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Commentary By Jason L. Riley

The Rough Road Ahead for Trump

Culture Culture & Society

If he wins, it won’t be pretty, because the conventional route tilts heavily in Hillary Clinton’s favor.

In recent days I’ve been asking political strategists of all stripes if Donald Trump could actually win in November, and sometimes it’s hard to get a direct answer. Usually, the person begins by telling me why the presumptive Republican nominee is undeserving—how he lacks the temperament or scruples or policy chops necessary to be president. When I reply that my question is about his prospects, not his qualifications, I’m told that a Trump victory would be very difficult but not out of the question. And that he’d have to win ugly.

“Mr. Trump’s biggest problem may be that he is swimming against strong demographic currents in the electorate.”

Several recent national polls show Mr. Trump narrowing the gap with Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll out this week put Mrs. Clinton three points ahead of Mr. Trump, down from 11 points in April. An ABC News/Washington Post poll has Mr. Trump leading Mrs. Clinton, 46% to 44%. The New York businessman is benefiting from the fact that his primary rivals have quit the race, while Mrs. Clinton is still fighting an increasingly nasty rear-guard battle against Bernie Sanders.

Still, there is less here than meets the eye. State-level polling matters more than national surveys, and polling in large battleground states that President Obama won in 2012 matters most. Mr. Trump ultimately must prevail in the Electoral College, and nothing in the current state polls predicts that happening. According to Real Clear Politics, Mrs. Clinton leads in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan—all of which went Democratic four years ago. If Mr. Trump isn’t competitive in these states, he likely loses.

In recent decades, the Republican coalition has included free-market advocates, military hawks and social conservatives, and Mr. Trump’s complicated relationships with all three factions has been on full display. Instead of unifying the party in the traditional sense, he wants to construct a different coalition centered largely around white blue-collar voters who have been economically marginalized by globalization and scorned by liberal elites.

“Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well,” wrote liberal journalist Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine recently. “A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to ‘check his privilege’ by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain.”

Mrs. Clinton’s clumsy, dutiful attempts to relate to this crowd couldn’t be less authentic. Candidate Trump, by contrast, empathizes to the max. His read is that these voters are fueled by anger and resentment of elites, minorities and the Washington establishment. And he is betting that there are enough of them to form a majority coalition and scramble the political map. It’s only May and there is a long way to go, but so far he is wrong. National polls notwithstanding, there isn’t a single state that Mitt Romneylost in which Mr. Trump is ahead.

Mr. Trump’s biggest problem may be that he is swimming against strong demographic currents in the electorate. In 2012, Mr. Romney proved that you can win white voters in a landslide and still lose a presidential election by five million votes. Mr. Trump is doubling down on this strategy, even though surveys show him performing weaker than Mr. Romney among white voters, primarily because he’s so weak among white women. Mr. Trump’s belief that he can say insulting and demeaning things about huge swaths of voters with impunity is fanciful. Mr. Romney’s “self-deportation” comments helped put 73% of Hispanic voters in the Democratic column. How well will Mr. Trump’s forced-deportation promise go over with this large and growing voting bloc?

Voters dislike Mrs. Clinton almost as much as they dislike Mr. Trump, but she can count on the fact that registered Democrats continue to outnumber registered Republicans. Mrs. Clinton’s first priority is maintaining the coalition that twice elected Mr. Obama, and she needn’t expand it to beat Mr. Trump. Given that the president’s approval rating has been rising of late and is now above 50%, Mr. Obama should be well positioned to help elect her to his third term.

Mr. Trump’s tougher job is to increase the number of Republican voters. The fact that two out of three respondents tell pollsters that the country is headed in the wrong direction should help his recruiting efforts, and his ability to consolidate Republican support so quickly after wrapping up the nomination is a good sign. But Americans tend to prefer optimistic leaders, and Mr. Trump’s campaign is about playing on people’s fears and anxieties to exploit anger and resentment. I hope most Americans aren’t as down on their country as Mr. Trump is.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal

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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal