TUCSON, Arizona — They both use the same line in their speeches, urging their audience to help make “America great again, again.” But how they get there could not be more different.
As President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence made final-week swings through two key regions, they struck contrasting tones in their attempts to deliver victory. While Pence picked his way through the latest economic statistics and translated them into jobs growth for his audience in Arizona, Trump shrugged off jobs numbers as “boring” before giving a shoutout to Fox News’s John Roberts in the crowd.
After four years, politics’ “odd couple,” the thoughtful evangelical conservative and the anti-politician showman, are finishing the 2020 campaign much like they have governed.
Insiders say the contrast is typical of the complementary roles they developed in office. But others wonder whether Trump might have a better chance of holding on to power if he could demonstrate his deputy’s message discipline and avoid burying good news on jobs and growth beneath cheap cheer lines about Hunter Biden that will do little to win over new voters.
“He’s got a good story to tell but often seems more interested in getting a laugh line out,” one campaign adviser said.
They come together on Monday, the final day of campaigning. They will appear at two rallies together in the must-win state of Michigan.
[PREDICT TUESDAY’S WINNER WITH THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER’S INTERACTIVE ELECTORAL MAP]
On Friday, the two held leapfrogging rallies in two crucial areas. While Air Force One made its way around what was once the Democrats’ upper Midwest “blue wall,” stopping in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, Air Force Two was on a tour of the Sun Belt, starting in Reno, Nevada, before making two calls in Arizona.
While Trump was speaking, Pence was in the air, with the televisions aboard Air Force Two tuned to the president’s rally. They showed Trump in Green Bay stopping to listen to a heckler.
“He wants to know, where’s Hunter? We haven’t found him,” said the president, wearing a dark overcoat against the cold. “He’s still looking for his laptop from hell. That’s where he is. ‘Where’s my laptop?’”
The Democratic nominee’s troubled son has long been a rally target. And the president has intensified the attacks after Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani made a string of salacious claims about the contents of a hard drive from the younger Biden’s computer.
Allegations about the Biden family mix with unsupported claims of powerful forces arrayed against the president and his allies.
“You need to show up in record numbers and deliver a blistering defeat to these corrupt forces,” the president said. “And they are corrupt as hell. They’re trying to take over our country, and we caught them.”
Calls for combating Trump’s opponents also dotted Pence’s rally in Tucson, Arizona, but they came from the audience, not the podium.
When Pence said Joe Biden was already planning a fresh coronavirus lockdown if he won power, someone shouted: “He can’t do that if he’s in prison.”
At a Trump rally, the shout might have been magnified by the president, not endorsed as much as echoed.
Pence pressed straight on to the choice facing voters, trying to switch the conversation away from a referendum on the Trump administration.
“Joe Biden says we’re in for a long dark winter,” he said. “But under President Donald Trump, we’re going to distribute the vaccine, we’re going to defeat the virus, and the best is yet to come.”
In three speeches in less than 24 hours, Pence steered clear of going after the Biden family. Instead, it was the sort of speech to be expected from someone who learned the craft as a congressman and then as a governor. He parsed national economic figures for local impacts and made sure his audience knew that none of the wins would have been possible without the help of the Republican governor, senator, or congressman in the audience.
In contrast, last week, Trump was under fire for dismissive comments he made about Arizona Sen. Martha McSally during a campaign stop in the state, where she is fighting for survival.
Costas Panagopoulos, professor of political science at Northeastern University, said the two appeared to have made a strategic decision to appeal to different types of audiences.
“Pence has been in politics a long time, and he may be less comfortable attacking family members than Trump has been,” he said. “And he potentially has a political future to think about, whereas for Trump, this is his last shot.”
Their differing characters are even evident in the staging of their rallies and musical soundtrack.
While Pence favors classic rock tinged with Americana — think Free’s “All Right Now” and Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Taking care of Business” — Trump’s pre-rally soundtrack drips with nostalgia or cheese, swinging from the vacuous, such as the Village People’s “Macho Man,” to a string of Elton John crowd-pleasers, like “Candle in the Wind.”
After four years of working with such a mercurial president, Pence riffed on their differences in his stump speech.
“Some people think we’re a little bit different,” he said in Tucson, pausing for the inevitable laugh. “But honestly, we’ve become very close friends.”
