By a lot of measures, Donald Trump does not appear to even be making an effort to win the presidency. For example, so far this month Hillary Clinton has spent about $23 million running mostly positive advertisements in battleground states like Florida, Ohio, and Virginia. Apparently, Trump has spent nothing on ads in the battleground states. Mitt Romney was famously outspent during the same time period four years ago, but even he managed to spend 46% of the total ad dollars in June 2012. And that clearly wasn’t enough, as the White House successfully branded him as a Bain Capital vulture capitalist who doesn’t care about you.
According to Philip Bump at the Washington Post, in April, Trump had about thirty paid staffers to cover the entire country, while Bernie Sanders had more than eight hundred. Clinton has more than eight hundred today, and Trump clearly doesn’t have anywhere near that number.
It isn’t working. On Saturday night, Utah Republican Party Chairman James Evans sat down with Trump in a Las Vegas casino to explain to him that he isn’t a lock to win the Beehive State in November. Afterwards, Evans, who is black, tried to spin away Trump’s racism:
“When you sit down with him you can see that it is more of a show, you know, and if anybody would know that somebody has that kind of sentiment in them, it would be me growing up in the South,” said Evans, who is African-American. “I could spot it a mile away and you just don’t see that in him.”
Evans said Trump’s statements about the judge and Muslims were “unproductive” and he argued Trump “recognizes he shouldn’t have made those comments.”
But at the same time, he said, “a presidential race cannot come down to one or two comments.”
When the best you can do is tell people that Trump’s racism is just “an act,” I think you’re in a pretty big hole. And it looks like Speaker Paul Ryan is at the bottom of that hole with a shovel. Meanwhile, Trump is out on the stump accusing Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz of plotting a coup against his nomination in Cleveland next month. Even if this were true, highlighting it isn’t any way to unite the party.
Things are so bad, in fact, that Trump felt compelled to personally respond to speculation that he’d drop out in return for a cash payment in the neighborhood of $150 million.
Trump himself says it’s a ridiculous proposition and that he’s not a fan of the question.
“This story is a total fabrication from you and POLITICO, as usual,” the New York billionaire said in an email sent by his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. “I will never leave the race, nobody has enough money to pay me to leave the race, and if they did, it would be totally illegal anyway. Did Obama and the Clintons get you to write this garbage?”
It’s true that Trump was successful in the primaries despite running a nontraditional campaign that did not rely on paid advertising and a lot of staff, but he’s asking Republicans to put faith in him to pull it off again in a general election, and that’s not a convincing argument when his polls looks worse than John McCain’s at this point. Instead, he’s just getting hammered with dozens of negative articles out there this Sunday morning and virtually no push back from his organization and almost no one in the GOP willing to get his back.
More than a year ago I began predicting that this would be a landslide election one way or that other. I suggested that the odds were better than it would be Democratic landslide, but I was most confident about is that it wouldn’t be close. The time has come for the country to decide whether it wants to be run by Democrats or Republicans, because this split government thing doesn’t work anymore. It’ll take a lot for the Republican House to fall due to the way the population is sorted and the districts are drawn, but I have little doubt which party will win the popular vote in the House. The Senate is almost definitely gone for the GOP, and it looks like they won’t even be seriously competing for the White House.
Can things turn around?
I can’t see how.
