Know how in those old-timey prison-break movies there's a roving spotlight searching the prison yard for felons trying to make it out?
My friend Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report has a theory about the 2016 presidential campaign that imagines Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump as the two prisoners trying to escape. As she explained in a September column:
This race feels like one of those movies where escaping prisoners desperately try to stay in the shadows as a huge spotlight arcs across the yard. I’m not implying that either candidate is a jailbird (or deserves to be in jail). It’s really about the spotlight. As we’ve seen throughout this year, the spotlight has not been their friend. When it hits them it exposes their flaws instead of highlighting their strengths. Their poll numbers and their favorability numbers sink.
The goal then for Trump and Clinton is to avoid the spotlight as much as possible. People don't like either of them, so when voters are reminded that one or the other is running for president, that candidate's numbers go down. It's remarkable.
This chart, part of the most recent — and highly-sought-after — PowerPoint deck from Republican lobbyist Bruce Mehlman, tells that story convincingly. Here it is:
As you can seen in the chart, the past five weeks or so of this campaign have been disastrously bad for Trump — largely because they have been all about Trump. From the release of a hot-mic recording of Trump making lewd and sexually inappropriate comments about women to the now 11 women who have accused the Republican nominee of unwanted sexual advances, the race has been about nothing but Trump. And for those who blame the media for that, I'd point you to Trump's Twitter feed and speeches at campaign rallies. He routinely seeks to re-litigate the charges against him, lashes out at the media and makes the race entirely about himself.
If Trump loses — and there's every reason to believe he will — he will have himself to blame for that defeat. He never seemed to understand — or if he did understand, he could never care — that the more the daily conversation in the campaign was about him, the worse he did. The way you win a race against Clinton is make it a referendum on her and her decades in public life. Trump has never grasped that. Which is why he is where he is today.
