This Week Has Already Produced Three Bad Signs for Trump’s Reelection
The president needs to keep suburbanites, rural voters, and industrial states on his side for 2020, and the last few days have been bad for all of them.
President Trump touches down in El Paso, Texas, today amid a national furor over racist gun massacres, a plummeting stock market, and growing signs that his trade war with China will fail to produce the historic deal he promised during his 2016 presidential campaign.
Each of these three developments hurts his standing with a key voter group he’s counting on to win a second term. The mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio—and Trump’s reluctance to push strong gun control measures—is likely to exacerbate collapsing Republican support among suburban voters. In last fall’s midterm elections, Republicans were routed in suburban districts from Orange County to Dallas to New Jersey, where polls show college-educated professionals, especially women, strongly support measures to curb gun violence. “Republicans are headed for extinction in the suburbs if they don’t distance themselves from the NRA [and] put forth solutions to help eradicate the gun violence epidemic,” Dan Eberhart, a major Republican donor and Trump supporter told Bloomberg News.