Yes, MAGA Fans, Trump Really Can Lose

Wanna know how?

Donald Trump’s loyal MAGA fans may not want to hear this, but Kamala Harris has more than a long-shot chance of beating the former president. She’s got a real chance to win, even if Mr. Trump’s loyal fans don’t want to believe it. And if she does win, it’ll most likely be because Donald Trump handed her the victory.

When he was running against a mentally and physically weak Joe Biden, Mr. Trump looked like he not only would win in November — but might actually win big.

After he was shot, it looked like he couldn’t lose. He had the sympathy vote along with the solid support of his base. The Democratic Party was in disarray. All he had to do at the GOP national convention was take the high road, sound like a statesman.

Instead he delivered a familiar political speech, the kind his fans hear at his rallies. It was a speech that showed there wasn’t a new Donald Trump after he was almost assassinated. What we got after that one hour and 32 minute meandering speech filled with the usual Trump exaggerations and lies, was proof that even a near-death experience couldn’t transform Donald Trump into somebody new.

As Dan Hennigner put it in his Wall Street Journal column, “If Mr. Trump couldn’t pull himself together to deliver a solid 60-minute case for his candidacy then, there is no reason to expect he will do so in the campaign ahead.”

It’s no secret that the election is going to be decided by moderate voters in a handful of battleground states. But Donald Trump doesn’t seem to grasp the reality that moderate voters are very different from his MAGA fans. That the MAGA crowd loves the cheap shots — but that moderates don’t. He doesn’t seem to grasp the idea that he’s already got the MAGA vote locked up. He needs to win over less partisan moderates if he hopes to win the election. But it’s not at all clear that he’s capable of behaving in a way that would win them over. Let’s just say Donald Trump doesn’t always act in his own best interests.

When he told supporters at a recent rally that he wasn’t going to be nice despite advice that that was the way to win, he got cheers. It’s a safe bet that those undecided voters weren’t cheering.

Joe Biden was old and frail and that was working in Trump’s favor. But Kamala Harris is running a future versus the past campaign — now 78-year old Donald Trump is the old man running against a 59-year old woman.

The polls that once showed Trump comfortably ahead of Joe Biden now have him pretty much neck-and-neck with Kamala Harris.

And Trump won’t be debating Joe Biden again. Ms. Harris won’t be the pushover that President Biden was. Trump will have to challenge her on the Biden-Harris record, where she’s vulnerable. If he does, he could come out ahead. But if he tries to win by demeaning her, those undecided swing voters will notice that too.

When he was running against Joe Biden, Mr. Trump was able to pick up support from black and Hispanic voters, especially younger men. Can Ms. Harris win those voters back? If she can’t, Barack Obama might be able to. Another reason she could win this election.

As for Ms. Harris well-known rambling “word salads” that leave anyone within earshot wondering what she just said — she’s been sounding a lot better since she took over for Mr. Biden. And Trump’s campaign team shouldn’t count on her annoying laugh (some would say, cackle) bailing them out either. With the stakes this high, she’ll present herself as presidential, and her friends in the media will do their part to burnish that image.

But let’s be clear — Donald Trump won’t be the only candidate who will run a campaign based on personal attacks. Kamala Harris is already calling the former president a sexual abuser and a fraudster. She’s already running a “prosecutor vs.  felon” campaign. Everything she says and does will be aimed at getting under Trump’s thin skin.

And when she goes low she’s hoping Trump goes even lower — hoping that will remind those moderate voters what they don’t like about Mr. Trump, about why after supporting him in 2016 they abandoned him in 2020 — and hoping they’ll give Ms. Harris a serious look.

But she has a record that she can’t run away from, as hard as she may try. She really is a San Francisco liberal in a middle-of-the road country. She really was named by an independent group the most liberal member of the United States Senate. And she’ll have to defend her role as “border czar” when the border was an open door. There’s also the Biden-Harris record on inflation.

And there’s still the question as to who she’ll pick as her running mate. Whoever that turns out to be will be compared to Trump’s pick, JD Vance — and that may wind up helping Ms. Harris too.

And there’s one more question: Will issues matter more to voters than Donald Trump’s divisive character. If they do, Kamala Harris may have a tough time convincing voters that they’ll be better off with her in the Oval Office. But if Donald Trump thinks he can beat Kamala Harris by tearing her down, by constantly insulting her, he may wake up on November 6, convinced, yet again, that the only reason he lost is because the election was rigged.