The Washington Post’s Tuesday pre-mortem of the 2024 GOP presidential primary titled “How Trump clawed back from distress to dominant Republican favorite” has some pretty funny shit from focus groups and interviews from Trump fans outside of rallies over the past year or so.
Verbatim from the section on findings from GOP primary voter focus groups for Trump’s rivals, cultish emphasis ours: “When they tried showing violent criminals freed under Trump’s criminal justice overhaul, known as the First Step Act, voters were unmoved. They just said they didn’t believe it. When they tried comparing rival candidates’ policy positions side-by-side with Trump’s, it damaged the other candidates’ favorability, because voters viewed the contrasts as an implicit attack on the former president. When they confronted a focus group with the facts about Trump’s failure to build a wall on the US-Mexico border, one woman explained that Trump intentionally didn’t finish the barrier so that migrants would bottleneck in the gaps and be easy to detain there.”
One Republican consultant observing the focus group told the Post “How do you engage with that level of creativity in finding a way to excuse Trump? Nothing could move them.”
Further down the Post gets into the Club for Growth’s ad campaign, the first of which “featured a gray-haired man named John talking on his front steps, reciting his love of Trump but frustration with his ‘distractions.’ Other Republicans snickered at the imagery – showing ‘John’ with a lawn mower or walking down the sidewalk in slow motion – saying it resembled a commercial for erectile dysfunction medications,” as if there isn’t significant overlap in their respective markets.
The Kochs’ Pro-Haley Americans for Prosperity group encountered similar problems when trying to attack Donald on electability. “An AFP mailer showing a MAGA hat reading ‘Make Republicans Lose Again’ so enraged some recipients that they brought it to local meetings to object,” the Post wrote.
An Iowa Republican voter told an AFP canvasser recently they’d “be voting for Trump because of what’s going against him. I don’t agree with anything he’s going through, I’d like to support him for that, The thing is, is can he win in the general? I don’t know.” Another told the Post “It’s all political, it’s all trying to put Trump down. They know we have a winner and they’re trying everything they can possibly think of. But every time they open their mouth, Trump goes up in the polls.”
That voter owns horses named Trump, Melania, Ivanka, DJ (for Don Jr), Lara, and Barron.