Margaret Sullivan: low approval and higher gas prices undercut the plea
Trump urged voters at a Kansas rally last month to “pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot. Just pretend,” as he campaigned for incumbent Republican senator Roger Marshall and gubernatorial challenger Ty Masterson. Sullivan writes that “Pretend I’m on the ballot” has become a regular rallying cry as Trump tries to fend off a Democratic “blue wave” in Congress.
With his poll numbers tanking and his behavior getting odder, Sullivan writes, the remark “seems more appealing to himself than to voters.” She notes that his approval ratings “are in the basement” and that gas prices are higher, on average, than at any time during the Biden years. “People feel like they need to float a loan before heading to the supermarket,” she writes.
Sullivan also points to the performance itself. At the Kansas event, she notes, Trump referred to the opposition as “Dumocrats.” A campaign analysis in the Independent described him as “increasingly detached from reality,” saying he “vacillates between topics to the point where his remarks border on the nonsensical” and ends every appearance “by awkwardly dancing to the Village People’s well-known gay anthem YMCA.”
She also cites reporting by the Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt that Trump has offered “unsolicited and increasingly unhinged assessments of men’s bodies” over the past few weeks. In Kentucky, speaking about Republican senator Jon Husted, the president said: “I examined his ass. And then I looked at his shoulders … I looked at his jawline … I then patted him on the shoulder, and it was like a piece of steel. I’m still recovering.”
Sullivan writes that Trump has stretched the truth on the campaign trail — “sometimes merely misleading in his remarks, sometimes straight-up lying.” She cites his promise at a North Carolina rally that gas and oil prices would tumble soon, and his claim that “I had it down to the lowest level in years.” PolitiFact disputed the claim, noting that when Trump took office at the beginning of last year, the average gas price was $3.23 a gallon, but by late September of this year it was $4.61.
The column argues that much of what has happened in Trump’s second term is working against Republican candidates. Sullivan cites what historian Garrett Graff described as self-dealing “so endemic and so obvious that it has broken through to voters,” along with what she calls Trump’s misguided war, his rants on social media, and his disparagement of longtime allies including Canada. She also cites “his obvious plan to declare the election rigged should it not go his way.”
“Even Maga die-hards and GOP allies in Congress have grown weary of his erratic behavior,” Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley noted, according to the column. Democrats, including Barack Obama, are “only too happy to campaign by associating Republican candidates with Trump,” Sullivan writes. The midterms, Obama told a crowd in Ohio, “is our last best chance to at least rein in some of the foolishness of this administration. It’s the circuit breaker in the system.”
Sullivan allows that the appeal may reach some voters. “Maybe that’s effective with Trump’s remaining cult-like base,” she writes, “and maybe it will bring some of those loyalists out to vote next week if they had been thinking of sitting out this election.” But she concludes that “more likely, the imagined association with Trump will serve to remind most voters that Trump’s malfeasance must be rebuked and rejected. Certainly not encouraged.”