Trump and his fans refuse to accept bad news, making a course change impossible.
Sean Hannity believes he has found the decisive factor in the 2016 election: “If in 96 days Trump loses this election, I am pointing the finger directly at people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and John McCain and John Kasich and Ted Cruz if he won’t endorse — and Jeb Bush and everybody else that made promises they’re not keeping.”
This is a fascinating perspective and one that is common to Trump fans. If their man loses, it cannot possibly reflect any flawed judgment, statement, strategy, or decisions on his part. They have already decided this. They don’t think anything he’s done so far has reduced his chances of victory. He has run as close to a perfect campaign as anyone can possibly ask, and the only thing standing between him and at least 270 locked-up-take-it-to-the-bank electoral votes is insufficient enthusiasm from Ryan, McConnell, Graham, etc.
Still, Hannity at least acknowledges that defeat is possible. At this point, it is not clear that Trump believes he is trailing. A vocal segment of his surrogates and supporters believe he is still on a smooth path to victory.
If one points to bad media coverage of Trump, his fans respond that the media are biased. Indeed they often are, but that doesn’t mean the bad media coverage is false.
If one points to bad polling for Trump, they will insist that the polls are either skewed or declare the polls are “a lie.”
You see extreme Pauline Kaelism: “Everybody I know is voting for Trump.” Perhaps that is the case (has this person really asked every person he knows?) — but their circle of friends of a dozen or several dozen or even a hundred is not likely to reflect the voting demographics of their state. If literally no one you know is voting for the candidate you dislike, you can be certain you’re in a bubble; Obama took 28 percent of the vote in Wyoming in 2012, and Romney took about the same share in Hawaii.
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Hillary’s dominating the airwaves in television ads, but Trump’s fans insist that doesn’t matter. Her super PAC has way more money than his does, but Trump’s fans insist that doesn’t matter. She has way more paid staffers and offices open in key swing states than Trump does, but Trump’s fans insist that doesn’t matter.
In each of these cases, there’s a germ of truth to the Trump fans’ argument. The press was brutal to George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 and he overcame that. Polls can have samples that include too many Democrats and aren’t likely to represent turnout in the elections. A lot of political television ads become ignored background noise in October, and the candidate with the most money doesn’t always win.
#share#But once all of these measuring sticks of a campaign are dismissed as meaningless, we’re left with key questions Trump’s fans — and arguably the candidate himself — stubbornly refuse to answer: What indicators do you trust? How do you know if what you’re doing isn’t working? Considering how quickly Trump shifted in his interest in polls, the philosophy seems to be that “all measurements with good news are true, and all measurements with bad news are false.” Any indicator of improvement is incontrovertible, every indicator of worsening is a damnable lie. That is a textbook definition of denial.
What do Trump fans believe is a good indicator of a campaign’s strength? Pin them down and they’ll answer: the size of the crowds at his rallies. If you’re skeptical of this as an accurate measuring stick, you have good instincts. Big crowds are nice to have, and the big crowds at Trump’s rallies in 2015 were a good early indicator that Republicans were a lot more interested in what he had to say than what, e.g., Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, or George Pataki did.
Every indicator of worsening is a damnable lie: That is a textbook definition of denial.
But each swing states has a voter pool of several million people. Getting 5,000 or 10,000 or 15,000 people to a rally doesn’t mean much in that context. In October 2012, Mitt Romney had three rallies with crowds estimated in excess of 12,000 people: in Fishersville, Va., Port St. Lucie, Fla., and Cuyahoga Falls, Oh. He lost all three states.
Four years earlier, John McCain and Sarah Palin attracted 13,000 in Colorado Springs, 15,000 in Fairfax, Va., and perhaps as many as 60,000 in The Villages, Fla. That ticket lost all those states, too.
Yes, it’s swell that Trump attracted 10,000 people to his rally in Jacksonville this week. But Florida will have between 8 and 9 million people voting this year. If only 8 million Floridians vote in the presidential election this year, the big turnout for Trump in that city will have amounted to 0.00125 percent of the electorate.
#related#In November 1988, the New York Times dutifully reported the high turnout for rallies featuring the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis: “15,000 in Philadelphia on Thursday, 9,000 in Chicago on Wednesday, and 7,500 in Milwaukee on Tuesday.” The candidate cheerfully declared he could feel the momentum and asked the crowd if they could smell the victory in the air.
He went on to smell defeat by 7 million votes, about eight percentage points, and 315 electoral votes.
The fixation on crowd size reflects the mentality of Trump and his fans; they begin with the conclusion they want — “All is well! We’re winning! Everything we’re doing is working great!” — and work backwards to find the evidence. Trump may not have the most solid record for Christian conservatives, but no one can deny he’s built one hell of a faith-based initiative.
– Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent of National Review.