Harry Enten, political analyst at fivethirtyeight runs through the numbers of why appeals by Democrats to Trump voters are unnecessary:
Stop me if you’ve seen a headline (or five) that proclaims something along the lines of: “Most Trump voters still support Trump.” Typically, the article includes quotes from Trump voters in Pennsylvania or Michigan. Sometimes it revolves around polling showing people don’t “regret” voting for Trump. The takeaway is usually: Trump still has the support of his base, which means Democrats haven’t cracked the Trump nut yet.
But here’s the thing: Democrats don’t need to crack that nut by 2018; Trump can hang on to most — if not all — of his base, and Democrats could still clean up in the midterm elections…
Let’s start with the basic fact that Trump won just 45.9 percent of the vote in 2016. That doesn’t make his victory any less legitimate — winning (the Electoral College) with a plurality rather than a majority is still winning — but Trump has a smaller base than every president elected since 1972, except for Bill Clinton in 1992. Trump voters are not a majority.
More importantly for the sake of 2018, they don’t represent the majority of voters in the majority of congressional districts. Trump won more than 50 percent in 205 of 435 districts. If House Republicans won every district where Trump won a majority in 2016 but lost every other one, Democrats would control 230 seats. Among seats won by a Republican in 2016, Trump fell short of a majority in 40 districts. Democrats need to win only 24 of those to win control of the House.
As Enten notes at the beginning of his article, recent polling shows Trump voters still overwhelmingly support Trump. And Enten’s review of the last eight midterm elections shows the GOP will hold them, because Trump voters are rank and file GOP:
In the last three midterm wave elections (1994, 2006 and 2010) that resulted in the president’s party losing the House, for example, the president’s party won at least 84 percent of the president’s voters. But that wasn’t enough. In 1994, voters who cast a ballot for a third-party candidate in 1992 (mostly for Ross Perot) turned against the Democrats, going more than 2-to-1 for GOP House candidates. The 2004 election was close enough that Democrats holding on to a bit more of their voters in 2006 was enough to make huge gains. In 2010, poor turnout among then-President Barack Obama’s 2008 voters (though its effects are often overstated) hurt Democrats across the country.
In short, how independents vote in 2018 and who turns out will play roles just as big as that of how satisfied Trump voters are. Even if the latter are super happy with Trump, if everyone else is super unhappy, Democrats will likely do well.
Part of the argument to reach out to Trump voters rests on the premise that they represent some sort of shift in the electorate, but that premise is false. Trump voters are the distillation of the GOP base, not an expansion of it, making it even less likely that they could be swayed by any message to vote Democratic:
There are no signs of major slippage in support among those who voted for Trump. His approval rating among those who cast ballots for him stands at 94 percent. Among Republicans, it is 84 percent. Asked of those who voted for him whether they regret doing so, 2 percent say they do, while 96 percent say supporting Trump was the right thing to do.When asked if they would vote for him again, 96 percent say they would
Steve Phillips at The Nation uses the recent special elections in Georgia and Kansas to show how Democrats can win the House this year, by getting Democratic voters to the polls (and not even all of them!)
If 84 percent of the people who voted Democratic in 2016 come back out and vote Democratic again in 2018, Democrats should be able to reclaim control of the House of Representatives. There is also a narrower path to recapturing control of the Senate, but that’s a topic for a future column (spoiler alert, the Senate path requires massive investment in and mobilization of Latinos in Nevada, Arizona, and Texas). The results of the special elections in Kansas and Georgia have highlighted the path to victory in House races, but in order to seize this opportunity, progressives must focus their time, energy, and money on organizing and mobilizing core Democratic voters rather than squandering precious time and resources trying to convince Trump voters of the error of their ways. (emphasis added)
Like Enten, Phillips examines the history of midterm elections, and shows us the lesson Democrats need to learn:
The diminished enthusiasm of Republican voters became markedly apparent in the recent special elections for vacant House seats in Kansas and Georgia over the past two weeks. In Kansas, Republican voter turnout declined by 62 percent while Democratic turnout fell just 32 percent. In the Georgia special election the following week, the pattern persisted with Republican turnout dropping 51 percent, twice the falloff of Democratic voters whose participation receded by just 25 percent.
This combination of out-of-power-party motivation and in-power-party complacency is consistent with historical trends. During the midterm election of 2006, when George W. Bush was president, Republican voter turnout dropped by 20 million people from the number that turned out for the prior presidential election. Democratic turnout dipped by just 10 million people, flipping enough seats for Democrats to take control and make Nancy Pelosi speaker of the House. Similarly, when Democrats won the White House in 2008, the subsequent midterm election saw 26 million Democratic voters stay home, while Republican turnout dropped by just 7 million.
Equally important to realizing that efforts to reach out to the rank and file GOP voters who support is unnecessary, and frivolous, is realizing that it is counterproductive. Appeals to the ‘White Working Class but didn’t vote for Trump because of racism, misogyny, homophobia or religious bigotry’ cohort (a group for whom there is little evidence to support its existence) alienates the progressive base of the party. Jill Filipovic at Cosmopolitan explains why:
This is a terrible strategy. It demonstrates the limits of "economic populism" when the term is defined by only men. And it's exactly why feminists have been so worried about the backlash against "identity politics" and the obsession from both the right and left with white working-class men. In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton's loss, a cottage industry of "I told you so" men has sprung up to lecture feminists and racial justice advocates on how identity isn't enough to win elections. Many of these same political analysts (and men who play political analysts on Twitter) have an outsize reverence for the white working-class man and seem to think that leftist economic policies will get these conservatives voters to change their long-standing right-wing politics — if Democrats just abandon the "identity politics" of pushing issues related to race and gender.
Of course, when "identity politics" are demonized in an effort to appeal to white men, it's women and minorities who lose out.
So, a strategy to appeal to voters we don’t need, have no shot at winning over, and trying to appeal to them drains the base of the enthusiasm it has now (which is our main advantage in the up-coming off-year elections). And this is a good idea, why?