Trump Pollster: Trump Defeated Himself by Alienating Voters

While Donald Trump persists in the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, as Politico is reporting, a report by Trump's own top pollster reveals that Trump defeated himself by alienating voters in key constituencies through his endless lies, the chaos of the Trump/Pence regime and the failure to provide any plan to seriously cope with the Covid-19 pandemic.  Indeed, his lie that the election was stolen is precisely the type of behavior that caused voters to say "enough" and vote for the Biden/Harris ticket having decided that Trump was not honest or trustworthy. Trump lost ground not only among college educated suburbanites, but also among older voters, younger voters, and white males.  Whether or not Trump is so mentally ill that he believes his own lies may never be fully known (I suspect his niece would answer this question in the affirmative), but the majority of Americans were tired of lies and disgusting behavior.  Here are highlights from the piece in Politico:

Former President Donald Trump has blamed the election results on unfounded claims of fraud and malfeasance. But at the top levels of his campaign, a detailed autopsy report that circulated among his political aides paints a far different — and more critical — portrait of what led to his defeat.

The post-mortem, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, says the former president suffered from voter perception that he wasn’t honest or trustworthy and that he was crushed by disapproval of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And while Trump spread baseless accusations of ballot-stuffing in heavily Black cities, the report notes that he was done in by hemorrhaging support from white voters.

The 27-page report, which was written by Trump chief pollster Tony Fabrizio, shows how Trump advisers were privately reckoning with his loss even as the former president and many of his supporters engaged in a conspiracy theory-fueled effort to overturn the election. The autopsy was completed in December 2020 and distributed to Trump’s top political advisers just before President Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

It is unclear if Trump has seen the report.

The findings are based on an analysis of exit polling in 10 states. Five of them — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — are states that Trump lost after winning them in 2016. The other five — Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — are states that Trump won in both elections.

The report zeroes in on an array of demographics where Trump suffered decisive reversals in 2020, including among white seniors, the same group that helped to propel him to the White House. The autopsy says that Trump saw the “greatest erosion with white voters, particularly white men,” and that he “lost ground with almost every age group.” In the five states that flipped to Biden, Trump’s biggest drop-off was among voters aged 18-29 and 65 and older.

Suburbanites — who bolted from Trump after 2016 — also played a major role. The report says that [Trump] the former president suffered a “double-digit erosion” with “White College educated voters across the board.”

The picture of the election presented in the report is widely shared by political professionals in both parties, if not by Trump and his legions of his supporters. Trump never offered a concession to Biden, and up until his final days in office, he clung to the debunked idea that the election had been stolen.

Trump’s personal behavior, the autopsy makes clear, contributed to his defeat. “Biden had a clear edge over POTUS on being seen as honest & trustworthy,” Fabrizio writes.

Trump’s response to the pandemic was also critical. The autopsy says that coronavirus registered as the top issue among voters, and that Biden won those voters by a nearly 3-to-1 margin. A majority registered disapproval of Trump’s handling of the virus.

Most voters said they prioritized battling the coronavirus over reopening the economy, even as the president put a firm emphasis on the latter. And roughly 75 percent of voters — most of whom favored Biden — said they favored public mask-wearing mandates.