My guess is that if you lived through the Trump era and are still considering voting for him, an offensive joke from a warm-up act won’t affect you.
Jim Geraghty wrote this morning about Tony Hinchcliffe’s appearance at Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden and how it did Republicans no favors. While I agree that the jokes were tasteless and not particularly funny (they didn’t even seem to land among the MAGA audience), I am skeptical that they will make any difference.
There isn’t any instant polling on this sort of question, so we’re all spitballing here, but my general perspective is that voters make decisions based on their view of the candidates, not the various people surrounding them.
My thinking was in part informed by an incident that occurred just before the 2006 midterms. John Kerry, who had been the most recent Democratic presidential nominee, told a group of students, “If you make the most of it and you study hard and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” What he later called a “botched joke” was seen to have backfired on Democrats who had been carefully fighting off Republican attempts to portray anti-war Democrats as contemptuous toward U.S. troops. He was removed from the campaign trail. But in the end it did nothing to blunt the momentum of Democrats that cycle, because he wasn’t on the ballot.
At this point, voters arguably have a better sense of Donald Trump based on his words and actions than of any presidential candidate in history. My guess is that if you lived through the 2016 election, his presidency, January 6, and the current campaign, and are still considering voting for him, then you won’t be swayed because of an offensive joke from a warm-up act.
When I expressed this view on X, several people chimed in to argue that this stage of the campaign is less about persuading undecided voters and more about mobilizing supporters to get to the polls and corral their friends and relatives to do so as well. And thus this could trigger a lot of people inclined to vote for Kamala Harris, especially Puerto Rican voters in swing states, to get off their couches.
Maybe so. But at the same time, Trump has benefitted throughout his political career from being the one to dominate the news cycle, for better or worse. So it could be argued that several days of controversy over his big MSG rally — and backlash among his supporters of its media portrayal as a Nazi rally — could be a motivator for his people.