What Is It That Worries the Squishy Middle About Trump?

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The 2020 presidential election, like pretty much all presidential elections, will depend on appealing to voters in the middle. I know it’s fashionable to ignore this in favor of “turning out the base,” but base strategies mostly work at the skinniest of margins. If your base strategy is a little better than your opponent’s, you might gain a point or two at best.

That’s fine, and it’s why campaigns work hard to turn out their base. But the real money is in the middle, because every voter you win is a voter lost for the other side. In other words, while base strategies tend to cancel each other out, voters in the middle actually count double.

Now, it’s a truism that a reelection campaign is a referendum on the incumbent, and I think that’s true in spades this time. This election is going to be all about Donald Trump, and in particular, it’s going to be about winning centrist voters away from Trump. So give this some thought: What is it that worries centrist voters about Trump? If you were tasked with creating blistering attack ads against Trump that would play in suburbs around the country, what would the ads say?

The hard part about this is getting away from all the things that you hate about Trump. You don’t count, after all, since you’re already a confirmed anti-Trump vote. You may be outraged about Ukraine or Brett Kavanaugh or emoluments or immigration or whatnot, but it’s pretty obvious that these things haven’t made a big impact on non-political-junkies who don’t pay much attention to this stuff.

Nor does Trump’s temperament seem to bother them. Not enough, anyway. The most commonly expressed opinion is that, sure, they don’t like the Twitter stuff and they wish he’d run off at the mouth a little less, but in the end it’s not a deal breaker.

So what is? Put yourself in different shoes. Or ask some friends whose political views are more moderate than yours. What really worries them about Trump? And what would it take to turn those worries into a vote for someone else?

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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