Paul Waldman discusses the “enthusiasm gap” that the Republicans are all out there touting as the key to their success in November.
Its not all that:
Biden is familiar from his many years as a senator and vice president, which makes it harder to change how people think of him. Uncle Joe may be a little overbearing at times and say things he shouldn’t, but everyone knows he means well. You may find him occasionally exasperating, but you don’t hate him.AD
And unlike Clinton, he isn’t a woman, so he doesn’t bring out the same kind of venomous misogyny she did. Nor has he been the target of decades of attacks from the right, the way she was.
It’s almost impossible to overstate just how much Republicans hated Clinton — and how important that was in 2016.
Let’s take just one measure. For decades, the highly respected American National Election Studies has been asking voters to rate candidates on a “feeling thermometer.” In 2000, Republicans gave Al Gore an average thermometer rating of 41 out of 100. In 2008, they gave Obama an average rating of 37. Their average rating for Clinton in 2016 was 17.
That’s partly a result of polarization and negative partisanship (ratings for the other party’s candidate have been steadily declining for the past two decades), but it has a lot to do with Clinton herself. Trump’s victory in 2016 — losing by 3 million votes but squeaking out a win in the electoral college — was only possible because so many Republicans hated Clinton so much that they were able to put aside their reservations about Trump…
[T]oday, no Republican tries to make the same kind of case, despite the fact that Biden is running on a far more progressive platform than Clinton did. Republicans just can’t seem to work themselves up into the same frenzy of terror and loathing.
Which shows how much of what they felt in 2016 was personal, not about what Clinton would do in office. Not only that, with the Trump presidency being such a disaster, no Republican can tell themselves, as they did then, “Sure, he’s a bigot and a buffoon. But maybe it will be fine.”
Oh heck. And here I thought it was all about their economic anxiety…
Here’s why this is important:
And you know who is motivated by hate right now? Democrats. As political scientist Michael Tesler notes, in some polls, the proportion of Trump voters who have highly unfavorable opinions of Biden trails the proportion of Biden voters with highly unfavorable opinions of Trump by nearly 30 points.
The Trump campaign likes to talk about the “enthusiasm gap,” by which it means that Trump has more intense supporters than Biden. But this is the enthusiasm gap that matters. A voter who finds Biden simply tolerable but would crawl through fire to vote against Trump is worth just as much as a MAGA-clad devotee of the president.
Republicans may have hated Hillary Clinton with a passion but they haven’t seen anything until they’ve seen the monumental loathing for their Dear Leader. And he’s earned every single bit of it.