after now, in the general.”
The math Trump faced was stark. In Presidential elections, the American electorate can be divided into three large categories: Hispanic and black and other non-white voters; college-educated whites; and the white working class. Polls showed that Clinton was at or above Barack Obama’s 2012 margins among the first two categories of voters, while Trump was only matching or slightly exceeding Mitt Romney’s level of support among the white working class. This was a recipe for a historic landslide against Trump. As a recent report by Ruy Teixeira, John Halpin, and Rob Griffin of the liberal Center for American Progress noted, the percentage of minority voters will likely rise by two points in 2016, college-educated whites will increase by more than a point, but the white working-class share of the electorate is projected to decline by 3.4 percentage points. Trump was banking his entire campaign on the fastest-shrinking faction of voters.
Trump’s adviser explained that the issue of the candidate’s temperament was not some phantom attack created by his opponents. Polls consistently showed that voters, by a margin of two to one, did not believe Trump has the temperament to be President; Democrats saw those polls, too, and so it was not surprising that the argument that Trump is temperamentally unfit to serve has been the centerpiece of the campaign against him. “With prior Republican nominees for President, I disagreed with them on politics, policies, principles, but I never questioned their fitness to serve,” Clinton said at the second debate. “Donald Trump is different.”
The choice before Trump was simple. He either needed to win back Republican-leaning college-educated whites, especially women, where the deficit was even worse than with men, or he needed a massive upsurge in the white working-class vote on Election Day. For instance, the demographers at CAP estimate that, if Clinton maintains her current strength among minorities and college-educated whites, Trump, in order to prevail, would need to win working-class whites by forty-six points, which is more than double Romney’s margin among that group in 2012, when he lost to Obama by four points.
In a sense, the strategic choice before Trump—double down on the white working class or reach out to white-collar whites—mirrored the differing approaches of the two top advisers who took over the campaign in August. Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager, had a history of sanding the rough edges off of Republican men in order to appeal to moderate women. By contrast, Steve Bannon, the new C.E.O. of Trump’s campaign, has spent the last few years as an architect of the neo-white nationalist movement that is toxic to the white-collar Republicans who have fled from Trump. For several weeks, it seemed that the Conway view of the campaign had prevailed. Trump was more scripted through late August and September. He talked about outreach to minorities, which was not so much about actually winning minority votes as it was about signalling to college-educated whites that Trump wasn’t a racist. He detailed a child-care tax deduction, which, despite its flaws as a coherent policy, was in synch with the strategic direction that Conway had pushed.
The wheels of this strategy came flying off in three dramatic episodes: Trump’s meltdown in the first debate, when he was unable to mount a sustained argument either for his candidacy or against Clinton’s; the release of the audio and video of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women; and the subsequent effective abandonment of Trump by Party leaders. (A quarter of Republican governors, senators, and Congress members have now said that they will not support Trump.)
“It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning, declaring an official end to the Conway experiment—and to any discernible plan to win the election. Trump is now attacking Republican leaders who allegedly betrayed him as much as he’s attacking Clinton. Perhaps the temper tantrum will pass and Trump will refocus his campaign in the final days on issues that have some strategic value to him. But it’s more likely that Trump knows he can’t win and that he has decided that the last stretch of his campaign should be used to set the stage for the aftermath of his loss. In this scenario, what’s crucial for Trump is to be able to convince his hard-core supporters that he—and they—didn’t lose, but that the dreaded Republican establishment sabotaged the Trump campaign in the final weeks. This strategy is in keeping with the way Trump has always spun his greatest defeats, from his failures in Atlantic City to his loss in the Iowa caucuses. He either denies that he failed or he argues that he was cheated.
Trump is either victorious or victimized, but never a loser. This week marked the end of Trump trying to actually win, and the beginning of him plotting to explain why the election was stolen.
