Dark MAGA: There can be no true despair, without hope.
The Trump vibes don't match the numbers.
Hey fam: Banger of a Secret show today. Sarah and I talked about the swing-state polling mini-surge for Trump, the idea that Trump is at his ceiling, and the moment when Angela Alsobrooks drove a lance through St. Larry’s vanity. The show is here.
Live show update: Tickets are now on sale for Detroit, too. Click to get your tix:
Come and hang with us!
1. Trump’s Ceiling
I gotten a lot of private pushback from friends yesterday for being too optimistic1 and their counterpoints generally fell into two buckets.
The first is that we don’t have enough data to know that he has a ceiling. The argument is that it’s only two elections and that’s not enough to project into a third.
Fair enough.
In response I’d say that it’s not really two elections. It’s a bunch of elections. We’re looking at his national numbers from 2016 and 2020. But we’re also looking at his Arizona numbers in 2016 and 2020; his Michigan numbers in both years; etc. Put it together and we’re seeing more than a dozen data points. These data points were all taken during the same two snapshots in time, true. But they are snapshots from several different voter groups during two time periods. The fact that none of these groups have much variance from one time period to the next seems meaningful to me.
But in addition to the votes in those two elections, we have years worth of polling on Trump and the level of variance we see in his numbers across the years is exceedingly small.
Let’s start with the 2016 Clinton-Trump polling, which gave us an 8-point variance. This is the biggest we’ll see, probably as a result of Trump being new enough that his support was malleable.
Once he got into office, Trump’s approval rating was abnormally consistent. (And also consistently low.)
Then we have his polling in 2020 against Biden, where his variance maxed out at 5 points.
And finally we have his favorability numbers over the last four years, where he’s never varied by more than 6 points, even with all of the external events surrounding him.
I understand that we’re comparing apples, oranges, and kumquats. But my overarching point is that people’s opinions of Trump are well-formed. He has a defined ceiling of approval. And this ceiling has moved very little over long periods of time, no matter how you measure it.
The second counterargument basically goes like this: