Shenker-Osorio: It’s a mass forgetting layered on with people understandably feeling that they are struggling, feeling they are having a hard time, and honestly reacting to a lot of what is distasteful in the present moment as the fault of Democrats because they have a pretty cloudy view. We see this a lot. We’re in focus groups, two to four focus groups a week, every single week, and have been since 2020 actually with some pauses for holidays and so forth—what we see over and again is a lot of, Well, I don’t know, but it seems like Democrats are in charge. Therefore, if there’s chaos, if there’s conflict, if there’s confusion, if America is “on the wrong track,” the general gist of it is that must be coming from the people in charge without a lot of knowledge or information about what happens below that. What I see in that Madison Square Garden odiousness is what happens when you drink so much of the poisonous venom of your own misogyny and racism and xenophobia that you genuinely forget, for example, that Puerto Ricans live across these United States and are voters in battleground states. You take it as given that you can say terrible things about them because they are confined to an island. News flash, there are boats and planes and people live all over the place.
The same thing with misogyny. You think you can just keep dishing it out and you don’t recognize that you live within a context in which women vote more than men. So you actually can’t stand to lose that demographic by that much because it turns out there’s more of us.
Sargent: A hundred percent. This brings up something that Trump said about Fox News. He raged on social media that Fox News spends too much time promoting Democrats, which is funny. More revealingly, he claimed that Fox News is showing too much of Michelle Obama’s speech, in which she took him apart pretty effectively. Trump was triggered in part by the backlash to his hate rally when he said all this about Michelle Obama because her speech was directed right at public conduct, like what we saw at that rally, the MAGA hatreds and so forth. Even more critically, Trump knows she has the capacity to bring back some of these nonwhite voters, particularly Hispanics, low-propensity ones, young men maybe. What are the prospects for getting that demographic back? We don’t really know how big it is. The polls are a little mixed. It’s hard to say how reliable they are, but it’s a significant dynamic. Is there really an opening here to get them back?
