Trouble for Trump?

Do we have an outlier, a harbinger, or a wake-up call? I refer to the poll by Talk Business and Politics and Hendrix College released Sunday and showing Donald Trump with a higher negative than positive rating in Arkansas, 50 to 46, and ahead of Joe Biden by a mere two points, 47-45.

It was a jarring finding. Arkansas has been Trumpville. Our state’s white rural conservatives have been devoted to his populism, conservatism, and political outsiderism, even his rascality.

The poll is likely not an outlier. All polls lately show Trump slipping because of the historic unease in American life and his woefully failed and petulantly divisive leadership response. Talk Business’ polls have charted uncannily the Republican surge in Arkansas since 2010. Trump acolytes who might wish to call the poll bogus will need to explain how Gov. Asa Hutchinson came away with a 62% approval rating.

As to whether the poll is a harbinger, the question is of what?

It probably will be a harbinger of Trump escalating his fomenting of fear of Democratic liberalism. But it’s also a harbinger that Trump has more significant woes nationwide. Nothing about being only two points ahead even momentarily in Arkansas bodes well for Trump in a broad sense.

The poll certainly is a wake-up call for Republicans that Trump’s stunts and harangues are, at least, ill-timed during racial unrest and a frightful pandemic.

Consider that Trump’s approval rating in Arkansas is 46%, and that he gets 47% head-to-head with Biden.

Most likely these Arkansas people disapproving of Trump but voting for him are white rural conservatives who fear either that Biden will pick a liberal woman as his running mate, install pro-choice judges, yield to elements of Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez democratic socialism, let immigrants overrun our border, or sanction Nancy Pelosi’s turning all our cities into San Francisco or Seattle.

Trump can’t win against himself. “Against Trump” will defeat “for Trump.” He requires an opponent to demean and demonize. What has saved him before and might save him again is fear, both that which the Democrats bring on themselves and that which the Trump campaign can stoke with gazillions of dollars.

I suspect that the 47-45 result last Wednesday is the closest Biden will get to Trump in Arkansas. Trump and the Republicans haven’t yet started the real demonization. Now they have the richly exploitable matter of “defunding” or “dismantling” the police, even to the extent that there are blocks of Seattle now accepted by a liberal mayor as an autonomous police-free zone. That kind of thing has the white rural culture of Arkansas shaking its head.

Trump might well go to election day in Arkansas with a slightly higher negative than positive personal rating and still win a 58-42 victory. That 58% would cover 47% who like him and 11% who don’t like him but can’t even fathom an alternative that scares them to death.

Meantime, on the national scale, nothing seems more important than Biden’s selection of a running mate. He’s old. He is a one-termer at most, it would logically seem. To vote for him, a decisive number of independents will need to be comfortable knowing they could well be picking not only their next president but the one after that.

It appears that U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris is the likeliest choice. U.S. Rep. Val Demings, the black woman former police chief of Orlando, intrigues. But being the former attorney general of the near-nation that California is and a U.S. senator from there now will probably make Harris’ possible presidency a marginally conceivable notion. Elizabeth Warren would be more conventionally presidential, but this seems high time for a black woman.

By the way, the Talk Business-Hendrix poll found U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton to have positive-negative ratings much like Trump’s. Cotton was at 44-47.

That stands to reason. Cotton is a creation of the nationalization of Arkansas federal office politics, not of any particular personal appeal, and he has systematically made himself into the chief Trumpian of Arkansas. His essence is angry negativity. That doesn’t work as well when severe problems arise to elevate the importance of consensus and solutions.

Cotton is fortunate he has no Democratic opponent to his re-election this year, which, in Arkansas lately, is not a great deal different from having one.

One more thing: People were wondering Sunday whether Trump’s numbers in Arkansas meant Sarah Huckabee Sanders was less a lock for governor in 2022 than I and others have been saying.

As political scientist Jay Barth put it: Trump’s problem in Arkansas is not with Republicans, who still uniformly support him in this poll, but with independents. Sanders’ association with Trump would still seem to carry the day in a Republican gubernatorial primary.

And there is no good reason, despite this snapshot from last week, to think the next Republican gubernatorial nominee won’t be the general election winner.