When former President Trump’s campaign plane suffered mechanical problems en route to his Montana rally this weekend, it might as well have been a political metaphor come to life.
On Saturday, The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan described Donald Trump’s recent run of bad polling and rough outings as “the worst three weeks” of his campaign. That’s putting it lightly. After a year and a half commanding the headlines and coasting toward a general election victory, Trump’s campaign now seems to be falling apart in every way imaginable. Judging by his private fury, Trump is well aware that his moment is slipping away.
Trump’s slide in the polls can be attributed to a few factors, from his terrible vice presidential pick to President Biden’s unexpected departure from the race in late June. There’s also a simpler factor at play: voters have seen Trump’s politics of rage and division before. Given a fresh choice, most Americans are eager for something — anything — new.
A new crop of national and state-level polls bear out the reality that voters are simply ready to move on from the Trump show, which they’ve now been watching for the better part of a decade. A New York Times-Siena poll released Saturday found Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump 50-46 in each of the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Dig into that poll and you’ll discover the topline numbers are just the tip of a political iceberg for Republicans.
Nearly half of those surveyed (48 percent) said they were either dissatisfied or outright angry with Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, compared to 25 percent who said they were satisfied. Only 19 percent of voters said they were enthusiastic. By comparison, Harris’s new veep, Tim Walz, bests Vance in every category: 21 percent of voters say they are enthusiastic about Walz, while 27 percent are satisfied Harris made the right choice. Tellingly, only 36 percent say Harris made a mistake in picking Walz.
The 12-point dissatisfaction gap between Vance and Walz could be decisive in a race that is likely to be decided by single-digit vote margins across the Rust Belt.
Voters also seem to be aware of the big changes Trump would bring if he were to march back into the White House in 2025. More than a third of surveyed Americans (36 percent) agreed that the former president would “tear down the system completely” if he wins — and they aren’t thrilled about it. A full 45 percent of Americans believe Trump’s chaos agenda would be bad for the country, with four in 10 saying a second Trump administration would be “very bad.”
Trump’s biggest liability, then, is that voters know him well and don’t trust his policy judgment or his ability to pick a potential successor. Democrats, meanwhile, can credibly run as the party willing to make meaningful reforms while protecting the nation’s core institutions.
Trump is also unable to pivot on the issue. Millions of Americans watched him cheer on the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and then pledge to consider freeing those involved. Good luck convincing those voters that Trump suddenly cares about upholding America’s democratic order.
Harris’s surge across the swing states comes down to more than offering the American people a more optimistic vision for the future. Voters made clear that they weren’t excited about a Biden-Trump rematch because it represented the continuation of a battle the American people had long since grown tired of watching. By listening to the public and stepping aside, Biden facilitated a campaign reset that the Trump campaign is incapable of countering.
The problem with a 2024 Biden-Trump rematch was always Biden and Trump. The former president may spend the next few months calling Harris stupid and questioning her racial identity, but none of that will change the reality that Trump is now the sole remaining actor in a play American voters are eager to stop watching. Given the choice, voters are clearly ready to vote for the only candidate who can offer them a break from their 2020 nightmare flashbacks.
Trump can’t envision any presidential contest without himself as a candidate, and the MAGA movement can’t imagine any standard-bearer other than Trump. That puts the entire Republican Party into a “cult of personality” death spiral. No one realistically believes Trump will step aside because no one realistically believes Vance (or any other Republican) could hold together a MAGA coalition unified only by its Trump fanaticism.
As he continues to thrash in a panic over his declining poll numbers and dwindling voter base, we can expect even more behavior from Trump and his allies that will push voters into Harris’s camp, worsening the situation for down-ballot Republicans across the country.
Donald Trump is finally learning the same lesson that Biden acknowledged three weeks ago: sometimes, the problem is you.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.