The start of the week brings us a raft of latter-day Trump endorsers who now have the look of a base-runner caught between 1st and 2nd after a miracle line drive catch. They already committed; no easy way back.
Part of this is the reaction to Trump’s escalating round of racist tirades against the federal judge presiding over the complex, far-ranging and increasingly damning fraud lawsuits brought against him. But there’s another part of the equation garnering much less attention. Just after Trump clinched the nomination, his head to head poll numbers against Hillary Clinton surged. May horse race polls are erratic and often misleading. We shouldn’t read too much into them. But people do read a lot into them. And there’s little doubt that seeing Trump go from what seemed like a sure loser to a maybe winner helped a lot of Republican elected officials get over the hump and come out in favor of Trump as their nominee.
Early June polls are just as erratic and limited in value as mid-May polls. But note that Trump’s numbers have been falling for two or three weeks. Clinton now has a 4-5 point edge over Trump. These numbers, just as much as the mid-May soundings, are playing into Republican cold feet about their rushed sign on to the Trump campaign.
More substantively, there are good reasons to believe that Trump’s mid-May ‘surge’ was always going to be ephemeral. Two things happened simultaneously. Trump clinched the nomination and rapidly coalesced Republican voters – if not all Republican elites – around his campaign. At the same time, the Democratic primary took a more divided and divisive turn, further sapping Clinton’s support. Taken together those two factors pushed Trump into a momentary tie with Clinton.
Even the possibility that Trump might become head of state was rightly worrisome to sane people everywhere. But looked at more closely these polls were bad news rather than good for Trump. Even with the most propitious confluence of events, Trump only managed to pull even for a moment. John McCain also managed to pull even or move slightly ahead at just the same moment in the campaign in 2008. He went on to be crushed in November.
The truth is these polls don’t tell us very much one way or another, other than as an explanation for why virtually the entire elite of the GOP willingly placed themselves in their current predicament. As I wrote over the weekend, GOP endorses are now facing the full force of what many the few genuine Republican NeverTrumpers were warning: Trump is mercurial and mentally unstable enough to do all manner of damage to Republican electoral prospects over the long and intense months of a general election campaign. And it’s only just June.
