Transcript: Trump Suddenly Losing Crucial GOP Support In Surprise Data
Caputo: Yeah, I think they’re plausible. Don’t get me wrong. One of my weaknesses is that I generally believe polls, but I believe polls for what they are. I don’t think Blueprint made up the numbers, right? They’re real. For this cohort of voters, there’s a problematic sign here, especially when you compare it to how they say they had voted in 2020. In 2020, this same group of voters said that they backed Trump over Biden by 31 percentage points. Compared to today, he’s lost 22 percentage points of support from this group of voters. And if you saw the way in which he ran his campaign, he ran a much more of an outsider, 2016-style campaign, so to speak, a less establishment Republican campaign. So in that respect, the numbers do make sense to me.
Sargent: I want to clarify that people shouldn’t take a single poll as gospel, but we also had the top-quality New York Times/Sienna poll this week, which found Harris leading among likely voters overall by 49 to 46. It also found that Trump has 89 percent of Republicans while Harris has 96 percent of Democrats. Harris gets nine percent of Republicans, which is up from last month’s New York Times poll. I think it’s worth taking this idea seriously that Trump’s support is a bit soft among Republicans. Marc, what are Republicans out there, GOP strategists, saying? Are they worried about this?
Caputo: No. That’s one of the jarring things for me as a reporter to balance. They insist, and some of these are people I trust … It’s not to say that they’re wrong or they’re lying or whatever, but they think things look pretty good for Trump. Their own polling, they say, and in some cases they’ll show off-the-record, indicates things are a little better for him. For instance, like the Quinnipiac Swing State Polls today for the Rust Belt indicate that that’s the case. We just don’t know. Outside of the polling, they’re looking at things like what The Washington Times, I believe, had reported about Republicans closing the gap in voter registration in places like Pennsylvania. There are all these little data points. Their absentee ballot and early vote returns, Republicans are better than they were in 2020 in places like Pennsylvania. So these are the hopes they have. Now, whether this is a 2022-style Republican overestimation of their abilities relative to their performance, obviously we’re going to [see] on Election Day, but their feeling that they’re communicating amongst themselves to their candidates is pretty good. I’m not saying they’re right, I’m not saying they’re wrong; but there are times where the public polling and their private sentiment align, and there are times when it doesn’t. Here’s one of those times when it just doesn’t.