Exploiting 'doom and gloom' is Trump's secret weapon with swing voters: analysis

Former President Donald Trump might have a secret weapon for taking on President Joe Biden in the 2024 election, warned Heather Digby Parton in an analysis for Salon published Wednesday — exploit the "doom and gloom" of swing voters.

One fascinating bit of challenge to the conventional wisdom of how politics works, however, comes from work that now-MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes did as a young reporter during the 2004 election covering swing voters in Wisconsin, Parton said — and it reveals how Trump could exploit jaded and cynical voters.

Hayes, wrote Parton, "found that these folks were very interested in politics, although they didn't "enjoy" it and neither did they seem to be able to connect it to their own lives in ways that made sense."

"Hayes said he saw that the worse things got with the war in Iraq, the better George W. Bush seemed to do with these people ... It's not that they didn't believe John Kerry could actually fix things. They didn't believe anyone could. They blamed politicians in general, so 'Kerry, by mere dint of being on the ballot, was somehow tainted by Bush’s failures as badly as Bush was.'"

Kerry ultimately won Wisconsin very narrowly — but this is a must-target state for Trump, and one he narrowly carried in 2016 before it just as narrowly swung back to Biden in 2020.

Many Trump-to-Biden voters in focus groups are adamant they are never voting for him again. But they might not have to, warned Parton — they just have to be disillusioned into not voting at all.

Republicans, she wrote, have spent years "cultivating cynicism about government so that they can carry out their toxic agenda without being held responsible for it. They make politics ugly and uncomfortable so that people will see the whole endeavor as something inherently negative and unworkable."

And if these voters give up, Trump can win a second term. "The Democrats and the press can't shirk from exposing the right's craven agenda, but they need to ensure that in the process they remind people that it doesn't have to be that way," she wrote.