U.S. President Donald Trump’s advisers have been talking up the so-called enthusiasm gap between Trump supporters and those of Democratic rival Joe Biden. But the more important gap come November might be the one between the emotional intensity of those who love Trump and those who loathe him.
If there was any doubt that June was a miserable month for Donald Trump — thousands more COVID-19 deaths, racial strife, tumbling support in the polls — his campaign manager appeared only to confirm it with an op-ed in the Washington Post this week that gamely tried to argue the president’s re-election prospects aren’t as bad as they plainly are.
Under the headline “Trump is beating Biden on the most important factor in this campaign,” Brad Parscale breezed past the recent flood of opinion polls that show the president losing to Democratic challenger Joe Biden — nationally and in the battleground states — and instead asserted that Trump has something that will count for more on election day, something almost magical: an enthusiasm advantage.
“President Trump is dominating,” Parscale wrote. “The unprecedented enthusiasm behind the president’s re-election efforts stands in stark contrast to the flat, almost nonexistent enthusiasm for Biden.”
Corey Lewandowski, one of Trump’s 2016 campaign managers, chimed in on the same day with the same pitch at Realclearpolitics.com.
“President Trump continues to draw huge ratings and massive enthusiasm, while Democratic presumptive nominee and 44-year career politician Joe Biden remains hidden away in his basement,” he wrote.
It’s true the enthusiasm of Trump devotees is vital to Trump’s re-election strategy — as evidenced, most recently, by the rally he held on the eve of July Fourth at Mount Rushmore, where he gave a speech in which he denounced the “merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children” and the “angry mobs … trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”
Rather than persuading voters to join his base, Trump has always focused on turning out millions of people who are already wild about him but who didn’t show up to vote in 2016. Whether there really are enough of those people to turn the election for him is a separate question.
But another question is whether the so-called Biden/Trump enthusiasm gap really matters anyway. The more important gap might have