'We're thinking landslide': Beyond D.C., GOP officials see Trump on glide path to reelection

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/15/trump-glide-reelection-
republican-officials-316457

By most conventional indicators, Donald Trump is in danger of becoming a
one-term president. The economy is a wreck, the coronavirus persists, and
his poll numbers have deteriorated.

But throughout the Republican Party’s vast organization in the states, the
operational approach to Trump’s re-election campaign is hardening around a
fundamentally different view.

Interviews with more than 50 state, district and county Republican Party
chairs depict a version of the electoral landscape that is no worse for
Trump than six months ago — and possibly even slightly better. According
to this view, the coronavirus is on its way out and the economy is coming
back. Polls are unreliable, Joe Biden is too frail to last, and the media
still doesn’t get it.

“The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for
Trump,” said Phillip Stephens, GOP chairman in Robeson County, N.C., one
of several rural counties in that swing state that shifted from supporting
Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. “We’re calling him ‘Teflon Trump.’
Nothing’s going to stick, because if anything, it’s getting more exciting
than it was in 2016.”

This year, Stephens said, “We’re thinking landslide.”

Five months before the election, many state and county Republican Party
chairs predict a close election. Yet from the Eastern seaboard to the West
Coast and the battlegrounds in between, there is an overriding belief
that, just as Trump defied political gravity four years ago, there’s no
reason he won’t do it again.

Andrew Hitt, the state party chairman in Wisconsin, said that during the
height of public attention on the coronavirus, in late March and early
April, internal polling suggested “some sagging off where we wanted to
be.”

But now, he said, “Things are coming right back where we want them … That
focus on the economy and on re-opening and bringing America back is
resonating with people.”

In Ohio, Jane Timken, the state party chair, said she sees no evidence of
support for Trump slipping. Jennifer Carnahan, the chairwoman of the
Minnesota Republican Party, said the same. And Lawrence Tabas, the
chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, went so far as to predict
that Trump would not only carry his state, but beat Biden by more than
100,000 votes — more than twice the margin he mustered in 2016.

“Contrary to what may be portrayed in the media, there’s still a high
level of support out there,” said Kyle Hupfer, chairman of the Indiana
Republican Party. He described himself as “way more” optimistic than he
was at this point in 2016.

The Republican Party apparatus that Trump heads in 2020 is considerably
different than the one that looked at him warily in 2016. At the state
level, many chairs who were considered insufficiently committed to the
president were ousted and replaced with loyalists. But their assessments
would be easier to dismiss as spin if the perception of Trump’s durability
did not reach so far beyond GOP officialdom.

When pollsters ask Americans who they think will win the election — not
who they are voting for themselves — Trump performs relatively well. And
if anything, Trump’s field officers appear more bullish than Trump and
some of his advisers. Even the president, while lamenting what he views as
unfair treatment by his adversaries, has privately expressed concerns
about his poll numbers and publicly seemed to acknowledge he is down.

“If I wasn’t constantly harassed for three years by fake and illegal
investigations, Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Hoax, I’d be
up by 25 points on Sleepy Joe and the Do Nothing Democrats,” he said on
Twitter last week. “Very unfair, but it is what it is!!!”

Yet in the states, the Republican Party's rank-and-file are largely
unconvinced that the president is precariously positioned in his
reelection bid.

“The narrative from the Beltway is not accurate,” said Joe Bush, chairman
of the Republican Party in Muskegon County, Mich., which Trump lost
narrowly in 2016. “Here in the heartland, everybody is still very
confident, more than ever.”

At the center of the disconnect between Trump loyalists’ assessment of the
state of the race and the one based on public opinion polls is a distrust
of polling itself. Republicans see an industry that maliciously
oversamples Democrats or under-samples the white, non-college educated
voters who are most likely to support Trump. They say it is hard to know
who likely voters are this far from the election. And like many Democrats,
they suspect Trump supporters disproportionately hang up on pollsters,
under-counting his level of support.

Ted Lovdahl, chairman of the Republican Party in Minnesota’s 8th
Congressional District, said he has friends who will tell pollsters “just
exactly the opposite of what they feel.”

When he asked one of them why, his friend told him, “I don’t like some of
their questions. It’s none of their business what I do.”

Recalling that polls four years ago failed to predict the outcome, Jack
Brill, acting chairman of the local Republican Party in Sarasota County,
Fla., said, “I used to be an avid poll watcher until 2016 … Guess what?
I’m not watching polls.”

