One month on from a precipitous collapse in Donald Trump’s poll ratings, many Republicans are no longer asking whether he can win the White House, but how badly he will lose.
Election models put Hillary Clinton’s chances of victory in November’s presidential election at over 80% – in the words of the New York Times, “about the same as the probability that an NFL kicker misses a field goal from the 20-yard line”. FiveThirtyEight statistician Nate Silver predicts a 28% chance of a landslide, in which she wins the popular vote by double digits.
Pundits have been wrong about Trump before, and in recent polls he has shown some signs of recovery. A Morning Consult poll released on Sunday showed him three points down on Clinton head-to-head, a halving of the gap a week before. The realclearpolitics.com average of polls, however, had him down by six.
Answering the question of just how bad things could get for Republicans, in Senate and House races as well as the general election, requires state-by-state analysis, an assessment of congressional contests and, perhaps, a little unscientific sampling of the mood.
Among demographic stereotypes who ought to remain loyal to Trump, few stand out quite like the “Nascar dads”. In 2004, these supposedly white, male and mostly southern fans of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing were targeted by Democrats in their battle with George W Bush. In 2016, after eight years of Barack Obama, they should be a bastion of enthusiasm for Trump.
While other former swing demographics, such as “soccer moms” in the suburbs, look lost to Clinton for good, white men in America’s red states are at the heart of Trump’s support. Early on, the campaign heralded an endorsement by Nascar boss Brian France and several drivers.
Yet recently, outside the Nascar Hall of Fame in Charlotte, the mood among visiting families who spoke to the Guardian before a recent Trump rally in the city seemed at best to have stalled.
At first, Keith, a former military man from nearby Fayetteville, home to Fort Bragg, the world’s largest military base, was supportive.
“I’m definitely against Hillary and I voted for [Trump] for the primary,” he said. “There’s no filter. He’s gonna tell you the truth.”
North Carolina is perhaps the most important of the traditional battleground states this year. In 2012, it was the only swing state that Obama lost to Mitt Romney. Since then it has swung further to the right, replacing one of its senators with a Republican in 2014 and sitting at the centre of a conservative backlash against transgender rights.
Nonetheless, five of the last presidential opinion polls here have show Clinton ahead. If Trump cannot win North Carolina, something is going badly wrong.
Keith, who like many Trump voters was reluctant to give his surname, echoed the very issue that the campaign is most worried could alienate voters in increasingly diverse states like this come November.
“The way he deals with certain things worries me,” he said. “Immigration is a big thing. You can’t just ban a certain race from coming into the country. It doesn’t work that way, especially as it’s the land of the free.”
For core supporters, Trump’s intolerant views and loud mouth matter less. For example, Keith’s friend Kaycee, an accountant from Great Falls, Montana, was less worried: “I would vote for Trump even though his social game isn’t so hot. He is an incredible businessman and I really think that’s what America needs right now. Sometimes he has no filter, but sometimes that’s not a bad quality.”
But among floating voters, particularly in states without a tradition of voting Republican but where Trump’s economic message is resonating, people are easily turned off by the billionaire’s brash style.
“From where I come from, they call him a bullshit artist,” said Neil, a 63-year-old self-employed heating and air-conditioning contractor from Providence, Rhode Island, who was also visiting the Nascar Hall of Fame on the day Trump landed in town.
“I am not a big fan. I just don’t trust what he says. He’s got that very pushy attitude. From a political standpoint, I don’t think he is doing that well. He just squirts off what’s off the top of his head. I don’t think he spends a lot time thinking about what he’s saying.”
The younger voters get, the bluer the state they come from, the more Trump’s style is a turn-off. Even, it turns out, for white dads at the Nascar shrine.
“He’s thin on policy, big on broad-based authoritarian statements,” said Mark, a 35-year-old engineer from Connecticut. “Saying ‘I am the only one who can fix everything you need’ sounds a lot like a dictator in Latin America or North Korea or something.
“I think he is very popular in a very narrow strip of America. That works well in a Republican primary, but not in a general election.”
A failure to capture states like North Carolina would kill Trump’s hopes of winning the White House. Worse, for Republicans, the mood among potential voters here speaks to the party’s concern about losing the control of the Senate that was gained two years ago with victories like that of Thom Tillis.
Senate seats last for six years, so Tillis is safe for now, but his North Carolina colleague Richard Burr is up for re-election. He is only two points ahead of his Democratic challenger, Deborah Ross.
Across states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, New Hampshire, Arizona, Wisconsin and Iowa, there is a real fear that Trump’s unpopularity could cause loyal Republicans to stay home and steer enough independents into handing control of the Senate back to Democrats.
The New York Times Upshot model gives Democrats a 57% chance of winning the Senate, and may even seriously erode the Republican party’s tighter grip on the House of Representatives.
Such is the worry that more than 70 Republicans recently sent an open letter to the party’s national chairman, Reince Priebus, urging him to divert resources away from the race for the White House and towards protecting the lead in Congress.
“If it’s truly a [Clinton] landslide, even the House may be at risk as well,” former Bob Dole spokesman Andrew Weinstein, a vocal anti-Trump Republican who helped organise the petition, told MSNBC last week.
“This guy is the Titanic. He is sinking, and right now the RNC is locking everyone in the boiler room and claiming we’ll all be fine. What we should be doing is putting out the lifeboats.”
