Some Trump backers cringing
Wild card is whether qualms will alter votes
WAUTOMA – Ted Korolewski is the treasurer of his local GOP. He’s an enthusiastic Trump voter. And at last month’s Waushara County Fair, he could be found staffing the Republican Party booth alongside a life-size cutout of the president.
Yet when a reporter asked him if he had any qualms about Donald Trump, he readily acknowledged some.
“I think a president ought to look like a president, act like a president. And he doesn’t do that,” Korolewski said. “I wouldn’t work for him for three minutes, and neither would you. You can’t! How could you work for him?”
Concerns about President Trump’s personality and behavior are one of the great wild cards in the 2020 election.
But the fact that they’re so widely shared — even among Trump’s own supporters — makes it especially difficult to gauge their electoral impact. Some voters back him because of his “persona,” many others do so in spite of it. This reporter has heard Trump voters in Wisconsin describe their candidate as a “jackass” and a “douche”; one of them confessed, “I can’t stand the man.”
Polls suggest that to win re-election, the president will have to win the votes of many people who either don’t like him or are put off by how he speaks and behaves (just as he did in 2016).
How are those voters weighing their personal qualms about the president?
Interviews with voters around the state and public polling in Wisconsin point to a broad spectrum of opinion about the president’s personal attributes. Qualities that are strengths to one voter are minor peeves, major concerns or disqualifying flaws to another.
There is nothing surprising about that. But what is distinctive about this election is how common those concerns are and the degree to which they cross political lines. Most Republicans and most people who voted for Trump in 2016 are very likely to vote for him again, whatever their qualms. Many have set aside their problems with his personality.
“I think he’s doing a decent job,” Korolewski said.
‘He puts his foot in his mouth’
But some have real discomfort with the president’s behavior and rhetoric, leaving them conflicted in either big or small ways about their vote.
“He doesn’t know enough to keep his damn mouth shut. Hey, you can think something, but you don’t have (to say it) ... He puts his foot in his mouth so many times,” said Dick Clark, a retiree who lives near Mauston. He voted for Trump in 2016 but doesn’t know how he’ll vote in 2020.
“Sometimes I wish he would just kind of be quiet a little bit,” said Jeff Pankratz, a Marshfield-area farmer who is largely supportive of the president. “As far as somebody putting his foot down and not being afraid to make somebody mad a little bit, I kind of like that. I don’t like the insults.”
One window into these sentiments comes from a first-time online survey conducted last month by the Marquette University Law School, which does regular telephone polls in the state.
Online panel registers ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’
In addition to his traditional phone survey, pollster Charles Franklin assembled an online panel consisting of a demographic cross-section of more than 200 Wisconsin voters to answer the kinds of open-ended questions that are hard to accommodate in a telephone poll.
One question was, “What, if anything, do you like about Pres. Trump?” Another was, “What, if anything, do you dislike about Pres. Trump?”
One takeaway from the survey is that while many anti-Trump voters had nothing positive to say about the president (a lot of them wrote “nothing” under “likes” and “everything” under “dislikes”), many pro-Trump voters expressed specific concerns or misgivings.
In fact, it was striking how many people from the most pro-Trump segments of the electorate said there were things they disliked about the president’s personality or behavior.
This was true of more than twothirds of the Republicans who took the survey. It was true of more than twothirds of the people who said they voted for Trump in 2016. And it was true of more than two-thirds of those in the survey who said they approved of Trump’s performance in office.
These concerns ranged from minor — that the president’s use of Twitter gives ammunition to his critics — to major, such as “unstable personality” or “he’s a bigot.”
Frustration with Trump’s tweeting was rampant. But among the broader “dislikes” offered by pro-Trump voters were such descriptions as, “crude,” “harsh,” “narcissistic,” “spoiled,” “childish,” “rude and reckless” and “quite brutal.”
Trump supporters in the survey had plenty of praise for the president’s qualities, too, saying he “does what he says he’s going to do,” “stands up for what he believes in,” “doesn’t care what people think about him,” and has a “will to combat all the negative and false news that is reported about him.”
Some cited the same attributes as both positives negatives.
One Republican Trump voter in her early 40s wrote, “he’s blunt” under her “likes” and “he’s blunt” under her “dislikes.”
One Trump voter liked the fact that he “is not political,” but didn’t like that “he doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut.”
One liked that he is “blunt” but wished he “was less boastful.”
Another liked that he expresses himself “openly,” but said he used social media too much.
In interviews with a reporter last month, many Republican-leaning or conservative voters around the state said they liked the president’s policies much more than his personal behavior.
“If I was to meet him face to face, and say one thing, it would be, ‘Hey, Donald, you need to get a thicker skin for what you’re doing. Stop the name calling’ … I like everything he does. I just don’t like the tweets,” said Trump voter Larry Verheyden of Green Bay.
Brenda Kindred, a Republican voter in Merton, said, “He’s a jackass, but I like what he’s doing. If he could just keep his mouth shut, that’s all I ask. It is conflicting because some of the things that come out of his mouth, I’m like, ‘Do I necessarily want to support that?’ It’s not like I’m supporting him as a person. I support some of his ideas. I do like the idea of someone finally standing up for the U.S.”
Her fiancé, Steve Adams, said, “I like what Trump is doing. I’m not a big fan of his tweeting. I’m not a big fan of his, just, nonsense, but whatever he’s doing right now is kind of what I agree with … that’s kind of like what everybody I know actually feels.”
In the regular telephone survey that Marquette released Sept. 4, Trump trailed the leading Democrat, Joe Biden, by 9 points in Wisconsin. His approval rating was 45%. Consistent with past surveys, the share of voters who “strongly” approved of his performance (26%) was much smaller than the share who “strongly” disapproved (44%), reflecting the fact that his supporters are more conflicted about him than his detractors.
Ed Goeas, a GOP pollster based in northern Virginia, divides the electorate into four groups depending on how they distinguish between Trump’s policies and his “persona.”
One is a large and overwhelmingly Republican group that likes both the policies and the persona.
One is an even larger and overwhelmingly Democratic group that dislikes both.
One is a smaller group of “mainly Republicans that don’t like his persona, but like his policies and put a premium on the policies,” Goeas said. “A lot of them have stopped worrying about his personality.”
And finally, there is an even smaller group “that are soft Republicans, soft Democrats, largely independent, that don’t like his persona, do like his policies, but put a premium on the persona.”
This reporter interviewed a small businessman from central Wisconsin last month who seemed to fall into this last category. (Like a lot of voters skittish these days about publicizing their political views, he didn’t want his named used). He described himself as a Republican-leaning conservative who doesn’t like Democrats on the issues but doesn’t “really care for the man in office right now.”
“He seems to belittle people, seems childish, looking for a fight that doesn’t have to happen,” said this voter, who was torn over his vote in 2020.