BOULDER CITY, Nevada — An outdoor crowd, an airport, and a thumping soundtrack. Substitute Air Force One for a dramatic mountain backdrop and the result was a reset of the Trump campaign as Vice President Mike Pence took the stage for the first rally since the president was diagnosed with COVID-19.
“A lot of talk this morning on TV about who won the debate,” said Pence of the previous night’s showdown with Sen. Kamala Harris. “I think when you compare the Biden-Harris agenda with what President Donald Trump has done and will continue to do for America, there’s no question who won the debate.
“President Donald Trump won the debate hands down.”
It was a classic Pence moment. Asked to become the face of Operation MAGA, as the campaign sends surrogates out across the country in place of a quarantining candidate, Pence made sure his audience knew the most important name on the ballot.
“We’re here for one reason, and one reason only, and that is that Nevada and America need four more years of Donald Trump in the White House,” he said. “It’s on, Nevada.”
Officials admit that they are weaker with the president confined to the White House but insist that Pence has long been the president’s strongest, most effective surrogate.
For the vice president, it is an opportunity to test drive his own appeal — more measured and more fiscally conservative — to a Trump base he will need if he is to realize his own presidential ambitions in 2024.
The appearance in Boulder City came ahead of a second appearance in Arizona later in the day. Both states are seen as critical battlegrounds in the Nov. 3 election.
The Biden campaign is all in on Arizona, which Trump won by 3.5 points last time around, targeting a state where changing demographics could help deliver 11 electoral college votes to the blue column. A Reuters/Ipsos poll published this week gave Biden a two-point advantage.
Trump had two rallies planned in the state this week before his COVID-19 diagnosis ended all travel plans.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign sees Nevada as a pick-up opportunity. Trump lost here to Clinton by 2.4 percentage points in 2016, but polls suggest he faces a tough challenge to turn things around.
However, senior aides wonder whether the COVID-19 pandemic might hobble the powerful Democratic ground game. The Las Vegas unions are known for driving turnout on Election Day, but their usual door-knocking, canvassing, and busing operations have been limited by the risk of infection.
The impact of the pandemic was on show earlier at Boulder City Municipal Airport. Local authorities limited the crowd to 250. Seats were spaced six feet apart. But few in the audience wore masks.
It made for a smaller event than the president’s recent airport rallies, but the themes were the same, and the audience frequently broke in with chants of “Four more years,” a cry echoed by the vice president.
“We need to decide right here and right now that Joe Biden will never be president of the United States of America,” said Pence, who had bounded on to the stage with a series of fist pumps. “We are going to re-elect President Donald Trump for four more years.”
Tim Murtaugh, Trump 2020 communications director, said Pence had always been Trump’s most effective surrogate. And he said his close relationship with the president contrasted with the atmosphere in the opposition camp.
“We don’t see that unity on the Biden-Harris ticket because, I think, very fresh in everyone’s mind is the fact that it wasn’t very long ago that Kamala Harris was on stage in a Democrat debate labeling quite forcefully Joe Biden’s policies as racist,” he said.
