We enter the weekend with Biden's lead in the RCP average slipping to 8.9%.
Trump is in the midst of a full schedule of rallies now. Calling the Bidens an organized crime family, he led the enthusiastic crowd at one Georgia rally in the by now ritualized chant of "Lock him up!" What is very clear is that this sort of thing resonates with the people who go to his rallies, but it is not catching hold beyond that segment of the population.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, he needs more votes than the angry chanters. His campaign now seems only focused on sustaining that anger among that limited segment of people. Perhaps he hopes it will come in handy after he loses in the November 3rd poll.
It's not as if he didn't (or doesn't) have other options. But Trump didn't listen to his political advisors last time and it paid off for him, so he's not about to start listening now. Meanwhile, the real theme of the weekend is the number of Republicans inside and outside the administration who are distancing themselves from the him [see Heather Cox Richardson's useful summary here].
I have a sneaking suspicion that many Americans are just done with incoherent blabbing. All through the early months of the corona virus, people needed calm reason and got instead cranky sparring with the media, conspiracy theories, rambling tirades, and the recurrent dredging up of past resentments. It was enough to make a vast swath of Americans just shut him off.
Now can he really think that by turning the tirades up to eleven he might win them back? Though there has been some slippage in Biden's polling of late from the high water mark of 10.5%, the evidence seems clear that the answer is no. In the past 25 polls, Trump has only been above 43% in 2 of them.
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See also:
Jonah Goldberg discusses empathy and demagoguery.
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