In our second of what will be a regular series of Substack Live chats, Anat Shenker-Osorio joined me yesterday to discuss my new piece, The Re-Emerging Anti-MAGA Majority, and its key finding that Trump’s earlier support depended on voters not understanding or believing he would do what he said he would do if elected.
On tariffs, deportations, and other issues that are cratering his approval ratings, Trump is now doing almost precisely what he said he would do. And voters hate it—including the “less engaged” voters who were supposedly too hard to reach before November with warnings about it. Therefore the latest polling tells us less about Trump than it does about the catastrophic failure of not just Democratic campaign professionals, but also civil society and the media, to effectively inform voters of the consequences of the choice they had before them.
We also talked about the problems with two major narratives about the 2024 election (the “if only” narrative and the “realignment” narrative); Democratic messaging and message-testing (we’re using thermometers when we need a thermostat); why the word “democracy” doesn’t resonate with many disaffected voters, but the reality of what it means they lose very much does; and much more.
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