I have spent the last five months working for Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT), a persuasion campaign that utilizes testimonial style videos from Republicans who plan to vote against the president this November. I was drawn to the project because it was the only organization that was built around my own views of the state of American politics. Donald Trump’s transformation of the Republican Party into a cult of personality undergirded by a fusion of populism and nationalism stood as antithetical to my own beliefs. This alienated me and thousands of other center-right leaning individuals from the political system altogether. RVAT’s goal is to build a new home for the politically homeless and begin building a stable coalition of voters on the classically liberal values that have been thrust to the sidelines in our current political system.
My job gives me direct insight into the American electorate, as I talk to, interact with, and hear the stories of hundreds of voters. The project was founded by Kenyon College alumna Sarah Longwell. I highly encourage everyone to visit RVAT.org to get a better sense of the project.
I wanted to share the insights of the most important swing voters in this election and how their behavior will affect President Trump’s reelection chances. I should clarify, these are generalizations of the most common stories I hear and are by no means meant to be all-encompassing.
I also will divide up voters into two categories: “Floor Voters” and “Ceiling Voters”. By floor voters, I mean those who voted for Trump in 2016 that serve as the foundation of his voting coalition. By ceiling voters, I mean any voter who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 who will vote for him in 2020. This would represent a net gain in support for Donald Trump.
UNDERSTANDING TRUMP’S STRATEGY
As Amy Walter pointed out, Trump is banking on an enthusiastic GOP base to help him win reelection. This means that Trump will have to keep all of his voting coalition intact from his 2016 victory (what I will call his floor voters) and hope that there are other Trump-supporting voters in the country that did not cast a vote for him in the previous presidential election (something that would help raise his ceiling).
That’s it. That’s his entire strategy. There is no effort to try and win over centrist moderates, independents, or former Hillary Clinton voters, demographics that would increase the size of this coalition and raise his ceiling. Yes, Donald Trump did tell suburban women, a demographic that he is losing at an incredible clip, “Please like me.” But outside of that valiant attempt, Trump has conceded many of these key swing voters.
THE VOTERS
There are 3 broad categories of voters I interact with:
1) The center-right 2016 non-Trump voter that will vote for Biden
2) The 2016 Trump to Biden voter
3) The Trump voter who rates him as doing a poor job, but is still on the fence
CEILING VOTERS
Now let’s look at our first group of voters: the center-right non-Trump voter.
For the center right non-Trump voter, there is a strong sense that Donald Trump is simply unfit for office and a threat to democracy. These Republican-identifying voters also see Trump as a fraud who represents little to none of their values.
These voters had one of three options in 2016: vote for Hillary Clinton, vote third-party, or sit out altogether.
- The Hillary Clinton voter
The majority of Republicans who voted for Clinton saw her as the lesser of two evils in 2016. They did not want to risk any chance that Donald Trump would win the election, so they decided to hold their nose and vote for the Democrat, perhaps the first Democratic candidate they had ever voted for. Given the events of the last four years, especially in the months following the pandemic, these voters’ fears of a Trump presidency were realized, giving them no affirmative reason to consider voting for Trump in 2020.
That being said, the vast majority of these voters will vote for Joe Biden this November. It seems as if President Trump has conceded these voters to Joe Biden, given that he has done little to reach out to his non-supporters. So while these voters sticking with the Democrat may not raise Trump’s ceiling of support, they were also the least likely to do so in the first place.
- The Republican third-party, abstaining, or write-in voter:
These voters had similar reactions to the candidacy of Donald Trump as the last group. They believed that he was not upholding Republican or American values and found his personality off-putting. However, Hillary Clinton was not a viable option for them either. Clinton’s unfavorability ratings were the second worst in history, trailing only Trump himself, and years of partisan hatred toward the Clintons shut down any chance of these right-leaning voters to show up to the polls for her.
Given the results of the election, many of the third party, write-in, or abstaining voters felt some level of regret for not voting for Hillary in the first place. After all, Trump only won the election with 77,000 voters across three states.
It is common to hear that these voters thought there was no chance of Trump defeating Hillary in the polls and that gave them a cover to vote the way they did (another possibility is they lived in states like California or Texas where their vote was already meaningless in their own minds. This type of voter does not have quite the same regret as others in more critical states).
However, a fair amount of these voters were willing to give Trump a chance to grow into the office of the presidency. That never happened.
Trump’s erratic behavior only confirmed many of these voters’ initial skepticism and drove them further away from the president and into the arms of Joe Biden.
A mixture of a down-to-earth character and a sense of moderate policy positions, Joe Biden is a much easier choice for these third-party voters than Hillary Clinton. This is why we are seeing droves of 2016 third-party voters embrace Joe Biden so enthusiastically in 2020.
