Let’s not naively insist on taking a wait-and-see approach regarding the events of the past 24 hours. The revelation of a tape from 2005 in which Donald Trump was caught making a number of lewd comments about women, and seemed to condone unwanted sexual contact toward women, is bad news for Trump. (#Analysis.) It’s not going to help Trump to become president in a country in which 53 percent of voters are women. [...]
Many of those Republican defections are strategic rather than sincere, of course. If the news had broken when Trump was 5 or 6 percentage points ahead of Clinton instead of 5 or 6 points behind her, we probably wouldn’t see quite so coordinated and forceful a reaction. But the timing of this is just about as bad as possible for Trump. Even before the “hot mic” tape, there were reports that GOP elected officials might abandon Trump if he had a poor second debate. That makes sense, given that the Senate is still close to a toss-up and hasn’t made a definitive break in either direction. With one month left until the election, there’s perhaps just enough time for vulnerable Republican candidates to convince themselves that they’re better off abandoning Trump than sticking by him. [...]
On the one hand, the fact that Trump’s support was so low to begin with could presumably mitigate the damage to him. If you’re only getting 40 percent of the vote, the voters you do have are probably pretty committed to you — and Trump has some passionate supporters.
On the other hand, the fact that Trump has only 40 percent of the vote means that the downside for him is awfully far down. What if he doesn’t win over any undecideds, and 40 percent turns out to be more of a ceiling than a floor? Trump’s unfavorable rating was approaching 60 percent even before the “hot mic” tape surfaced, which means he was already running into a headwind in terms of picking up additional support. Furthermore, he’s targeted a narrow slice of the electorate instead of a majority coalition. He doesn’t have much of a ground game to turn out his marginal voters, and, especially if he’s losing in the polls, they could decide that it just isn’t worth the time to vote.
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