Trump Rally Post-Mortem: Cautious Optimism (Or, Don't Worry: He Probably Won't Win)

Is Trump the last stand for bovine white America, or the beginning of a whole new nightmare? Nate Gowdy

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We’re 68 days before the general election and Trump can’t even fill a stadium in Everett, WA. Though he mentioned more than once his desire and ability to win Washington’s 12 electoral votes, Clinton is 19 points ahead of him in the Elway poll. Why he came here I don’t know. No one else does, either. But maybe he just really likes the mountains? Or the lack of income tax? Or maybe it’s familial—his dad did spend a little time here.

Signs signifying nothing. Nate Gowdy

The only thing that struck the fear of God in me, besides watching a gang of Trump supporters point at a suspected protestor and shout “TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP” until authorities remove them from the audience, was the number of first-time voters I met. Of the 10 or so people I talked to, half hadn’t voted in the last election. One said she hadn’t EVER voted, and she was over 50. “Fwenty-six," as she said with a smile.

Are there enough first-time voters and/or people who don’t often vote to blaze a path for Trump to win 270? The Los Angeles Times conveniently published the results of the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll this morning, which is designed to track “people who sat out the 2012 election but say they plan to vote this year.” This is the silent majority peoples’ bumperstickers keep talking about.

According to that poll, the silent majority isn’t so major:

“Even that best case is a problematic one for the Republican nominee since he seldom does better than a tie in the poll’s results…As of Tuesday morning, the poll showed Trump ahead 45%-42%, well within the margin of error…Trump’s situation is even more challenging because of the difficulty of turning nonvoters into voters, a task for which Trump’s campaign may be especially ill-suited.”

He can't even get a solid lead on her in the world of "disaffected voters." He’s got no ground game. And his supporters don’t appear to be self-starters in the world of political action. At a Bernie rally you’ll see little clumps of people all wearing the same thing, lots of acronym-heavy t-shirts representing various state coalitions, evidence of micro-organization based around shared political interests and ideas. But when I look into the overeager faces of Trump supporters and when I talk to them at Trump rallies, I only see people taking the day off work to watch the Trump show.

“Do you want me to do the poem?” Trump asked. “Alright I’ll do the poem.” And he does the poem. And they look happy. The people I talked to didn't seem particularly driven by any policy, no sense of a shared reality to fight for, no sense of shared fight. As Jamelle Bouie puts it in Slate: "There is no horse race here. Clinton is far enough ahead, at a late enough stage in the election, that what we have is a horse running by itself, unperturbed but for the faint possibility of a comet hitting the track."

Unless Hillary, as the saying goes, wakes up next to a dead boy or a live girl, I’m going with team Cautiously Optimistic.

Counterpoint: Sean Nelson thinks we should be afraid. Very afraid.