Donald Trump hovers on knife-edge in polls

Donald Trump boards Air Force One after his Orlando rally. Picture: AP.

A few weeks ago Donald Trump invited one of the country’s more seasoned political pollsters to the White House to discuss his prospects in next year’s election. The pollster explained that when an incumbent seeks re-election it all comes down to his job-approval ratings. “If he’s at 40 per cent approval, he’s finished. No chance,” he told the attentive president. “If he’s at 50 per cent, he’s home and dry.”

So where did that leave the president, his listener was eager to know. “Right now, my polling has you at 45. Right in the middle.”

Mr Trump, of course, demurred, saying he had seen polling with much higher ratings than 45. But no one outside the White House fundamentally disputes the inescapable arithmetic, or its conclusion. Through almost 30 months of this tumultuous administration, Mr Trump’s ratings have been remarkably consistent: that critical job-approval number has hovered in a narrow range most of the time around the win/lose mark. And the indications are that as the election draws near, the amplitude of the swings in his rating is diminishing. Over the past year the monthly NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has shown his approval oscillating steadily in an arrow-slit of a window between 43 and 47 per cent.

Whichever way you look at it, Donald Trump, the 45th president, is defined, constrained and governed by that number 45. That’s the backdrop to the launch of his re-election campaign this week in Orlando. It’s not clear that there is much he can do to get his numbers well clear of break-even level. The economy is in good health, the country is at peace, and voters give the president credit for that. But those credits are balanced by enduring debits: continuing reservations about his character, manner and style. And so, in near perfect equilibrium, we are back to that magic number.

Unless there is some unforeseeable event that shifts the apparently immovable political realities, we are heading either for yet another razor’s-edge election, or the president has to find alternative ways to win.

One way could be to offer some promises for a second term. If you press them, the president’s advisers wax lyrical about a plan that will both build on the economic achievements of the first four years and do or complete the things he won’t get finished in his first term. That wall will be built, with a more complaisant Congress (and perhaps Mexico) toeing the line. Obamacare will be properly repealed and replaced with a less onerous healthcare system that somehow still protects the indigent. Mr Trump the builder will get big infrastructure projects done for a nation whose roads and airports are a crumbling wreck. Abroad, we’ll get Middle East peace, a return home of US forces from Afghanistan and the Middle East, Iran back in its non-nuclear box, and a cowed China, much more willing to play by the rules on trade.

But it doesn’t take a cynic to spot that this message is exactly the same as it was four years ago, and it seems clear that this is exactly how the president plans to campaign.

The Florida launch speech felt a lot like late Frank Sinatra doing the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The raw talent was still there, the almost spiritual connection with an adoring audience that would follow him anywhere, and if you closed your eyes the lilting timbre of his voice even evoked the crooning of Ol’ Blue Eyes himself. But as with late Frank, the material hadn’t changed in years.

For Bad Bad, Leroy Brown, we had Crooked, Crooked Hillary Clinton. He spent a good part of the night inveighing against his vanquished opponent for all the world as if he were running against her again in 2020. He reminded the crowd of the infamous missing emails and got a rousing encore of “Lock her up”.

He attacked Democrats, though with more up-to-date material this time, accusing them of plotting a coup against him by trying for impeachment. And, of course, there was the media, the fake-news, dishonest, enemy-of-the-people media engaged in a conspiracy with his political opponents.

He did offer one major change from 2016, conducting an impromptu poll as to whether the 2020 campaign slogan should be “Make America Great Again” or “Keep America Great”. The latter got a substantially larger ovation.

The pundits may regard all this as warmed-over Trumpery circa 2015 but who’s to say it won’t be effective?

It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the large base of Trump supporters is animated less by a litany of economic data or a list of second-term promises and more by the cultural solidarity Mr Trump represents. This is expressed more by what he and his supporters detest than what they want or plan: Democrats, the Clintons in particular, who in their indefatigably narcissistic way refuse to take themselves out of the national picture; the media, much of which continues to treat the president (and his supporters) like a communicable disease; and illegal immigrants who remain an inviting target for a law-and-order president.

The Democrats still have to pick a candidate. In the abstraction of hypothetical opinion polls it’s a lot easier for a generic Democrat to beat Mr Trump than it will be once that Democrat is flesh and blood, with a history, a record and set of positions (socialism, anyone?) that might start to make voters who are withholding their approval of Mr Trump hold their nose and tick the box.

In any case, in 2016 Donald Trump won just 46 per cent of the vote. That’s not much more than 45.

The Times