Trump: Almost Popular

Nate Silver tracks all the polls, calculates their biases and accuracy, and then takes the perfect weighted average. He’s amazing. I use his average for “likely voters” because that’s what really matters.

On March 27, Trump’s approval hit 46.3% and his disapproval hit 50.0%. Both are multi-year records, and the difference, minus 3.7%, is his best score since March 14, 2017 — less than two months after he took office. His handling of the pandemic is actually a little bit popular.

If we “flatten the curve,” and slow down the infections, it will help hospitals and those who need them, but it will take longer to end the epidemic. If the virus blasts through the population at its current high exponential rate, it will kill many more, but it could be over long before the election. And the economy would have time to recover. It could be booming from the stimulus and from everyone catching up on their spending.

Attacking Trump over Russia before we saw the Mueller report, only helped Trump and hurt Rachel Maddow. Attacking Kavanaugh helped Trump. So did Impeachment. The coronavirus is an even trickier situation.

There’s one clear example of what worked. Amy Klobuchar quietly asked Kavanaugh:

OK. Drinking is one thing, but the concern is about truthfulness, and in your written testimony, you said sometimes you had too many drinks. Was there ever a time when you drank so much that you couldn’t remember what happened, or part of what happened the night before?

It was a tough but fair question, ask quietly but tenaciously. Kavanaugh lost his temper and embarrassed himself. Then, next day, he came back and apologized. That never happens with a Trump/Kavanaugh type, but he knew she had won in the eyes of the public.

Most Democrats want to be seen as attacking Trump as a way to prove themselves to their base, and as a way of fending off vilification by extreme “progressives.” But seeing Trump under attack brings him sympathy from fence-sitters, and fires up his base.

What works is to look like you are not attacking him, but ask or say things that unnerve him. Then let him expose himself. Losing his balance when not attacked makes him look weak and ineffective. He loses standing with his base and those who are on the fence. That’s how Nancy Pelosi does it.