It’s Republicans’ turn to panic about their nominee and the polls

With former President Donald Trump trailing in the polling averages for the first time in months, Republicans are starting to panic.

Trump’s deficits as a candidate have some Republicans privately pining for the switcheroo Democrats pulled off at the top of their ticket from President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris.

As their convention approaches, Democrats appear to have breathed new life into the campaign, with a little bit of help from their friends in the media.

The Republican panic is nothing like that Democratic freakout after Biden’s June 27 debate flop, which ultimately knocked the sitting president out of the race. But it is reminiscent of the gnawing doubts Democrats had about Biden going into that debate.

Democrats were growing increasingly worried that Trump, a defeated former president they once believed was spent as a political force, had a small but consistent lead in the battleground states and looked like he might even win the popular vote.

Younger Democratic voters and a nontrivial slice of the political press had never seen a Republican presidential candidate have such an extended lead in the national polls. The last time it happened, George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, was only the second time the GOP standard-bearer won the popular vote since 1988. And even then, John Kerry had managed to take the lead at some point by the July 4 weekend.

That was one reason many Democrats were upset that Trump was maintaining a lead that was surmountable by historical standards. The final RealClearPolitics polling average showed Trump ahead of Biden by 3.1 points. By comparison, George H.W. Bush erased a 17-point Michael Dukakis polling lead to win the White House in 1988.

Biden’s evident and growing flaws as a communicator at age 81, seen by many voters as a reflection of his broader fitness for office, wiped out whatever remaining confidence Democrats had in his ability to manage any kind of comeback.

Now Republicans find themselves in a similar situation. They are shocked by Harris’s rise in the polls just weeks after they seemed to have the 2024 election well in hand. It has reminded the more timorous Trump supporters among them of everything they have always disliked about him. They question whether Trump has the message discipline required to close an even narrower gap with Harris, 0.4 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics national average as of Monday night, by the start of early voting or November.

It is easy to imagine either Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) or former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley having been better prepared for the Democrats’ ticket switch than the Trump camp appeared to be. Indeed, Haley regularly predicted Harris would replace Biden one way or the other, while DeSantis has been much more focused on his anti-Harris messaging since the president dropped out.

“For these same Republicans who want to be as mean and nasty as the Democrats, the question must be asked: Is it time to ditch Donald Trump for a candidate who can win?” asked influential conservative radio talk show Erick Erickson. (He did ultimately conclude the answer was no.)

Unlike Biden, Trump is already his party’s nominee. He also won that nomination by beating DeSantis and Haley, not Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) and Marianne Williamson. He has a stronger base than Biden and would tell anyone asking him to bow out for the good of the party to pound sand.

Trump is being advised, perhaps begged, to adapt his “stump speech to define Vice President Harris as liberal and weak, advisers tell us. And praying he’ll stop the recidivistic pull to simply improvise haphazardly,” Axios reported.

Yet even at the height of Trump’s message discipline, when he refrained from doing anything to overshadow Biden’s implosion, the former president’s rally speeches and Truth Social posts were replete with wild material. A campaign predicated on Trump never leveling personal insults, improvising at live events, or venting on social media for 90-odd days was never in the cards.

Luckily, branding Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) was always going to be a full-party project not wholly dependent on the nominee’s stump speech. 

The Trump campaign may already be moving in that direction with a return to X with tighter messaging, a bigger messaging role for running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), and a battleground state advertising blitzkrieg. 

Republicans don’t have the same options Democrats did when it comes to dealing with their concerns about the top of the ticket. All they can really do is avoid making their renewed fears of losing a self-fulfilling prophecy.