It’s almost July and everything is getting worse:
President Trump and his campaign team are grappling with how to resuscitate his imperiled reelection effort amid a wave of polling that shows him badly trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and losing traction even among core constituencies.
Some Trump advisers and allies are privately pushing for sweeping changes to the campaign, including the idea of a major staff shake-up and trying to convince the president to be more disciplined in his message and behavior.
But so far, the campaign has settled only on incremental changes — such as hiring and elevating a handful of operatives who worked on Trump’s upset victory in 2016 — and has yet to settle on a clear message for his reelection. Campaign officials and other advisers are also still struggling with how to best focus their attacks on Biden, which so far have been scattershot and have failed to curb his rise among voters.
And then there’s Trump himself, who has derailed his team’s desired themes on an almost daily basis — deploying racist rhetoric and mounting incendiary attacks on critics amid a surging coronavirus pandemic, an economic crisis and roiling protests over police brutality.
Numerous national polls show Trump losing significant ground with seniors and among white voters, including both those with and without four-year college degrees. He has also slipped among white evangelical voters. According to new New York Times/Siena College polls, Trump is at least slightly behind Biden in six states that he won in 2016 and are pivotal to his reelection path — including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where he trails by double digits.
“You can’t win with these numbers. They’re atrocious numbers,” said Edward J. Rollins, co-chairman of the pro-Trump super PAC Great America and the former campaign manager for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign.
“The president must straighten his campaign out and convey to the American people that he can move forward and lead,” Rollins said. “He’s got to go out and add 10 points pretty quick. If he can do that, he’ll win. If not, Biden is sitting there as the alternative.”
Trump’s advisers and allies have grown frustrated with some of the president’s incendiary and divisive behavior and comments in recent weeks and are dismayed by the polls, including some of their own internal surveys that also show him losing to Biden. The president also came under fire for a June 20 rally in Tulsa that failed to attract much of a crowd even as the campaign downplayed coronavirus distancing guidelines.
But many Trump allies remain deeply skeptical of the public polling — pointing to 2016 polls in key states that underestimated Trump’s support — and say the internal polling and modeling that they’re sharing with the president is less grim than the public surveys. Multiple campaign and Republican officials also asserted that they have seen no serious erosion in Trump’s political base.
“Over the past four months, the president’s support among Republican voters has ranged between 90 and 94 percent consistently,” said Tony Fabrizio, the campaign’s chief pollster, referring to the campaign’s internal polls. “As of our most recently polling, it stands at 94 percent.”AD
Fabrizio added that any erosion is among independent voters, who always swing back and forth between the two candidates.
Four recent national public polls show between 87 percent and 91 percent of Republicans approving of Trump.
Trump has polled advisers on whether he should make changes to the campaign, and several White House and campaign officials said there were ongoing discussions on how to improve the president’s political standing.
The president has responded to the turmoil by emphasizing his nativist and base instincts, attempting to rally his core supporters through controversial and racially tinged comments and tweets.
The latest example came Sunday, when Trump retweeted a video that included a supporter proclaiming “white power” in response to counterprotesters and calling his backers in Florida retirement community where the demonstration occurred “great people.” Trump later deleted the tweet and a White House spokesman said the president had not heard the “white power” shout.AD
He has twice referred to the deadly coronavirus, which originated in China, derisively as the “kung flu.” In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network on Monday, he baselessly accused former president Barack Obama of “treason.” And he has dismissed the racial justice protesters — who took to the streets after the killing of George Floyd in police custody — as “hoodlums,” “thugs,” and even “terrorists,” promising “retribution” in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Thursday night.
Advisers, meanwhile, are frustrated with the president’s tendency to portray himself as the victim, and have urged him to stop the public displays of self-pity.
“If the election was today, we are in big trouble,” according to one person close to Trump, who like others requested anonymity to share a candid assessment. “Thankfully it is not.”
He’s not going to change. Their only hope is that something external intervenes to either make Biden unacecpetable or rally the country around him. Asteroid hit maybe?
Obviously, the way they are planning to win is by cheating. But it’s going to be much harder to steal it if they are behind by 10 points. Still, not impossible. The country is being devastated by the pandemic and the economic destruction that goes along with it. Things may very well be so chaotic by the time November comes around that they will be able to manipulate the results and there won’t be much of anything anyone else can do about it.
If I thought Trump was capable of strategic thinking, I might even think they are mishandling the pandemic so badly for that purpose.