Republicans and their media shills keep repeating— ad nauseum— that if Señor T would just stick to the talking points his handlers have written for him, he would win, win, win. They want him to talk about issues, not crowd sizes or Kamala’s race or personal appearance or any of his wild grievances going back years and years. The problem with that, of course, is that the voters detest Republican positions on issues, something Trump understands better than the Republican establishment does.
Yesterday, Greg Sargent highlighted a new poll from Ipsos that compared voters’ perceptions of Tim Walz and the weirdo Trump made his running mate. Sargent’s point is that the Vance and the GOP campaign are unpopular because their agenda is unpopular. “The survey— which breaks down public perceptions of them in demographic detail— suggests Vance’s style of right-wing populism may have a long way to go to achieve the broad-based appeal that its proponents have long hoped for,” wrote Sargent. “It’s often said that Trump chose Vance to maximize the ticket’s appeal to non-college white voters, but doing so may come at a steep price with other voter groups among whom Trump must improve if he wants to win.”
While 42 percent of Americans view Vance unfavorably and 32 percent view him favorably— putting him 10 points underwater— Walz is viewed favorably by 39 percent to 30 percent. That’s a net difference of 19 points.
Even more striking is how various groups see Vance:
He is viewed favorably by only 24 percent of independents, versus 39 percent unfavorably.
He is viewed favorably by only 23 percent of self-described moderates, versus 41 percent unfavorably.
He is viewed favorably by only 22 percent of 18- to 39-year-olds, versus 44 percent unfavorably.
He is viewed favorably by only 32 percent of women, versus 40 percent unfavorably (interestingly, Vance fares a tad worse among men).
He is viewed favorably by only 28 percent of Hispanics, versus 39 percent unfavorably.
He is viewed favorably by only 9 percent of Blacks, versus 50 percent unfavorably.
He is viewed favorably by only 32 percent of suburbanites, versus 42 percent unfavorably.
He is viewed favorably by only 33 percent of college-educated whites, versus a striking 55 percent unfavorably.
By contrast, Walz is viewed positively on net by those groups— though his favorable ratings are clearly not high enough among them yet.
Unsurprisingly, Vance is viewed positively by non-college whites (+9 points), rural voters (+13 points), and white evangelicals (+37 points). This is the trade-off that Trump made in picking Vance: Brimming with certainty that he would win by a landslide before Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate, Trump chose a running mate who would juice his base, with little concern about his lack of appeal to voters outside it. That hubris, a key weakness of MAGA, has, by encouraging the Vance pick, seemingly produced a serious mistake.
…There is evidence that perceptions of progressive excess in the Democratic Party may have caused some erosion among certain nonwhite working-class constituencies. But now the full range of Vance’s own extreme views is emerging. His immigration skepticism has shaded into forms of “great replacement theory.” His views about the virtues of childbearing have curdled into a demand that All Good Citizens must contribute many more birth children toward solving long-term demographic woes, which apparently cannot be addressed through immigration, managed judicially in the national interest.
…Many non-MAGA voters—especially among Latinos, moderates, independents, suburban women, and so forth— are probably reachable with certain right-leaning arguments about crime, border disorder, and woke excesses. But the ethnonationalist-natalist vision of our citizenship duties goes too far, and surely alienates them as well. When Democrats denounce Vance as “weird,” it’s shorthand for disgust at that worldview— and large swaths of those constituencies likely agree.
Yesterday, at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania for himself and Senate candidate David McCormack, Trump decided to campaign against Kamala’s looks, babbling on with his typical stand-up comedy routine nonsense and insisting that he’s “much better looking than her. I’m a better-looking person than Kamala.” He also called her a lunatic, mocked her laugh, and claimed she didn’t pick Josh Shapiro as her running mate because he’s Jewish— was that why he didn’t pick David Kustoff (R-TN) or Max Miller (R-OH) as his own running mate? He also critiqued her popular— popular outside of billionaire circles— economic agenda: “This is communist; this is Marxist; this is fascist.”
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