Some of President Donald Trump's supporters in North Carolina are sick of his act.
Political strategists found at the start of the year many reluctant 2016 Trump voters were willing to back him for re-election, but the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic crisis have drained much of that support, reported McClatchy.
“I just feel so passionately about the fact he does not deserve another four years in office,” said 69-year-old Jay Copan, a registered independent from suburban Raleigh. “We’ve done the four years with him, and he’s shown what he can do and what he can’t do. He just does not deserve another four years.”
Copan jumped off the Trump train watching the "clown show" news conferences in the early days of the pandemic, and he and many voters were disappointed in the president's response to nationwide protests against police brutality.
“It turned out after the [George] Floyd murder and how that was handled, we could and did drill even further with those voters,” said Mike Madrid, data analyst for the anti-Trump Project Lincoln, who watched the president's support bleed even further away from college-educated voters this summer.
Trump skeptics who now back Joe Biden come from a variety of demographics and make up about 5 percent of the electorate, but pollsters found the former Democratic vice president leads the GOP incumbent within this group 60 percent to 25 percent.
“Young voters tended to be troubled by his response at the protests, younger swingy voters,” said Democratic pollster Nick Gourvetich. “While with older voters, it was the pandemic. So it was eating out of both sides of the age gap.”
Before this year, focus groups told pollsters that Washington was a mess but their own lives were generally fine.
“Now, it was just bleak,” said Sarah Longwell, a GOP operative who formed Republican Voters Against Trump. “Everybody would say the same thing: ‘It’s a sh*tshow.’”
The economy had been the glue that held together Trump's coalition, according to one GOP strategist, but even Republicans are growing tired of the constant disruptions.
“It’s clear that the direction of everything is moving toward instability,” said Shawn LeMond, a a former Republican state legislator from Greensboro, N.C. “Just over and over and over, the instability.”
