Trump is maturing in the Sun Belt

Former President Donald Trump got some much-needed good news from the Sun Belt states this week.

The latest NYT/Sienna poll of the southern region, which stretches from North Carolina to California, shows Trump leading Democratic candidate Kamala Harris by comfortable margins, just a month after the same poll showed Harris with a significant advantage in parts of the region.

According to the latest figures, Trump has opened leads in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. In Arizona, Trump now leads Harris by five points according to NYT/Siena figures, as voters express concerns about the porous border. A Fox News poll released Thursday also showed Trump leading by a smaller margin of 3 percent.

Immigration is the top issue for Arizona voters. More than 1 million illegal immigrants are estimated to have crossed through the Yuma sector alone during Biden’s presidency, and Trump’s campaign has repeatedly tried to link escalating tensions along the border to Harris. Because of the importance of the three states, and Arizona in particular, Harris will visit the Southwest this weekend as her campaign tries to portray her as tough on crime, citing the time the vice president spent prosecuting of transnational gangs when she served as California’s attorney general.

Whether that message resonates is a completely different question. Harris has struggled to support what many voters see as her weakest issue; immigration. And while Harris enjoyed a surge in popularity over the summer that has allayed the concerns of many of her Democratic critics, she still trails Trump by 14 percentage points on this issue.

Trump also appears to have made significant progress among the Hispanic voting base. A shocking recently released Quinnipiac poll shows Trump with an eight-point lead over Harris. However, that number has been disputed by Pew Research Group, which found Harris ahead by 18 points. Other critics have pointed to an Economist poll showing Harris with a 28-point lead over Trump among Hispanics. Even in Trump’s worst-case scenario with the Latino voter bloc, he appears to be stronger in the polls than most Republican presidential candidates of the past. The last Republican standard-bearer to even come close to matching the demographic group was then-President George W. Bush, who lost the bloc to John Kerry by 18 points in 2004.

Even more troubling for Harris, the Arizona Police Association, which represents more than 12,000 members of local and state law enforcement agencies, endorsed Trump for president in late August. The Association split its approval on the ballot, choosing to support Democratic Senate candidate Ruben Gallego over MAGA rabble-rouser Kari Lake. Lake’s poor polling and failure to resonate with centrist voters have not yet lowered Trump’s numbers in the state.

“Donald Trump creates his own weather,” noted former Republican lawmaker Stan Barnes of Arizona.

Trump’s ability to escape the controversies of his counterparts will play a major role in the race in North Carolina, where Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is under fire for lecherous comments he allegedly made on a pornographic forum in the early 2000s.

Many of Robinson’s associates have abandoned his campaign, and the MAGA flamethrower is down double digits and falling as he militantly claims the disturbing posts were “manufactured” by artificial intelligence, despite strong evidence to the contrary. Since the allegations emerged, Trump has steered clear of the man he once called “Martin Luther King on steroids,” and both his team and vice presidential candidate JD Vance have barred Robinson from further campaign events.

According to the NYT/Sienna poll, which was conducted before the Robinson scandal broke, North Carolina is the tightest race of the three. The state, which went for Trump by fewer than 75,000 votes in 2020, is essentially a flop, and the Harris campaign has spent a lot of time and money in Tar Heel country. Whether that down payment pays off in a state that has consistently voted Republicans into office over the years remains to be determined.

Trump is also showing strength in Georgia, a state that President Biden narrowly and controversially carried in 2020. Not only is Trump leading in the latest NYT/Sienna selection, but the latest CBS poll also finds the former president leading by 2 points. News. Fox News countered the bullish narrative in a poll released late Thursday that showed Harris leading by three points in the state.

Voters in the region cite rising housing costs as their top concern and that’s good news for Trump, who has consistently polled ahead of Harris on the economy. Harris has tried to cast herself as a pro-labor capitalist who can revive the middle class, but voters remain skeptical of her abilities after four years of rising costs under the Biden-Harris administration.

One area in the Sun Belt that could surprisingly pose problems for Trump’s campaign is his home state of Florida, a region that no Democratic presidential candidate has captured since Barack Obama did so back-to-back in 2008 and 2012. Harris is polling better than expected in the Sunshine State and a just-released survey from The Independent Center and The Bullfinch Group shows the 59-year-old trailing by just one. That poll follows a Florida Atlantic University poll released last week that showed Harris leading Trump by narrow margins.

