Larry Sabato said Donald Trump is running out of room to change the race, arguing that the former president does not have a persuasive message and that the campaign’s main value now is in firing up a narrow slice of loyal supporters. With about 36 million votes already cast when Sabato spoke, he said what happens on the trail matters less with every passing day.
Sabato, who directs The Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and writes Sabato's Crystal Ball, said Trump and fellow Republicans are trying to sell a difficult story. He said voters are not especially moved by talk of the war in Iran, high gas prices, high food prices or corruption, and he compared Trump’s pitch to Joe Biden’s effort to argue that the economy is strong when many voters know it is not.
That is why Sabato sees Trump’s rallies as far less important than the broader message, or lack of one. He said Trump’s only usefulness right now on the campaign trail is to energize the super MAGAs, and even that does not reach all MAGAs because some are not voting. In Sabato’s view, the former president’s best chance to save Republican seats is to produce an enormous turnout from that core group in a couple or three deeply red states.
He drew a line between those places and the country as a whole. Sabato said money can matter in some places, especially where about 80% of the population may be MAGA or super MAGA, but he said it is not driving the election overall. He added that people often give money too much credit in politics, and that some spend on it as a luxury rather than because it changes the outcome.
The larger problem for both parties, in his telling, is that many voters in deeply red states are already set in their ways. Sabato said their voting habits are so Republican that they have been hard to move all their lives, which leaves Trump with a narrow path: excite the most dependable supporters, hope turnout is huge, and accept that persuasion is almost gone. If that does not happen, his campaign may help little beyond the loudest corners of his own base.
