Where it all went wrong for Trump in the final weeks

Donald Trump hopped from regional airport to regional airport during the presidential campaign’s final day, performing for thousands of – and them for him – supporters with an act that was more dinner theatre than a political persuasion attempt.

The president was not in Gastonia, North Carolina, or Bullhead City, Arizona, or Mountorsville, Pennsylvania, or Rome, Georgia, to convince any independent voters they would be better off with him serving another four-year term. He was not even there to appeal to parts of his 2016 coalition – white men who graduated from college and white women who did not – who had been telling pollsters for a year they might vote Democratic.

Mr Trump could have stepped out of his armoured limousine, “the Beast,” in Gastonia with a message aimed at white male graduates of the state’s widely respected university system, sprinkled with a second-term promise to put a little more cash in the pockets of white women who never picked up a four-year degree.

Instead, his entire performance that late-October night – just as it was in his 45-rally sprint from 12 October to 2 November – was the same. His campaign tour became a traveling show of the same disjointed series of grievances, vague promises, opponent insults and fear-sowing at each stop.

The president could have opted to visit a white-collar business or two that evening in the Charlotte area to try keeping some of those white men who voted for him four years ago in his corner. Instead, he landed at Charlotte Douglas International Airport and zoomed the 17 miles from there to Gastonia, eager to be surrounded by another adoring crowd of people who were always going to vote for him.

One of the reporters traveling with him that evening filed a dispatch that described the scene in Gastonia proper as Mr Trump motored to a regional airport there, complete with supporters lining streets, “ranging from small children to large men with large trucks and ATVs.” The “frequency and size of these groups intensified the nearer we got to the airport,” the reporter wrote.

White college-educated men shifted to former Vice President Joe Biden over the summer and fall, and they told pollsters for months they trusted him more than the president to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Four in five Biden supporters left voting stations on Tuesday and said containing the sometimes-deadly virus that has killed at least 233,300 people in the US this year should be the country’s top priority, according to CNN’s exit polling data.

Almost three-quarters of Mr Trump’s supporters said rebuilding the economy should be the main goal, according to those exit polls. The president, to loud cheers, said some version of this at almost every final-stretch rally: "The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.”

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He opted to side with those who stuck with him all four years rather than reach out to supporters who drifted away.

“That pandemic is rounding the corner. They hate it when I say it. You know, you turn on to this immense DNC and fake news, CNN. All you hear is, ‘COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID.’ That's all they put on because they want to scare the hell out of everyone,” he falsely claimed to a collective laugh from his Gastonia backers.

“And you know, the more testing you have the more cases. They say cases are up,” he said, dismissively. “Yeah, testing is up. We have more testing than India, China, and almost every other country put together. You could say it's ridiculous.”

Those two key voting blocs thought otherwise as they cast their ballots, likely costing Mr Trump a second term despite receiving nearly 70 million votes after a scandal-plagued and truth-challenged term of hardline policies calibrated to please his most conservative backers.

Among white college-educated women with no college degree, Mr Trump won them four years ago by 27 percentage points. That fell to 21 per cent this time, according to CNN’s exit polling. He won white college-educated males by 14 points in 2016 – but that bloc supported the former VP by 2 points this time.

Some Washington insiders who have studied the Trump re-election campaign closely contend the president and his team were mostly focused on finding carbon copies of the Gastonia crowd who did not vote last time and convincing them to cast a ballot this time.

“The one thing we know the Trump campaign did back when it had a lot of money is that it worked hard to find additional friendly voters who didn't turn out in 2016,” according to David Dayen, executive editor of the liberal-leaning The American Prospect magazine.

One former Clinton White House official-turned-analyst suggests the president and his team – along with the Washington polling and political class – simply misread several lessons of the 2016 election and his coalition that cycle.

“President Trump’s support is eroding among college-educated whites,” according to William Galston of the Brookings Institution. “One hypothesis has been that Trump’s often crude and sexist behavior turned women off from Trump early on. And there’s no doubt that that has been part of the answer to this puzzle.”

“But when we look back at these two races, the key point may not be women’s disaffection from Trump in 2020,” he added, “but rather men’s antipathy to Hillary Clinton in 2016.”