On an almost daily basis Trump exaggerates or lies about his opponents and says that once he is elected he will do things that sound like the acts an all powerful dictator after a military coup. I’m not going to bother listing all of the horrible things he has been saying. The list is way too long. Suffice it to say that if even one of those things would have ever been said about any presidential candidate in the past, he would have been completely rejected by the American electorate as unfit. Presidential candidates have dropped out for a lot less. (Gary Hart and Ed Muskie come to mind.)
And yet the latest polls have shown the election to be a dead heat. The more Trump talks his trash, the better his poll numbers become. The latest numbers according to the latest NBC poll show an actual tie between likely voters: 48% for Harris and 48% for Trump. And a statistical tie in al the battleground states. The election is 3 weeks out and these are the best numbers for Trump since Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Considering that more than half the electorate votes democratic, this means some Democrats are switching their vote to Trump.
Not only that but while the percentages for Harris are still high, Black and Hispanic support for her has dropped from what they were for Biden in the last election. Some in these both of these 2 demographics have switched their allegiance to Trump, too.
The media has been relentless. Every day they report on a new and obvious exaggeration or lie Trump tells his supporters at a rally about his opponent - or the revenge he’s going take against his ‘enemies’ after he wins the election. And yet, it is as though this is helping him rather than hurting him.
The media must be pretty shocked by all this. Is there nothing they can say or do to wake the American people up to the reality of who and what they will be voting for – if the vote for Trump? They must be collectively shaking their heads in utter disbelief.
I think the answer to all of those questions is that the American electorate knows exactly what he has been saying and they don’t care! They do not take his trash talk literally and don’t care about his lies and exaggerations. Nor do they care about his vindictiveness over his ‘enemies’.
Those same polls show what the electorate does care about. The two most important things being the economy and illegal immigration. Most of the electorate believes they were far better off financially when Trump was president. And they fully support his policy of mass deportation of all illegal immigrants. By far. While the abortion rights issue favor Harris, I don’t think that is what’s moving the electorate.
This is the only explanation I can think of. It appears that these 2 issues override all other considerations. They do not believe that Trump will destroy the country in a second term anymore than he did in his first term. They in fact believe the opposite. That they were better off then than they are now. They want to go back to that.
If the media wants to understand why their very harsh and very legitimate criticism of Trump isn’t working, they ought to think about that.