The latest such evidence comes in a new study released today by Navigator Research, a consortium of Democratic research and advocacy groups. The report, provided exclusively to The Atlantic, examines a group that many analysts in both parties believe could prove to be the key bloc of 2020 swing voters: Americans who say they approve of Trump’s management of the economy, but still disapprove of his overall performance as president. And it shows Trump facing significant headwinds among that potentially critical group, partly because of the divisive language and behavior he’s taken to new heights, or lows, since last weekend—tweeting about the congresswomen and encouraging his supporters to attack them as well. [...]
[T]he key measure for Trump next year will be the share of voters who approve of his overall performance, not the (for now) wider group who give him good marks on the economy. “They have to become approvers,” [Republican pollster Gene] Ulm says. For incumbents, he adds, “job approval is your vote—it’s almost like religion.” The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll dramatically underlines that point. It found that in 2020 matchups against any of the four major Democratic contenders—former Vice President Joe Biden and Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Kamala Harris of California, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts—Trump drew support from a minuscule 5 percent or less of voters who disapproved of his overall job performance as president. (Trump led each Democrat by at least 83 percentage points among voters who approve of his performance.) [...]
The other strong possibility, of course, is that it’s a mistake to attribute any real calculation to Trump’s course of conduct. According to this perspective, Trump behaves like a white-nationalist thug because he is one. He’s not playing some sort of multidimensional chess that shows how devilishly clever he is; he’s using the world’s biggest megaphone to act on the insecurity, megalomania, desire to demean other people that defines his character. As the comedian Flip Wilson used to say: “What you see is what you get.” If that’s the case, all the numbers and rational analysis in the world won’t keep Trump from cutting racist capers and threatening his many enemies all the way to November of next year. It will be a wild ride.
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