Public opinion analyst Karlyn Bowman said on Monday that President Trump’s talk of massive GOP turnout in the midterms could cause Republicans to stay home from the polls.
“President Trump, himself, has talked about a red wave, telling his supporters that ‘we’re going to win big,’ so maybe they think they can just stay home,” Bowman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha on “What America’s Thinking.”
Trump has repeatedly touted a “red wave” ahead of November’s midterm elections, despite multiple polls showing Democrats leading on the generic ballot.
Democrats lead Republicans by roughly 8 points, 49.1 percent to 41.3 percent, on a RealClearPolitics average of generic ballot surveys.
Many Trump supporters, however, appear to be convinced Republicans will come out in large numbers during the midterms.
An internal Republican National Committee survey obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek found that 57 percent of respondents who described themselves as strong Trump supporters said they don’t believe Democrats have a strong chance of taking back the majority in the House.
“President Trump has promoted the fact that there’s going to be a red wave, and his people believe everything he says,” political analyst Bill Schneider told Concha.
“He is rallying his supporters and they’re pretty indifferent. What they do remember, and talk about all the time is ‘aren’t these the same pollsters who said to us that Hillary Clinton was easily going to win the election?'”
Earlier this month, the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. told a conservative talk radio show that he was worried that Republican voters might not show up to vote in November because they were too complacent.
“We’ve just got to stay motivated. You know, that’s the real problem. Our guys, they’re getting everything that they’re wanting. I mean, my father’s going through his list of promises and checking them off one after the other after the other,” he told the audience of SiriusXM’s “Breitbart News Saturday.”
Trump Jr. told the audience that they should regard his father as being on the ballot when thinking about voting this November, even though the president actually isn’t.
“They don’t realize that Trump’s on the ticket in 2018, right?” he said. “There’s no question that we can win this, but we’re just fat, happy and lazy because we’re getting everything that we want,” Trump Jr. said, in remarks first reported by the liberal group People for the American Way.
— Julia Manchester
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