What can Trump do to win?

Without debates, he has few opportunities to pull off a comeback

Friends,

Here is a quick blog post on the most recent news.

The Debate Commission this evening announced that next Thursday’s presidential debate would not go ahead as scheduled. The third debate, originally intended for October 22nd, is still on — although that was the original plan for one on the 15th, too…

This has left me pondering a question: What exactly could Trump do to win? Because he needs to do a lot, or have a massive polling failure, to pull off this level of an upset. The last two weeks have left his chances at re-election in tatters, according to the major models.

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Consider, if you will,Exhibit A:

And Exhibit B:

And C:

Needless to say, Trump is in a deep, deep hole. This is not 2016, when Hillary Clinton had a 70-80% chance to win at this point in the cycle. Things are fundamentally worse for the president now.

From first principles, candidates can rely on a few things to cause punctuations in the campaign. The first is debates and conventions, which offer them the ability to “reintroduce” themselves to the public or highlight favorable issues or events. This makes Trump’s choice to forego the debate pretty puzzling, at least from a strategy point of view. There are no other high-variance events remaining in the campaign, and Donald Trump desperately needs a high-variance next couple of weeks to win.

So, if he doesn’t have debates, what can he do?

Setting aside that I think it’s incredibly unlikely, I think the best thing he could do is take responsibility for the spread of covid-19 in the country and take clear, popular actions to combat it. He could ascent to CDC recommendations and mandate masks in indoor public spaces nationwide and encourage states like Florida and Texas, which are seeing increasing cases, to close bars and restaurants for indoor service. Of course, there’s a political cost here from the right, but appearing more moderate and compassionate, more of a traditional presidential leader, might got a long way.

Trump could also appear on every news network for the next two weeks campaigning for an ambitious stimulus bill, which is both wildly popular (nearing 80% support) and very, very necessary for tens (hundreds?) of millions of families.

Trump could also call of the nomination hearings for Amy Coney Barrett — filling the seat left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg is unpopular, according to recent polls, and an unnecessary fight right before the election (the lame-duck session could still pass a nominee if he loses in November).

But really, I’m frankly unsure whether even all of these would be enough.

Trump has for four years catered endlessly to his base — each time extracting a political cost among the majority for pursuing unpopular policies or political goals. His major legislative battles (for the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act and American Health Care Act) extracted some of the highest political costs of modern polling. Countless other evens of his presidency (children in cages, calls to Ukraine to pursue investigations into his political rivals) were also wildly unpopular. For a president that only won the election because of 77,000 votes in a few states, you’d think he’s spend more time expanding the pool of voters who might feasibly support him instead of shrinking it.

Trump is a minority president. And minorities aren’t usually enough to win elections.