Instead, as they prepare for a post-lockdown summer of party picnics and
parades, Republican Party organizers sense the beginnings of an economic
recovery that, if sustained, is likely to power Trump to a second term.
They also see a more immediate opening in the civil unrest surrounding the
death of George Floyd.

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“The other side is overplaying its hand, going down roads like defunding
the police and nonsense like that."

Michael Burke, chairman of the Republican Party in Pinal County, Arizona

“The further and further the Democrats tack left, and the further you get
to where it’s the defunding the police,” said Scott Frostman, GOP chairman
in Wisconsin’s Sauk County, which Obama won easily in 2012 but flipped to
Trump four years later. “I think we have the opportunity as Republicans to
talk to people a little bit more about some common sense things.”

Biden has rejected a national movement to defund police departments. But
elections are often painted in broad strokes, and local party officials
expect Trump — with his law and order rhetoric — will be the beneficiary
of what they see as Democratic overreach.

“The other side is overplaying its hand, going down roads like defunding
the police and nonsense like that,” said Michael Burke, chairman of the
Republican Party in Pinal County, Arizona, a Trump stronghold in 2016.”
“Most of the American people are looking like that saying, ‘Really?’”

By most objective measures, Trump will need something to drag Biden down.
He has fallen behind Biden in most swing state polls, and he lags the
former vice president nationally by more than 8 percentage points,
according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. A Gallup poll last
week put Trump’s approval rating at just 39 percent, down 10 percentage
points from a month ago. Democrats appear competitive not only in expected
swing states, but in places such as Iowa and Ohio, which Trump won easily
in 2016.

Little of that data is registering, however. State and local officials
point to Trump’s financial and organizational advantages and see Biden as
a weak opponent. They’re eager for Trump to eviscerate him in debates.
“While the Democrats have been spending their time playing Paper Rock
Scissors on who their nominee is going to be, we’ve been building an
army,” said Terry Lathan, chair of the Alabama Republican Party.

James Dickey, chairman of the Texas Republican Party, said it took Biden
“days to figure out how to even successfully operate, or communicate out
of a bunker” and that he “has clearly not been able to deal with any real
challenging interview.”

Local officials brush off criticism of Trump by Republican fixtures such
as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who said last week that Trump
“lies all the time.” They dismiss press accounts of the race. Dennis
Coxwell, the chairman of Georgia’s Warren County Republican Party, said:
“It’s gotten to a point where I cannot believe anything that the news
media says.”

Many admire Trump’s bluntest instincts — the same ones that have cost him
among women and independent voters, according to polls. “The left called
George Bush all kinds of names and just savaged him all the time … and
Bush never said a word,” said Burke, who worked for Trump in the late
1980s and early 1990s overseeing his fleet of helicopters. “It was
frustrating for those of us on the right. Now a guy comes along, you
attack him, you’re getting it back double barrel. And everybody’s sitting
around saying, ‘Yeah, that’s right, give it to ‘em.’”

And most of all, they put their confidence in an expectation that the
economy will improve by fall.

Doyle Webb, chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party and general counsel
to the Republican National Committee, said the only concern that he would
have about Trump’s reelection prospects is “if the economy had another
downturn.”

“But I don’t see that happening,” Webb said.

Instead, he predicted an improving job outlook and a return to “the old
Clinton mantra: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’”

“I think that people will be happy,” Webb said, “and [Trump] will be re-
elected.”

It’s a widely-held view. In Pennsylvania last week, Veral Salmon, the
Republican Party chairman of the state’s bellwether Erie County, measured
enthusiasm for Trump by the large number of requests he has received for
Trump yard signs. In Maine, Melvin Williams, chairman of the Lincoln
County Republican Committee, saw it in a population he said is “getting
sick of this bullshit,” blaming coronavirus-related shutdowns on
Democrats. And across the country, in heavily Democratic San Francisco,
John Dennis, the chairman of the local GOP, was encouraged by the
decreasing number of emails from the “Never Trump” crowd.

Not in his city, but nationally, Dennis said, “I’m pretty confident that
[Trump] is going to pull it off.”



--
No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.

Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party ran out of gas and got run over by a Trump
truck.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
of the Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump has boosted the economy, reduced illegal immigration,
appointed dozens of judges and created jobs.

Senile loser and NAMBLA supporter Nancy Pelosi got "Trumped" on February
5, 2020. "President Trump, Not Guilty."