The New York Times reports that the Trump campaign is feeling its oats after surviving the impeachment that nobody ever thought would result in his removal. I guess it’s the little things …
The challenge facing Mr. Trump’s advisers remains the same as it has been since 2017: The president is among the most deeply divisive leaders in the nation’s history, whose conduct has helped accelerate a realignment of moderate suburban voters toward Democrats. These voters have been the cornerstone of Democrats’ electoral revival since 2016, helping them flip governorships and propelling their capture of the House.
Mr. Trump cannot win a second term without winning back suburban voters and independents in a handful of states he carried in 2016. But he is highly averse to staying on script and delivering a consistent message aimed at moderate voters rather than his hard-core admirers, or his own need to get things off his chest.
Mr. Trump’s advisers argue that the suburban voters who eschewed Republicans in the 2018 midterms will vote differently when the president’s name is on the ballot. And they are lacing the strong economy into much of their messaging and policy plans: Mr. Trump himself sees the economy as his calling card and is monitoring fluctuations in stock market closely, and his team thinks the economy is one of their best selling points in the suburbs.
“Suburban women is where he has a challenge,” said Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican from North Dakota. “I think the biggest problem that he has with suburban women is the part that so many in his base like about him,” Mr. Cramer said. “His rhetoric, his punching down at his opponents. It’s so different than anything they’ve seen.”…
Republican National Committee officials are tracking the suburban problem. In 2016, about 100,000 Michigan residents who voted in state legislative races left the box for president empty. Many of those voters were men in the suburbs, R.N.C. officials said, and were people who didn’t believe Mr. Trump was truly a conservative, but who have come back after seeing him deliver on conservative judicial appointments and a tax-cut bill.
But suburban women remain difficult to sway, Trump advisers acknowledge. Some messages have moved the dial, if only temporarily: When Mr. Trump talks about Democrats wanting to provide government health care benefits to undocumented immigrants, for instance, Republican officials have seen an uptick of support in their own surveys of the suburbs of Pennsylvania. When Mr. Trump paints the entire Democratic field, falsely, as supporting ending private health insurance, his advisers see room for him to grow. But they admit that it’s a difficult line to walk.
The G.O.P. strategy ultimately depends on who his Democratic opponent turns out to be. And Mr. Trump faces an unknown in Michael R. Bloomberg, a billionaire former New York City mayor running a general election strategy, who is spending so much money that Mr. Trump’s advisers acknowledged that he cannot be ignored even if Mr. Bloomberg loses the Democratic nomination.
With the Democrats enmeshed in the start of their primary season, Mr. Trump is beginning his own new phase: He has reasons to feel reassured about his prospects as he turns more fully to his re-election effort, and the apparatus of the White House and the Republican Party are more able to focus on winning him a second term.
The problem they have with all that is … him. And he’s not going to change. If anything he’s going to get worse as the pressure increases.
The real question is whether or not the Democrats can get their shit together and smartly go after his voluminous weaknesses instead of destroying themselves.
We live in hope.