Too many liberals and Democrats seem obsessed with talking about Donald Trump all the time. It's all about the latest crazy thing Trump says or does and why he is the worst person ever. But it remains the fact that a GOP nominee who can't beat out head lice or traffic jams is somehow still tied or maybe even beating the presumptive Democratic nominee. If you want to understand WHY, you need to focus less on Trump and more on people who currently say they would vote for him in November.

I’ve actually talked with hundreds of people in one-on-one conversations about this election, who they think they might vote for and why. I’m responsible for leading a field team of about a dozen more people who’ve had hundreds more conversations around the same and similar topics. I’ve also watched as polls and focus groups end up reflecting what we are hearing at the doors before everyone else catches on. So if you want to understand the voters who are currently identifying as Trump “supporters” you should really listen up here and now. Because if you don’t understand why so many well meaning, working class people are currently saying “Trump” when a pollster asks them who they are voting for, you’re never going to win back enough of them to win in November.

The first thing you need to understand is that Trump’s “support” is soft at best. Several months ago when we first started listening to voters about the presidential election, the #1 choice for all working class voters was undecided. Now that the primaries are “over” and the two parties have presumptive nominees, more of those undecideds have drifted to Trump than to Clinton so far. But even those voters who now say “Trump” if given the choice don’t really like that choice. They are not excited about their candidate. As one example, the first five Trump “supporters” I talked to just a few nights ago had responses to the question of who they would vote for like this:

“Unfortunately Donald Trump.” (sad face)

“I guess Trump.”

“Definitely not Hillary!”

“I heard there’s a chance someone else might run. Is there? I guess Trump if it’s him and Hillary.”

“Dear God I hate to say it but if I had to vote right now it would be Trump.”

Most Trump voters are not enthused about voting for Trump. There are some who are, of course. But they seem to correlate very well with the 35% or so of GOP primary voters he was getting reliably, early and often in the primary season. But as the national polls have tightened of late, it’s not because millions of people all of a sudden enthusiastically jumped on board the Trump bandwagon. If anything, they’ve hesitated to do so and are still begrudging about doing it. That’s the first bit of good news for Democrats in November.

The second important thing to know is that the top issue of these voters is far and away the Economy. It’s not terrorism. It’s not immigration. It’s not, as far too many liberals seem to just assume, a fervent desire to back and openly racist candidate. Jobs and the economy are issue #1 in working class neighborhoods of any race.

This is potentially very good news for the Democrats in November if they run a truly progressive economic campaign. But it is also potentially very bad news if the party as a whole remains largely tone deaf on economic concerns. It further poses a unique and difficult challenge for the likely nominee and I will now explain why.

The New York Times called it the “B-Minus Economy.” Unemployment is low but that is buoyed somewhat by the number of people who have given up looking for work. We’ve been adding jobs for a record number of months but as we’ve done so wages still refuse to go up for the vast majority of Americans. We could probably add to it the effect of “B-Minus” health care reform in that the cost of health care for most people is still rising but rising less quickly than it did before. The legacy of the last 8 years and the Obama presidency is an economy that is growing slowly but where most of the gains aren’t being felt by working class people. We can argue that Obama should be graded on a curve given that he’s had a GOP opposition aimed at blocking EVERY single thing he’s tried to do, but voters are faced with the situation they are faced with.

Now add to that the fact that this economy that grows but doesn’t grow for me has been going on for the last 35 years at least. All those charts watch wages stagnate around 1980 while productivity and GDP and profits continue to rise. Yes, that occurred under Reagan and two Bushes but it also occurred under Clinton and Obama. Now we have a second Clinton running for president by wrapping herself tightly in the mantle of Obama.

Given that reality, a large chunk of working and middle class voters want to see real, fundamental change. They don’t want to see continuity with the past 35 years of American political and economic life. One sentiment I’ve heard echoed by voter after voter who is thinking of voting for Trump is the following statement in different forms:

“You know...Trump scares me. But I know what we get with Hillary. More of the same. More Clinton and Obama. I don’t know what Trump’s going to do and maybe he won’t be different but maybe he will. I gotta hope that something can change.”

In other words: I would rather have a really scary, really risky change than more of the same thing I’ve seen for the last few decades.

It’s kind of like the reasoning you see from people facing a terminal illness when the conventional treatments have failed to work. They will try any risky, experimental and potentially fatal new procedure knowing just how risky and unproven it is because nothing else has worked. This is the gut feeling of a huge number of swing voters. They don’t care about ideology or labels like liberal and conservative. They’ve voted for Democrats and they've voted for Republicans and on bread and butter economic issues they’ve seen largely the same results for 35 years. They feel, and quite rightly, that we need something radically different.

Sadly, it seems we Democrats aren’t going to give them that option. We’re going to say “stick with the Dem party establishment where things are slightly less bad for you than they are under Republicans” instead of voting for the scary, risky, crazy change guy. It leaves a major opening for the GOP and Donald Trump and Trump, for all his flaws has good political instincts on how to play up this frame.

If you listen to Trump speak for a long time (difficult, I know and rather painful) beyond the sound bites you get from the media, you’ll see he spends a ton of time talking about trade. This is an issue where both Democrats and Republicans have screwed over the American people. Clinton, of course, passed the most famous and the first of the big trade deals, NAFTA. He did this over the major objections of labor. Today Obama stands in support of the TPP, also opposed by labor and any smart progressive.

Trump talks endlessly about trade. And it’s hard for Democrats to credibly counter him on it, despite the fact that Trump himself is a major hypocrite on this issue with his companies making products overseas. His supporters don’t like it, but they often buy his defense that “I’m a businessman and need to make money in a bad system.” On the other hand, Democrats have to defend being major players in setting up that same system. This is a major problem which, by the way, would have been solved by having Bernie Sanders as the nominee.

Where Democrats DO have an opening, I think, is to focus on some smaller economic puzzle pieces, particularly around wages. I’ve talked to many female Trump supporters who nevertheless wish that Trump would join Hillary in supporting equal pay for equal work. Most working class people also favor raising the minimum wage and do not like what Trump has had to say about it. If we can hammer away at these issue specifics, we have a chance to peel away more working class votes.

In the end, it’s a double edged sword to learn that Trump voters are focused primarily on the economy. It means that we do have a chance to win over a lot of these voters without becoming racists, anti-immigrant xenophobes. The challenge, however, is that on the bigger economic picture we have a nominee who is tied in most minds to Wall Street and to bad trade deals while Donald Trump has been able to successfully paint himself as an outside on those issues so far.

That being said, I think Clinton’s foreign policy speech was a major mistake. Why? Because she reinforced the narrative that Trump was a risky, dangerous change and someone who was outside the mainstream. All of my work with swing voters suggest that change and someone outside the mainstream is exactly what they want. Painting him as a major break from the recent political past is a bad idea.

So what do I think would work instead? Number one, focus on economic issue specifics that appeal to working people. Second, paint Donald Trump as a con man who really is NOT any different than the usual politician trying to get votes. The reachable Trump voters are desperate for something different. You’ve got to convince them that he’s not, because if they still think he IS, no matter how scary that “different” might be, it’s going to be preferable to the “same”.