The scorching tone he has adopted is largely intended to solidify support within his own party. Private Republican polls indicate the president is slipping into the red states, largely because conservative voters are uneasy.
“Trump needs, or believes he needs, fear of the ‘other’ to motivate his base and create enthusiasm,” said Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster. “Right now, people fear Covid-19, but that is inconvenient for Trump, so he is trying to increase fear of something he believes will benefit his reelection: the raging mobs of leftists who destroy the history of U.S”.
Matthews noted that his rhetoric does little more than solidify voters who would likely return to their corner. “It has no interest in expanding its base or even withdrawing those who have left,” she said.
Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Survey Institute, said past presidents have tried to spread the culture battles, “giving people this kind of amorphous environment where they can continue to live.” However, Trump is unlike any of his predecessors.
“Donald Trump does not give you that option: you are with him or against him,” said Murray, whose latest poll this week showed that Biden led from 53 to 41 percent. “It is forcing people to take sides. And when they take sides, more of them move to the other side. ”
At Biden, Trump also faces a centrist opponent who is not easily branded as a radical liberal, but is seen as an acceptable alternative for some older voters and Republicans in a way that Hillary Clinton was not. Biden, for example, has said he does not support the police outlay, and has made careful distinctions between knocking down monuments to the country’s founding fathers and those commemorating Confederate leaders.
That hasn’t stopped the Trump campaign from claiming that in the black-and-white world he wants to present to voters in November, Biden is on the side of violent looters. “The first instinct of Joe Biden and his party is to agree with the agitators that there is something fundamentally wrong with the United States and that there has always been,” Tim Murtaugh, director of communications for the Trump campaign, said Saturday.
