Donald Trump has achieved two things besides locking up the Republican presidential nomination. The first is widely acknowledged: He now has a real chance of beating Hillary Clinton. Sean Trende, the best of the big-picture political writers, puts the possibility Trump will win the presidency at 30 percent. That sounds about right, for the moment anyway.
The second achievement is the effect Trump’s rise has had on the political environment. It’s helped Republicans. GOP leaders had feared they’d lose the Senate overwhelmingly, maybe the House too, and lots of governors as a result of a Trump wipeout in November. But now that the Trump-Clinton race looks to be reasonably close, that fear has receded.
Let’s look at the landslide anxiety before getting back to Trump. Until around the time of the Indiana primary on May 3, which Trump won in a blowout, Republicans feared the worst. Then Scott Reed, the political mastermind at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ordered an initial round of polls in six Senate races.
In nearly every state where incumbents face stiff challenges—Arizona, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire—polls found Republican incumbents doing as well as or better than expected. The same was true in Nevada, where Rep. Joe Heck is running for the open Senate seat. In Wisconsin, Sen. Ron Johnson polled slightly below the other Republicans but still in a competitive position.
All but Johnson were within the margin of error in the poll. And this was before the chamber spent $10 million in May on ads in the contested races.
One surprise was how well Trump was doing. In Arizona, a state Republican strategists thought might be lost because of its large bloc of Hispanic voters, he was running five points ahead of Clinton. Rather than threatened, Senator John McCain looks to be in good shape. He has endorsed Trump.
The polls showed unusual ticket-splitting: 10 to 15 percent of Trump voters weren’t backing the Republican Senate candidates. “I took this to be a good sign,” Reed says. “It showed they had room to grow. We want to make sure [Trump voters] vote down ballot.”
Meanwhile, Reed and chamber officials are urging Senator Marco Rubio of Florida to run for reelection. He dropped out of the presidential race after losing the Florida primary in March and has declined to seek a new Senate term.
Republicans, however, are worried about losing the Florida seat. None of the five GOP candidates for the Senate nomination appears to have caught on with voters, prompting the effort to get Rubio to reconsider. Reed believes the prospects of persuading him have improved, but are no better than 50-50.
Back to Trump. He turns out to be more of an outsider than we ever imagined. His view of what a presidential candidate should do and say are completely different from that of any candidate in recent memory.
Trump has said the Republican convention in Cleveland in July needs more “show biz” than normal, and he intends to provide it. His plan is to address rallies elsewhere during the first three nights of the convention—say, in Philadelphia, Dallas, and Seattle. His talks would be beamed back to the convention, dominating each evening’s events.
On night four—Thursday, July 21—Trump would show up at the convention to deliver his speech accepting the Republican nomination. Taken together, the four speeches could provide “a single explanation of Trumpism,” says Newt Gingrich, Trump’s friend and adviser.
Despite criticism of his campaign style, Trump insists he won’t change. Even some of his advisers would like him to tone down his remarks. They’ve gotten nowhere with this advice and aren’t likely to.
His intention is to maintain his blitz of Clinton and others as the centerpiece of his campaign. Gingrich has characterized it as a “scorched earth” approach. Trump will give a formal speech occasionally, as he did last week in introducing his energy policy. But those speeches won’t eclipse the day-to-day message, which Trump himself comes up with and delivers extemporaneously.
He won’t dwell on what may appear to be grievances. Last week, he denounced the media for their coverage of his fundraising for veterans’ groups. But that was merely the pretext for his attack, not the broader purpose.
Trump is determined to discredit the press. He thinks that 90 percent of reporters, journalists, and media organ-izations are opposed to him. “He’s going to treat them like people who are 90 percent against him” and his presidential bid, Gingrich says.
“Trump’s assault on the political press may reflect a hunch that he is the first president since FDR who can take on the entire press corps and win,” Gingrich says. “FDR invented the radio fireside chat to jump past the print media. Trump is inventing a social media/cable news/talk radio mix that lets him reach people directly in defiance of the political reporting-analyst class.”
This strategy allows Trump to clobber Clinton in the strongest possible terms. He won’t be dependent on the TV networks for air time or the elite press for coverage. “He thinks that is the only way he’s going to win,” Gingrich says. No matter how vigorously he is attacked, he will always come across as the lesser of two evils. That’s his calculation.
It also means he doesn’t have to build a massive campaign staff, as Clinton has at her headquarters in Brooklyn and across the country. “She’s got 800 people on staff,” Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said on Fox News Sunday. “We got 70 people on staff, right? They think that bigger is better.” Trump thinks “smaller, leaner, more efficient” gets “better results.”
We’ll see if this works as well in a general election as it did for Trump in the primaries. If it fails, Trump will only have himself to blame.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
