By Erick Erickson

He must rebuild and grow gains, but neither he nor his supporters seem interested

After the President's tweet cheering on the demise of the Weekly Standard, I noted President Trump needed to be building bridges in the aftermath of the 2018 midterms, not burning bridges. Numerous Trump supporters offered up a variation of "f**k them" and "they'd never vote for him anyway."

They sure seem certain that the President could do nothing to lure any of these people his way. Over at RedState, Sarah Quinlan notes the President probably has no shot getting her vote.

This is all a bigger threat to President Trump than Bob Mueller.

The President won in 2016 while losing the popular vote. He only won because 60,000 voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania went with him over Clinton. In 2018, in turnout nearly as high as a Presidential election, those states swung Democrat. In fact, a good number of voters who had voted for Trump over Hillary, rejected Republicans in those states.

In suburbs from Oklahoma to Kansas to Georgia, voters who do not necessarily show up at party meetings and vote in Republican primaries, but tend to vote GOP in the general, turned out en masse for Democrat candidates.

One of the ongoing issues that President Trump has is that, frankly, a lot of his vocal supporters in the Republican ranks have felt completely comfortable letting out their inner-asshole and never trying to build bridges with new voters. The President has done nothing but encourage it. They have all given up on the art of persuasion and diplomacy.

But all the data out there right now suggests the President is not only not expanding his base of support, but that his base of support is smaller than it was in 2016, which puts his election chances in 2020 in jeopardy. If the President cannot figure out how to lure people back to him, he is going to have trouble. He won because people hated Clinton more than him. She will not be on the ballot in 2020. He will, if he cannot lure people to him because of him, have to lure people to him through a deeply negative campaign against the Democrat nominee.

Unfortunately for Trump, that then puts him in Clinton's spot. People were confronted in 2016 with the hypothetical Trump versus the Clinton they knew. They went with the hypothetical because they knew Clinton and knew they did not like her. In 2020, Trump will be asking voters to reject the hypothetical Democrat for the Trump they know. And most voters, including a significant portion of Republicans, do not like the Trump they know. In fact, they're tired of him and are growing weary of a lot of his hardcore supporters too.

Republicans can curl up in the fetal position and mutter all they want, "They were wrong about 2016. They were wrong about 2016," but everyone now knows to look at state polling, not national polling, to focus on the Electoral College. And that data shows the President needs to be building bridges, not burning them.

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