Upon closer investigation, Donald Trump’s reelection chances begin to severely deteriorate. An analysis of the 2016 election showed that third-party voters essentially gave Trump the opening he needed to squeak out victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. But now, these voters are decidedly falling into Joe Biden’s camp, vastly inhibiting Trump from raising his ceiling of support that he so desperately needs.
FLOOR VOTERS
- The 2016 Trump to Biden voter
Donald Trump voters who are now on the fence or have switched their vote to Joe Biden all tell roughly the same story: “I wasn’t voting for Trump, I was voting against Hilliary Clinton.” I referenced earlier that Hillary had historically low approval ratings and this played a major role in Trump’s 2016 victory. Many of these voters I speak with say that they really disliked Trump’s behavior and personality, but there was some hope that as a businessman (or at least someone who played a businessman on TV), and as a political outsider, he could “shake things up” in DC. They also thought his behavior could be explained by his lack of political experience, or as a campaign shtick.
These voters abandoned the president at various times throughout the last four years. Some saw quite early that Trump’s behavior was never going to change and that they had made a mistake in their vote. However, most were willing to stick with Trump thanks to a generally strong economy. But everything really changed with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd.
The country is going through three simultaneous crises at once: the pandemic, racial injustice, and economic hardship. Many of these voters see Trump as responsible for exacerbating all three. To make matters worse for Trump, these crises directly affected people. Their children are stuck at home and cannot go to school, local businesses are shut down, and the brutal killing of George Floyd was in broad daylight which led to waves of protests all across the country.
All of this was enough for many of these reluctant Trump voters to abandon him altogether. Joe Biden is also seen as a solid choice for these more moderate Republicans. While many of these voters admit they disagree with some of Biden’s policies, they view Trump as a threat to our national well-being, something that transcends debates over the marginal tax rate.
Then, there is the nail in Trump’s coffin. Not only is Trump unable to bring in new voters to his coalition (his ceiling), but he’s also losing his base support left and right. Any new voter he hopes to bring to the polls with him that sat out in 2016 is being offset by either A) an abstaining voter who didn’t like Hillary or Trump who will now vote for Biden or B) a former 2016 Trump voter.
2. Trump Undecideds
All of the aforementioned voters are people who I have connected with via the RVAT project. However, I also listen to focus groups of 2016 Trump voters who believe he has done a poor job. I wanted to briefly mention some observations about these voters, but I highly encourage you to read more about these focus groups from Sarah Longwell.
It’s important to preface this by stating that there is no good way to broadly label the thoughts of this group of voters. However, there is a strong sense throughout the group that the country is doing very poorly and that Trump is partially to blame. They also find his personality off-putting and they wish he would get off of Twitter.
But when it comes to their vote in 2020, there is almost no way to say definitively what their considerations are. Most want to hear more about Joe Biden’s policies and what he will do in his time in office, but some are wary that he is not up to the job. Other Trump learners (those who are not sure they will vote for Trump, but are considering voting for him more than Joe Biden) feel that Biden may be pulled further to the left and argue that it’s better to go with the devil you know (Trump) than the one you don’t (Biden).
However, all things considered, the majority of undecided voters I see are leaning toward Biden. Most notably after the first presidential debate, many undecideds said that there was no way they could vote for Trump given his wildly inappropriate behavior and his refusal to denounce white supremacy, but were not yet sold on Biden. They also admit that they could just sit out altogether or perhaps vote for a third-party candidate.
Whether they end up going to the polls or not is a question, but what is shocking is the numbers of former Trump voters that are at least shutting the door on voting for him. For Trump to have any chance of winning, he at least needs to hold on to his base of support and maintain his floor. But what I am seeing personally is that every single voting group is abandoning the president. He is neither holding onto his 2016 coalition nor adding to it.
All of this is to say, Donald Trump’s chances in November seem slim to none. The FiveThirtyEight projection is giving him a 9 percent chance of victory just one day out from the election. While FiveThirtyEight is using a mixture of polling data, demographic trends, and other factors in their simulation, the above qualitative analysis seems to be in perfect unison with the quantitative data.
Regardless, what is clear is that Donald Trump did this to himself. He has alienated voters with his off-putting behavior and divisive rhetoric. He has failed to reach out to his non-supporters and present them a vision of the next four years that they can vote for in good conscience. Instead, he is willing to throw his entire reelection campaign in the hope that there are millions of MAGA-hat wearing voters out there that didn’t feel like going out to the polls in 2016. But for every new voter he is able to add to his coalition, there is a former Trump supporter who is leaving. And all of those third-party and non-voters that gave him the opening in 2016 are voting for Biden, too.
We’ll see what happens, but I’m confident that the work Republican Voters Against Trump is doing will lead to a Biden victory this election.
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