Over the last 24 hours there have been a raft of articles – from some of the profession’s top journalists – about a growing Republican push to reject Donald Trump as nominee in Cleveland. This is quite simply a fantasy. At this point it would involve a convention coup against the man who has unquestionably clinched the nomination. They might as well blow up the convention hall and pretend they never planned to contest the election in the first place. See it less as part of what we call reality than as a measure of the agony of Republican elected officials (comparable to the desperate cries amidst delirium of those who have suffered profound injuries) and the denial that goes along with that. But again, I want to return to the polls and to note how much the polls are driving this. It’s not just Trump’s increasingly blatant racism, which has gotten so much more attention.
As you can see here, from late April through mid-May Hillary Clinton’s margin over Donald Trump decreased markedly. Two factors seemed to be at work. His primary ended and Republican voters coalesced around his candidacy. Her primary may have been over in mathematical terms around the same time. But it actually became much more acrimonious, thus driving down her potential support among Sanders supporters. Since PollTracker uses a regression analysis rather than just tracking a simple mathematical average to find the ‘average’ of the polls, what you don’t see here is that in real time Trump actually had a momentary, fractional lead in mid-late May.
As you can see, he’s been tracking down since.
For Democrats, the promising part of these numbers is that the primary process on their side really only ended on Tuesday. As PPP noted in their write-up yesterday of their most recent Pennsylvania poll, her numbers are being heavily weighed down by Sanders supporters who are resisting switching their support to Clinton for the general election. “If Clinton could win over even just half of those Sanders supporting hold outs her lead over Trump (in Pennsylvania) would go from a tenuous 41-40 to a comfortable 47-40.”
It would be historically unprecedented for a nominee not to be able to make up half those resisting her candidacy at the end of a bitterly contested primary. Look at 2008 for just the most recent example. Whether Clinton will be able to bring around 50% or 80% or 95% of Sanders hold outs is a good question. But from the vantage point of early June it’s all upside for her. And she’s already reopening her lead against Trump nationwide.
Which brings us back to Republicans who keep oscillating between Stockholm Syndrome and Bravehart braggadocio in their shotgun marriage to Donald Trump. Yes, I get that Republican officials are genuinely shocked and in many cases outraged by Trump’s overt racism and indifference to the independence of the judiciary. But c’mon, unless they took a nap for the last year none of this is really a surprise. There is a simple fact here that is undeniable. Republicans united around Trump when his polls were climbing and it started to seem that he wasn’t a certain loser in November. Whether anybody should be giving May polls that much significance is besides the point; they do. Now they’re looking at the Curiel blow up in the context of new data which makes it look like May was just an ephemeral bump. There’s no reason not to run for the exits, even though the exits are double bolted and there’s a raging dumpster fire on the other side of the door.
The upshot is simple: Republicans are seeing again the general election they’ve gotten themselves into, getting behind a party leader who is an erratic and impulsive pathological liar with ingrained grievances against non-whites, women and anyone who happens to get on his nerves at the moment. But they’re also getting cold feet because his poll numbers are getting worse.