Harris’ surprising strength in the state is likely due in part to Amendment 4, a November ballot initiative to protect abortion rights, which could lead to Democratic voters turning out in large numbers. Florida currently has a six-week abortion ban that Trump has wavered on. He initially said he would vote “yes” on the ballot initiative before quickly adjusting his answer after facing backlash from conservative voters. Similar abortion measures have won approval in politically red areas across the country, and the Florida initiative could help Harris reach the kind of numbers Obama used to beat John McCain and Mitt Romney.

On Thursday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee announced it would spend millions in Florida and Texas in an effort to sow unrest in reliably red states. While incumbent Senator Rick Scott appears headed for a comfortable re-election in Florida, Senator Ted Cruz appears vulnerable in Texas. New polling from Emerson, who rightly called a narrow victory for Cruz over Beto O’Rourke in 2018, shows Democratic Rep. Colin Allred trailing Cruz by just four points, with 6 percent of respondents undecided. Trump, who defeated Clinton by 9 and Biden by 6 in the Longhorn State, currently has a safe 5-point lead over Harris.

According to polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, Nevada and its seven electoral votes are in a summation zone. The latest Emerson poll from the region shows that the two candidates are statistically in a dead heat. Trump, who lost the state by nearly 3 percentage points in 2020, has tried to gain ground among service workers by promising “no tax on tips.” Harris will campaign in Las Vegas this weekend after her visit to Arizona.

But even if Trump wins every contested Sun Belt state, he would still have to pick a Rust Belt state to win reelection, a task that is becoming more difficult by the day. Harris, who chose Wisconsin Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, has shown surprising strength in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin since entering the race in late July.

Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 was largely due to his performance in the Blue Wall states. His heartfelt message to those struggling to make ends meet in the bombed-out shell of what was once America’s palatial manufacturing center rang true in a way that no other politician on the left or right could articulate.

Michigan-born filmmaker Michael Moore, whose brilliant 1989 film Rogier and I depicted the economic devastation caused by the exodus of automakers in Michigan cities like Flint, and understood better than anyone Trump’s appeal to those abandoned by America’s wealthiest:

Donald Trump came to the Detroit economic club, stood before Ford Motor executives and said, “If you close these factories like you’re planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I’m going to impose a 35% tariff on those cars if you return them and no one is going to buy them. It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives. And it was music to the ears of people in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The Brexit states.

Trump’s 35 percent tariff threat never materialized. In 2019, Trump unexpectedly imposed a 5 percent tariff on all goods imported from Mexico. The decision was heavily criticized by Trump’s own administration and was quickly scuttled, although Trump claimed the measure had reduced illegal immigration.

In a look back at the 2016 campaign, Trump said Tuesday that he will impose a 100 percent tariff on all cars imported from Mexico if he is re-elected president. “The only way they can get rid of that tariff is if they want to build a factory here in the United States, while you operate that factory,” Trump told a crowd in Georgia.

The 100 percent tariff proposal came just a day after Trump, flanked by John Deere equipment, threatened the company with a 200 percent tariff if it went ahead with a plan to transfer a significant portion of its manufacturing base to move to Mexico. A company spokesperson refuted Trump’s claims, noting that John Deere has had a presence in Mexico since 1952. “We are not moving to Mexico,” said a terse message issued in response to Trump’s comments.

Whether Trump’s harsh words on tariffs resonate with voters remains to be seen. Voters in the Rust Belt have certainly seen how the former president has failed to deliver on such promises in the past, and his numbers in the Rust Belt are not nearly as positive as the Sun Belt numbers show, although Pennsylvania appears to be in play on way to the Rust Belt. last piece.

The evolving nature of the 2024 election is indicative of the sublimely chaotic and rarefied atmosphere in which Americans find themselves today. Late Thursday night, a new Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll gave Harris a slim lead all of the swing states. If one thing is certain, this race could change in an instant. For Trump, the hope is that he lands heads-up at the right time.