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For a man who loves to brag about his numbers and his ratings, things are starting to look pretty grim. President Trump may still be able to garner cult-like adoration from his MAGA-base, but just about everywhere else — he is slipping.
As Axios reports, Biden is leading 54% to 44%. But it isn’t just the popularity of former Vice President Joe Biden that should have the Trump campaign worried. Here are seven signs that the tide is turning.
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The overall satisfaction with the direction of the country has been trending down for most of the year — especially with Democrats. However, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center shows that Trump is even losing ground with Republicans.
The satisfaction level with Republican voters had hovered around 50%, but the most recent numbers show a big slide downwards. Only 19% of Republican voters stated they were happy with the direction of the country. 63% claim they are angry with the state of affairs and 56% admit they are currently afraid of the way things are going. Only 25% of Republicans feel pride “when thinking about the country.”
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Some of the most devastating anti-Trump, pro-Biden ads to come out in the last few months have been produced by Republican groups.
The Lincoln Project, in particular, is a Republican Super PAC that was created with the sole purpose of getting Trump — and all his cronies — out of office. The group has been churning out ads left and right that are absolutely brutal.
Another group, Republican Voters Against Trump, has been collecting videos of ex-Trump supporters who are now embarrassed or ashamed of their vote in 2016.
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Trump loves to brag about the economy, but there isn’t much to brag about at the moment. Roughly half of all Americans are currently unemployed.
CNBC reported on the coronavirus-induced shutdowns which dropped the number of employed adults to 52.8%. According to Deutsche Bank’s chief economist, Torsten Slok, “To get the employment-to-population ratio back to where it was at its peak in 2000 we need to create 30 million job.,”
But we aren’t even at the worst of it. The “jobless rate is expected to decline to 12.4%” further this month. As more and more people become unemployed, Trump will likely see his approval ratings continue to slip.
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Trump kicked off his post-shutdown rally season in Tulsa where he expected 1 million people to attend. The campaign was so sure of the overwhelming attendance, they built an overflow stage outside the arena.
The reality was far less impressive: 6,200 attendees.
His campaign tried to blame the low attendance numbers on protestors, saying that Trump supporters were blocked from entering the grounds. Although, CNN reported that they did “not see any prolonged activity by protesters that prevented attendees from gaining access.”
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Trump has botched the handling of the coronavirus pandemic from the beginning — starting with his firing of the pandemic response team, to calling the virus a hoax, all the way to insisting the country be reopened before the proper protocols had been put in place.
Now, as of July 1, there are 2.6 million infected people in the U.S., and at least 127,400 have died.
Trump’s incompetence has led to more coronavirus losses in the United States than those lives lost in WWI. People were already disappointed with his handling of the crisis, but his claim that he asked his people “‘slow the testing down” was met with harsh criticisms. The White House claimed the president was “joking,” but it would appear that slowing down testing is exactly what the plans to do.
As Rolling Stone reported just days after the Tulsa rally, “The Department of Health and Human Services has announced it will pull funding from more than a dozen drive-through testing sites across five states, including Texas, at the end of the month.”
Joking, indeed.
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The country’s support of the Black Lives Matter movement has seen a surge since the death of George Floyd. Demonstrators have been marching in cities across the country, and the world, since the end of May. At the end of June, 51% of Americans were in support of BLM.
The President has been firmly on the opposite side. He had called protestors “thugs” on Twitter, advocating for the police to shoot them. He had peaceful demonstrators tear-gassed and shot with rubber bullets so he could pose in front of a church with a bible. Most recently, he retweeted a video of a man shouting, “white power” which his administrators had him take down.
His position against the Black Lives Matter movement is hurting him, particularly in battleground states.
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In a further attempt to eliminate every part of former President Obama’s legacy, Trump is once again trying to kill the Affordable Care Act — in the middle of a pandemic while half of the country is unemployed.
Trump’s plan to eliminate Obamacare goes against what the majority of the country actually wants. The Daily Kos reports that 49% of Americans would prefer that the ACA be expanded — only 36% of people wish for it to be repealed.
Nearly half a million people applied for benefits in May and June, and that is on top of the 23 million Americans who are already depending on Obamacare for insurance coverage.
