(Palmer report)
To the surprise of perhaps no one but Donald Trump, the TV ratings
for the Republican National Convention are terrible. It turns out having
a bunch of deranged speakers slobbering all over Donald Trump –
seemingly half of them named “Trump” themselves – isn’t exactly making
for compelling viewing. But here’s the thing.
Based on social media chatter and trending topics alone, it’s easy to
glean that a whole lot of anti-Trump people are watching the Republican
National Convention because it’s a train wreck they can’t look away
from. Yet even with all these additional looky-loos, ratings are still terrible.
This means that startlingly few Trump supporters are watching the
Republican convention. This suggests that even Trump’s own base is tired
of trying to hang in there with his narcissistic nonsense and rambling
lies, as the country crumbles around them.
Donald Trump’s surrogates like to talk about a supposed “enthusiasm
gap,” as if Joe Biden’s large number of supporters don’t count because
they’re not as enthusiastic as Trump’s smaller number of supporters. But
the extraordinarily low number of Trump supporters watching Trump’s
convention is a sign that Trump is the one with the enthusiasm gap. It
gives us a real opportunity to double down on voter registration and
turnout, phone banking, and polling place volunteering, in order to run
up the score and land a decisive victory on November 3rd.
