MSNBC
By Benjy Sarlin and Alex Seitz-Wald
February 9, 2016
For
months, the political world has been consumed by the question of
whether Donald Trump — that guy??? — could really win the GOP
nomination. Now Republicans and Democrats
alike are starting to ask the next question: What happens if he makes
it to the general election?
Approaching
Trump as his party’s nominee is difficult because he’s already
confounded so many political expectations to get to the point he is now.
What is clear, however,
is that the wealthy real estate mogul has not had to face the type of
attacks that are likely to come his way in a general election, nor has
he weathered anything close to the scale of negative ads he’d have to
endure to succeed. For a variety of reasons,
rival GOP candidates and their donor allies have overwhelmingly spent
their ad money bashing each other rather than Trump, hoping to winnow
down the field before taking the on the front-runner one-on-one.
Conversations
with strategists in both parties reveal two tough angles in particular
that Trump will have to overcome should he go up against Democrats in
the general
election.
Puncturing the populism
Trump’s
biggest superpower in the GOP primaries, the one that may propel him to
the nomination, is his ability to connect with blue-collar white
voters. He’s promised
to lift those voters up while waging war on their perceived enemies:
China abroad, immigrants at home, and elites everywhere.
To
some Democrats and Republicans, the obvious play then is to try and
wreck the myth of “Donald Trump: Working Class Hero.” That means an
onslaught of ads casting him
as a heartless businessman stomping on the weak: Things like trying to
kick veteran vendors off his street, suing an elderly widow to turn her
home into a parking lot, applying to bring in foreign workers while
decrying them on the trail for stealing jobs.
He’s also complained during the campaign that “wages [are] too high” in
America to compete with China.
It
took awhile, but you’re starting to see this angle from some Republican
groups and candidates. Liz Mair, the GOP strategist behind the
anti-Trump Make America Awesome
PAC, told MSNBC it’s the only angle that works in focus groups. The
group’s current slogan in New Hampshire ads: “He’s For Trump: Not Us.”
This
is only half of the attack Trump would face from Democrats, however.
The critical second part is something Republicans can’t deploy for
ideological and political
reasons: Trump’s policies would make him personally a whole lot richer.
Trump’s
sweeping multi-trillion dollar tax plan would massively benefit him,
his business empire, and especially his globetrotting safari-hunting
heirs who would pay zero
taxes on their inheritance. Why don’t the other candidates bring it up?
They’re promising similarly lavish tax breaks for the one percent.
It didn’t attract much notice at the time, but Bernie Sanders has already targeted Trump with this exact frame.
“This
is a guy who does not want to raise the minimum wage,” the Democratic
candidate said in a CBS interview in December. “In fact, he has said
that he thinks wages in
America are too high. But he does want to give hundreds of billions of
dollars in tax breaks to the top three-tenths of 1 percent.”
That
line touched a nerve with Trump, who responded on Twitter by abandoning
his “wages” remark (which he made on camera at two separate points) and
claiming it was misinterpreted.
He can expect to face a crush of ads with those clips as well as him
boasting “I fight like hell to pay as little as possible” when he
debuted his tax plan.
Prominent
Clinton allies are predicting an offensive along these lines, according
to a Politico report, which they liken to the ferocious attacks on
layoffs and bankruptcies
at Bain Capital that helped drag down Mitt Romney in 2012.
Obama
campaign veterans always insisted that the special sauce to the attacks
against Romney was the broader argument that Republican policies would
only enrich people
like him. Romney anticipated the attacks and pledged early on not to
use loopholes to try and lower his own tax bill, which created problems
of its own. Trump has left himself wide open and relied on his
“authenticity” to repel attacks, but there’s no telling
if it will work outside of his base.
Building a backlash
Others
within the Democratic Party put less stock in a Bain-style attack
targeting Trump’s blue-collar white support. The more important task,
they argue, is using Trump’s
words and positions to fire up the Democratic base.
The
top goal for Democrats in 2016 is to keep up their margins and turnout
with the Obama coalition: Single women, Latinos, and African Americans.
If they show up, Republicans
will have to push their share of the white vote to new heights, giving
them only a narrow path to victory.
Trump
has antagonized every single group in the Obama coalition. All
Democrats have to do, the thinking goes, is remind them with a series of
parallel campaigns narrowly
aimed at each group.
“I
truly believe these targeted demographic attacks are going to be the
most important ones,” one top Democratic strategist told MSNBC. “It’s
hard to imagine who he’s
left uncovered at this point.”
While
Republicans have castigated Trump for bigotry at points, minority
voters are mostly a bit player in GOP primary contests and rivals’
attacks against him have been
far more muted than anything that would come his way in a general
election.
Expect
Trump calling undocumented immigrants “rapists” to play on Hispanic
media 24/7, his flirtations with apparent white supremacists to run on
black radio stations,
and a greatest hits of his most sexist moments everywhere. Surrogates
would blitz the news making the same case to each slice of the
electorate individually.
“Trying
to win a primary in primary campaign where the base of the party votes
is very different than winning a general election,” Clinton strategist
Joel Benenson told
MSNBC, citing the significant demographic differences.
About
89 percent of all Republican voters in the 2012 presidential election
were white, per exit polls, but the overall electorate was only 72
percent white and that number
is projected to drop another two points in 2016 thanks to population
trends. Moreover, Trump’s support is most concentrated among non-college
educated white voters, a group whose share of the electorate is on the
decline.
Trump’s
boasted that he’ll win the majority of Latinos and African Americans
come November, but current polling supports the notion that he’s
isolated himself even as
he’s driven his own support up within the GOP. Recent Gallup polling
found 60 percent of Americans had an unfavorable view of Trump, far
higher than previous nominees in either party. He’s been a bogeyman in
Spanish-language news for months and his poll numbers
with Latino voters are poisonously low even at a point when most
Americans usually don’t tune in closely to the election.
The
caveat is that Trump was similarly unpopular in polls of Republican
voters when he started his campaign and he managed to clean up his
image. Reintroducing himself
to the broader public will be tougher when he’s been the top news story
in the country for months, but he’s proven his doubters wrong plenty of
times already. He’s also proven competitive in some early general
election polls.
Make no mistake, though: The toughest hits have yet to come.
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