Dick Morris: Did Trump Lose His Base in 2020?
The media is peddling the idea, based on exit polls, that while Trump gained among Hispanics in 2020, those advances were more than offset by losses among high school-educated white men who had heretofore been his political base.
This opinion was prominently featured in a Wall Street Journal editorial published last week.
Oddly, enough, one of Trump’s own pollsters, Tony Fabrizio, seemed to bolster this narrative.
But it is not true. John McLaughlin, the other Trump pollster (who was more frequently in direct contact with the president) said “everyone who voted for Trump in ’16 who was still alive voted for him again in ’20.”
The erosion the exit polls reflect was among people who did not vote in 2016 but fell into the same demographic categories as Trump’s base — high school-educated whites.
Lured to vote by the convenience of home delivery, remote, absentee, mailbox or dropbox voting, these couch potatoes still backed Trump, but by lesser margins than their more motivated peers.
This analysis gets to the heart of why Trump lost in 2020.
A flood of paper ballots boosted turnout by 20 million more votes — millions more of whom voted for Biden than for Trump.
The Democrats won the election by encouraging and enabling this avalanche of paper ballots, stoking it with fears of the virus.
By bringing the polls to the voters, as opposed to getting them out to vote, Democrats changed the calculations of politics, likely permanently, vastly increasing the turnout of downscale voters.
The mission of the Republicans is to adjust to these new rules and beat the Democrats at their own game.
They should not be distracted by false claims that their base abandoned them. It didn’t. The party must dig deeper into its pool of supporters to bring out their votes by home delivery and room service.
Bring the polls to them.
The party has to embrace this new era of no-excuse absentee voting and not concede these voters to the Democrats.
Other necessary steps include electronic signature verification, frequent purging of voter lists of dead voters or of those who moved away and, of course, a requirement of photo ID to cast ballots.
Above all, we must focus on eliminating private-sector financing. Dropboxes must be banned.
These common-sense steps are vital to restoring confidence in our election system.
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