Republican strategists are warning publicly and privately that the Trump campaign is in danger of letting the election slip away unless urgent action is taken to overhaul muddled messaging and stamp out a string of its own humiliating goals.
Campaign manager Brad Parscale is under intense pressure after Saturday’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Organizers claimed hundreds of thousands of supporters had signed up but faced embarrassing questions when the arena was only half full and coverage was dominated by empty seats.
But a bigger danger, according to several strategists who spoke to the Washington Examiner, is that President Trump is losing the skill that powered him to victory in 2016: his ability to connect with ordinary voters.
With more than four months to go, most of the strategists believed there was time to turn things around.
“They need some adults running the operation,” said a Republican strategist who asked to remain anonymous in order to discuss campaign strategy. “The mainstream press are decidedly against him, you have to stop giving them cudgels to hit him with.”
There was more bad news for Trump in a Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll published on Tuesday. It showed presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden doubling his lead over Trump to 12 points, amid questions about the president’s handling of the coronavirus, racial tensions, and the economy.
The tide of negative figures and the misfiring of Saturday’s rally, which had been billed as a chance to reset the campaign, have sparked a debate about whether to change direction.
The extraordinary nature of the year so far, beginning with optimism and a booming economy only to be hijacked by a coronavirus pandemic and violent protests, suggests any recalibration would quickly be overtaken by events, said George Birnbaum, a political consultant with experience in congressional and international elections.
“Both sides right now are having to ride the wave and figure it out as they go because the hand of God is changing the chessboard from day to day,” he said, describing how protests about police brutality that might have helped Biden quickly morphed into the sort of violence and vandalism that would boost Trump’s law-and-order message.
“There’s very little you can do in terms of planning, strategy when you have this kind of level of uncontrolled emotion.”
Even so, the campaign was consistently missing a trick, failing to capitalize on Trump’s position in the White House, according to a senior Trump adviser.
“Every day he has to do something — whether it’s the immigration executive order, whether it’s the monuments — he does something, and then the campaign has to take that and amplify it and put it in terms of what he stands for and what he will do in the next four years and how the other guy is the opposite,” he said.
The campaign was too reliant on digital and was not doing enough work in amplifying the message and getting it in front of people who would make a difference in the election, he said.
“They are not taking what the White House is doing and putting it into this overarching message,” he said.
Rick Tyler, a frequent critic from within the Republican Party, said the electorate was being bombarded with mixed messages. Was the presumptive Democratic candidate frail, bumbling “Sleepy Joe,” or a dangerous socialist intent on destroying America, as Trump said on Saturday?
More than that, there needed to be a positive message that Trump had spent four years working for the American people and would get them through the current crises.
“He’s got to be saying, ‘When you elected me, I promised to lower unemployment, increase GDP, keep the economy strong, and I did these things,’” he said. “Then the terrible pandemic came, and he’s not good at it, but he’s at least got to give empathy a passing glance, to say that this is a rough patch, but we’ll get through it together and return to prosperity.”
Instead, as one senior GOP operative pointed out, viewers of Saturday’s rally were treated to a 14-minute reenactment of Trump defending the way he walked down a ramp at the U.S. Military Academy earlier this month. He said: “Who does that speak to?”
Most voters were still in the same place they were in 2016.
“They want to take care of family, want to know their jobs are safe, and they can put food on the table without a lot of nonsense getting in the way,” he said.
“Trump’s got to tap back into that.”
