Split, not Shy

The shy Tory is not so chary. So kicks another pop poli-heuristic.

Pollster and data analyst (nerd!) Patrick Ruffini crumbles up and bins the brief conventional wisdom that Donald Trump, by sheer Herculean effort, makes the Republican Party a voter’s darling. Or, at least, makes it slightly more palatable, like a generous sprinkle of MSG.

Last month’s off-off-year spandy lib-sweep in Virginia and New Jersey was supposed to be a blaring tocscin to the GOP Trump’s lame-duck status is a fetter on the legs of rubied hopefuls. A RealClearPolitics headline: “Can Republicans Learn To Win Without Trump on the Ballot?” Ditto Politico: “Republicans Fear a Midterm Slump without Trump on the Trail.” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie concurred: “[W]hen it comes to other Republicans, when [Trump’s] not on the ballot, he’s an albatross around their necks, and that’s been consistently the case.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who, at one time, was seen as heir apparent to Trump’s truculent populism, regurgitated the workaday sentiment: “I think Republicans have an issue that Donald Trump has created a big pool of voters, but some of them are unique to him, right? So they’ll go vote for Trump, and they’ll vote for all Republicans when Trump is on the ballot. But if he’s not on the ballot, some of them don’t vote.”

Here comes numbercell Ruffini, like a psephological Martin Luther, staking his theses to the Cathedral door. Cold data refuting easy Sunday roundtable narrative? Ruffini should count himself blessed if Jake Tapper doesn’t knock his door in the early hours, cannon of cordite in hand.

“In all our years studying the idea of a ‘hidden’ or ‘shy’ Trump vote, we’ve never found evidence of a voting bloc completely invisible before that showed up to vote just for Trump—and which stayed home for other Republicans,” Ruffini writes at his Substack. The whistley popping sound you hear is George Stephanopoulos’s anchor-chair cushion deflating.

The last decade’s fore-and-aft ballot bobbing was more complicated than the typical tale recounted unthinkingly on cable TV: a brash demagogue inspired a precariat of welders, electricians, plumbers, auto mechanics, landscapers, busboys, day laborers, grease pawls, and all variety of agnostic high-prole factotums to make a rush for the polls on their lunch break on the first Tuesday of November to cast a trunkish middle finger to “the establishment.” Hence, Trump is the tribune of working stiffs whose plebiscital patterns are shrouded from professional gaugers. Any slapheaded chub in a Brooks Brothers three-piece can waddle before a Fox News camera, spew the pappy syllogism, and slump off, contributor check in hand for a job done well enough.

It’s a recyclable explanation, glossed so frequently that it’s become smutched and opaque, and thus wrong. Ruffini breaks the bad news to every Beltway big, including news anchors, print columnists, blog penners, content farmers, AM radio bloviators, think-tank fellows, PR sharps, and those squirly CNN number-crunchers who run around with an iPad on election night, pointing to charts before commercial breaks. The “Trump voter” isn’t a mindless, drooling, hirsute-handed yanker of the Republican lever every four years. He’s something worse, defying the understanding of District swells who purport to understand the country.

Ruffini reveals the ugly truth: Trump voters in competitive districts “sometimes ticket split in favor of local Democrats.”

Quelle horreur! The empty-skulled zombies are exhibiting… they’re showing… these desiccated dumbos from hell’s unbidden fire are actually demonstrating agency that was supposed to be nulled into oblivion! These Trump husks were supposed to sway before their orangish master’s flapping talons, blindly punching “R,” regardless of name, whether it be Hitler, Putin, the old pervert in the one-room a mile away on the sex-offender registry.

A sterling example of this dynamic is the Silver State, where Trump hit red six but the Republican whiffed the Senate race thanks to bisected ballot casting. Of course, the idea of Donald Trump, the king of gaudy pleonexia, losing Vegas stakes is as unthinkable as an anthropomorphized ethanol subsidy coming up short in Iowa.

Ruffini winds up his analysis by going full-on cryptidologist, pinning national election results on a mythical creature long thought to be extinct, like the dodo, the auroch, and a heterosexual Elton John. Those “irregular Trump 2024” are also the unicorn of American politics: “swing-voting independents.”

This should come as welcome news to today’s MAGA-fried pachyderm party. Indeterminate is synonymous with persuadable. Soon enough, the President will ride off into the hazy pink Florida sunset. The Trump mien will still be used to brand ask-emails for fixed-income Ethels. But Republicans, like their loose-ended blue counterparts, will have to attract a new commanding personality, someone able to sell voters on policies that will materially improve their lives. Rage bait and Twitter gotchas won’t cut it.

Maybe not so good news for a party of coattail riders.