Axios has a news article titled, “Trump’s surprise fan club: Why many Dems want him to win big in N.H.”:
Donald Trump wants a big win in New Hampshire on Tuesday to effectively end the GOP presidential primary. Many Democrats are rooting for the same thing.
Why it matters: President Biden’s team believes that Trump becoming the presumptive Republican nominee for president would give a much-needed jolt of energy to voters and grassroots donors who don’t want to see Trump back in the White House.
Democratic strategists close to the Biden campaign say that as good as Trump is at mobilizing his MAGA movement, he’s also one of the best motivators of Democrats that the strategists have ever seen.
But others note that Trump, although disliked by two-thirds of American voters, could conceivably win the general election, because Joe Biden is also deeply unpopular:
- Some still recall Jim Messina — Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager who is close to the Biden team — hoping in early 2016 that Hillary Clinton would get to run against Trump, who wound up getting elected.
- “I wake up every morning,” Messina said then, “and drop to my knees and pray, ‘Please, God, give me Donald Trump’ ” as the GOP nominee.
Progressive reporters also often hope Trump is nominated again, both because he is more likely to lose the general election than Nikki Haley is, and also because coverage of Trump sells newspapers in ways that coverage of Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis never has.
Newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times got a huge boost to their internet traffic, number of subscribers, and ad revenue, starting with Trump’s 2016 campaign, and continuing through Trump’s presidency. Now, with Trump out of office, the Washington Post is losing money and laying off staff. Ironically, the Washington Post, which has not endorsed a Republican for president since 1952, benefited from Trump being in office, making money from progressives who signed up as subscribers while he was in office.
When Ronald Reagan was in office, that did not give liberal newspapers much of a boost, because although liberal voters disliked his policies, they did not personally hate Reagan as much, and didn’t get as much satisfaction from reading media coverage trashing him. Reagan actually rolled back more of his Democratic predecessor’s regulations than Trump did, and cut welfare and wasteful programs favored by progressives, unlike Trump. But Reagan had an agreeable personality, so liberals did not personally hate him as much, even though he was more conservative than Trump. (They still often disliked Reagan, though).
When Reagan rolled back regulations issued by his Democratic predecessors, he succeeded more than half the time. By contrast, Trump’s attempts to rescind Obama’s job-killing regulations were blocked by courts around 90% of the time.
