The real reason Donald Trump’s convention is such a problem for him

| 11:57 pm EDT August 25, 2020
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To the surprise of perhaps no one but Donald Trump, the TV ratings for the Republican National Convention are terrible. It turns out having a bunch of deranged speakers slobbering all over Donald Trump – seemingly half of them named “Trump” themselves – isn’t exactly making for compelling viewing. But here’s the thing.

Based on social media chatter and trending topics alone, it’s easy to glean that a whole lot of anti-Trump people are watching the Republican National Convention because it’s a train wreck they can’t look away from. Yet even with all these additional looky-loos, ratings are still terrible.

This means that startlingly few Trump supporters are watching the Republican convention. This suggests that even Trump’s own base is tired of trying to hang in there with his narcissistic nonsense and rambling lies, as the country crumbles around them.

Donald Trump’s surrogates like to talk about a supposed “enthusiasm gap,” as if Joe Biden’s large number of supporters don’t count because they’re not as enthusiastic as Trump’s smaller number of supporters. But the extraordinarily low number of Trump supporters watching Trump’s convention is a sign that Trump is the one with the enthusiasm gap. It gives us a real opportunity to double down on voter registration and turnout, phone banking, and polling place volunteering, in order to run up the score and land a decisive victory on November 3rd.