Mr. Trump meets the General Electorate Part 2: The Limits of Free Media

By Kit

In the aftermath of disastrous polls putting him below where Romney was four years earlier, and a Federal Election Commission report showing his campaign low on funds, Donald Trump decided to make a speech railing against Hillary and on Monday, fired his campaign manager - a move that never signals health in a campaign. It was probably his first attempt to look like a serious contender for the presidency instead of a contender for the host of Who Wants to be President! And, given his attempts at the Scottish golf course to moderate his more outlandish statements. this attempt seems to mark a new turn in his presidential campaign. But his supporters should be wary of getting too giddy about it.

The speech got the attention of a bunch of the media when he made it. Unfortunately for him, that coverage dropped like a stone when the Democrats staged a 25-hour sit-in that night on the House floor. And by Friday it had disappeared almost entirely, courtesy of Britain voting to leave the EU and all the financial and political mayhem that vote caused. Yes, some late night news programs talked about it but the Brexit got the bulk of the coverage. Indeed, the only programs that might have given it a substantial amount of coverage over the Brexit (Hannity) cater largely to people who are already voting for Trump or otherwise made up their minds on the matter.

This illustrates the first limitation of free media; it only lasts as long as people are talking about it. The moment another Big Thing happens in the news, whatever free media you picked up courtesy of your most recent statements of actions disappears. That means you need to keep staying in the news and Trump, at the very least, seems to understand this, which is why he has spent much of the past year screaming anything that he thought might grab headlines. This swept him to the nomination with those who tend to support him.

Before we go further on the issue of free media, some election numbers: In 2012 129 million people voted, of whom Romney netted about 60.9 million, while Obama received about 65 million. Now, let us assume for a minute that everyone on of the 13,300,472 people who voted for Mr. Trump in the primaries show up in the General. He will still need every one of the 16 million people who voted against him. Let’s assume he will. That brings us up to 29.5 million voters. Romney netted 60.9 million people. The total number of votes cast in in 2012 were about 129 million, just below the 131 million who showed up in 2008, so let’s split it and assume that somewhere around 130 million people show up for 2016. This means Mr. Trump will need 65 million votes to win the general.

He received 20% of that number in the primaries and 45% of that number of people voted in the Primaries. That means Trump will need to quadruple his own vote and double the number of GOP voters just to receive what Romney grabbed. Also, a certain, and rather key, portion of those 30-35 million people who didn’t vote in the primaries but might normally vote for the Republican in the general won’t be paying attention to things until after the conventions, some not until the fall.

And what will they be watching? Well, The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News’ highest rated show and the highest rated cable prime-time news program, averages about 2.5 million viewers in 2015 and Hannity about 1.5 million. By comparison, Big Bang Theory nets about 20 million viewers per episode in its most recent 9th season and NCIS: New Orleans nets about 15 million per episode. Even lesser shows like Mom and Agents of SHIELD grab about 7 million and 4 million, respectively.

And here we have the second limitation of free media: not everyone is watching the shows and channels on which your free media is likely to be showing. And that is counting free media in general, not just the positive coverage. So, when late-September comes it will be shows like Big Bang Theory and NCIS that everyone, including a fair number of potential voters, will be watching, and it will be during those shows’ commercial breaks that people will see the ads put out by the various campaigns.

Well, they’ll be watching Hillary’s commercials at least.

Hillary ended May with $42 million while raising $26 million during the month and is currently buying up ad space between now and November like there is no tomorrow. Her folks and the folks at the pro-Hillary Super Pacs will be hammering Trump with ads about his over-the-top rhetoric, his ignorance about basic issues like the nuclear triad or how anything works, his infidelities and sexual philandering, and the fact that he seems to have to change his views constantly. In other words, the very stuff that prompted a anti-Trump high turnout in the primaries.

Now, before you start pointing out that many of these attacks apply in some way to Hillary (she called Republicans her enemies, she failed to take basic security precautions with her emails, her husband is a serial philanderer, and she too will say anything to get elected) remember the point is not necessarily to get people to vote for her but to ensure that a significant number of the potential Republican voters who dislike both her and Trump stay home or vote third party. Considering that a recent poll showed 48% of Republicans would support a different nominee at the convention, this might prove easier than you might think.

And for those who might be swayed to vote for Hillary, she has a ground game to snatch them up. Pro-Hillary volunteers will canvass swing districts, knocking on doors or calling up homes, asking the residents if they are interested in voting for Hillary Clinton. If the resident says “Yes” then the nice young volunteer will ask if that person would be willing to make a donation or sign of up to receive more information about the campaign. If the person says “Yes” to the first or both (saying yes to the first automatically says yes to the second) then that person will receive emails, letters, and phone calls from then until election day asking them for donations, reminding them to vote on election day, and asking if they will need help getting to the polling place.

Trump’s campaign, on the other hand, only raised about $3 million and ended the month with $1.3 million. By comparison, Mitt Romney had raised about $23.4 million and had finished the month with $17 million. Even the defunct Ted Cruz and Ben Carson campaigns ended May with more money. To further drive this point home, at least 50 House members have campaign funds bigger than him. All of that stuff that I just told you that Hillary will be doing? Trump will be able to do none of it. He won’t be able to canvass and ID potential voters, he won’t be able to remind them to show up on election day, and he won’t be able to help voters get to the polling places on election day.

Now, his supporters may reply that Trump didn’t need any of that in the primaries and still managed to win. True, but he began it as the biggest news-grabber in a divided primary where, due to many of the GOP primaries having winner-take-all or winner-take-most rules, he was able to win either a majority or all the delegates in enough states despite only average about 35-45% of the vote. And when it did become a two-person race between him and Cruz (and Kasich), he had picked up enough momentum and had the aura of “inevitability” to carry him to majorities in the Republican primaries.

Well, he has since lost that momentum. He spent the month after grabbing the nomination launching a series of attacks against the judge presiding over his case, bringing up the fact that he has a lawsuit against him for one of his shady business deals and that he has spent this campaign using racially-tinged attacks that many Americans found repulsive, thus reminding many voters why they dislike him in the first place. Then polls came out showing him trailing Hillary 6 points and now the FEC report showing us the dire state of his campaign.

Now, many earnest Trump supporters are pointing to the Brexit vote, which surprised a lot of people. Yes, there are parallels to the Trump campaign, in that the Remain vote was seen as a vote for the establishment, and the polls for a long time showed a Remain win, but there the similarities cease. First, the Brexit campaign was never tied to one figure, despite the Remainers' attempts to make it exclusively about Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson. Whereas, the Trump campaign is exclusively tied to the person who might be the most controversial candidate since George Wallace. Second, the Leave campaign actually, well, campaigned. They ran ads, they canvassed, they knocked on doors. In other words, the Leavers had a ground game.

As it stands, Donald Trump’s only hopes are the presence of a “shy Tory” factor in the polls, meaning some people who intend to vote for Trump on election day are not admitting it to the pollsters, that Hillary will fall on her face enough times between now and November to cost her momentum, and that Johnson and (maybe) Sanders will eat enough into her votes to give Trump the edge. But these are just hopes and failed campaigns are filled with the such hopes, be they the PUMA voters of 2008 or the “skewed” polls of 2012.