Those of you who read this blog know about the Republicans’ affinity for the bandwagon effect — tell everyone you’re winning and in the end people will want to go with the winner. Trump is especially enamored of this because he brags about everything anyway.
Dan Pfeiffer has a piece today explaining that it might not be the smartest move this time out.
Believe it or not, there are strategic reasons why Republicans publicly assert they are winning no matter what the polls say, and Democrats always hypothesize that a stunning defeat is right around the corner.
However, this election is unlike any other. The electoral coalitions have shifted, and the Trump campaign did not adjust its playbook to address the new reality.
For the longest time, the Republican coalition was comprised of older, mostly college-educated voters who participated in every election. Democratic success, on the other hand, depended on turnout from lower-propensity voters who rarely voted in midterms.
This explains why Republicans generally did better in lower-turnout midterm elections and Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one presidential election since 1988 (Yep, you read that correctly). Higher turnout was good for Democrats and bad for Republicans. Higher turnout means irregular voters show up and dilute the power of the GOP’s hard-core base of regular voters.
[…]
Because of the differing nature of their coalitions, Democrat and Republicans took different approaches to motivating their voters.
The Republican theory depends on the “Bandwagon Effect.” They believe that undecided voters will tip to the likely winner. The Republicans want the illusion of momentum at the end of a campaign. They often go to extreme measures to create that illusion. They rely on a barrage of junk polls that show their candidates winning. They assert that the map is shifting in their direction — even campaigning in solidly Blue states as a demonstration of confidence.
Democrats worry about complacency. Lower-propensity voters are less likely to vote if the outcome is assured. In other words, their decision to turn out depends on believing their vote matters. We learned this lesson in 2016. Approximately four million people who voted for Obama in 2012 stayed home during that election, which helped put Donald Trump in the White House.
Pfeiffer points out that coalitions have changed dramatically since 2016, however. With those college-educated suburbanites moving to the Democrats, it’s the GOP that depends on low propensity voters. He quotes a Cook Report survey that found”
Our final poll finds Harris leading 51%-47% among high-engagement voters — a remarkably stable four-point lead the same as the previous two polls — only this time with just 2% remaining undecided. But Trump has bounced back to a seven-point lead with low/mid-engagement voters, 52%-45% — smack dab in between his 10-point lead over Biden among those voters in May and his three-point lead over Harris in August. The likely explanation? Since August, Trump has consolidated more Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters and other third-party voters to his column, allowing him to increase his low/mid-engagement vote share from 48% to 52%, while Harris’s share among that group has remained stagnant at 45%.
Pfeiffer notes:
Trump and the Republicans now need less-likely voters to turn out — the exact type of voter prone to complacency. There is now real dissonance between the Trump campaign’s messaging and its target voters.
Trump is literally telling his voters that he can’t lose (unless the other side cheats) and it’s clear they are already measuring the drapes for the White House. He’s campaigning in states he can’t win and is refusing to do interviews and events by the dozen. He’s acting like he’s already got it in the bag. Of course.
Pfeiffer points out that Obama’s team knew they had to turn out those low propensity voters so they built a massive, sophisticated field operation. I remember it well and it started months before the election. As you know (just read the previous post) the Trump team has not done that. They outsourced their field operation to Super PACs one of which, Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point ,has been relegated to just one state after failing to meet goals this month and the other a late comer to the party, Elon Musk, who’s apparently having similar problems.
As Pfeiffer says, the GOP hasn’t updated its campaign strategy and frankly, I don’t think they could if they wanted to because Trump lives by the bandwagon effect. He just lies and lies about everything, under the assumption he can make people believe anything. And he’s certainly right about the members of his cult. But whether he can count on that working with low propensity voters in another thing. They might just hear him bragging about how great he is and assume he’s going to win whether they vote or not. If they like him, that’s a problem.