The Trump campaign may have reshuffled its leadership, but the message to supporters this week remained constant.
“The same media polls that had the world convinced that Hillary Clinton would be elected in 2016 are trying the same trick again in 2020,” said new campaign manager Bill Stepien. “It won’t work.”
Privately, campaign advisers and Republican strategists are not so sure. They warn that epithets and nicknames are not sticking to Joe Biden in the way they did to Clinton, that Trump is no longer an outsider candidate seeking an upset, and that the electoral map is looking very different.
Although much can change in the four months before Election Day, insiders fear the campaign is being stretched thin as it defends traditional red states such as Texas and Georgia as well as others, including Iowa and Ohio, that it won comfortably four years ago.
Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and Trump supporter, said looking back to 2016 was the wrong analysis.
“It is true we can lose by a point or two in the national polls and still win, but the campaign needs to take the polls seriously and recalibrate the strategy because it is not working,” he said.
The Trump 2020 campaign is a behemoth compared with the ragtag band that won in 2016 when the advance team would sometimes be Corey Lewandowski and Donald Trump Jr. in a rental car, as one veteran described it recently.
The headquarters may have moved from Trump Tower to rented office space in Arlington, but the spirit of 2016 infuses the new setup. After the return of 2016 communications guru Jason Miller last month and the elevation of Jeff DeWit, 2016 Arizona chairman to a senior role, the president’s counselor Kellyanne Conway said: “The president’s bringing the band back together.”
On Friday, she locked horns with reporters at the White House, reminding them how many TV networks had forecast the wrong result in 2016 as she unpacked what she said were methodological flaws in sampling this time around.
“Just get the sample right, so people don’t breathlessly say, ‘Oh my God, Joe Biden’s winning by 65 points,’ when the sample is 34% Democrat, 24% Republican,” she said. “It’s not fair, it’s not scientific, it’s not legitimate.”
Even so, the campaign’s spending suggests concern in states that should be safe.
At the end of June, the campaign used its war chest to reserve airtime in six states at a cost of $95 million, according to Advertising Analytics. It may be no surprise that money is pouring into Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, two states that swung narrowly to Trump last time, but Arizona and Ohio were not meant to be battlegrounds.
Then came news this week that the Trump campaign was reserving another $1 million in Iowa for Labor Day through to polling day.
And in Texas, a recent YouGov poll of likely voters gave Trump a lead of only 1 point. It follows other polls that put Biden ahead in a state that has not gone blue since Jimmy Carter ran in 1976.
At the same, the most recent fundraising numbers show Biden eating into Trump’s financial advantage, reducing the president’s lead from $200 million in March to $53 million at the start of July.
“The Trump RNC juggernaut has huge financial advantages in February but has nearly evaporated,” said Eberhart.
Robert Shapiro, professor of political science at Columbia University, said some parallels with 2016 remained.
“The Trump people think their people are underestimated, that they are not responding, or the likely voter models being used in the polls are not right. There is that level of uncertainty,” he said.
But the shifting electoral map, with the likes of Arizona moving his way, put Biden in a strong position, he added, with plenty of routes to claiming 270 Electoral College votes.
The Trump campaign “should be scared out of their minds,” he said.
In recent weeks, the Trump campaign has been quietly focused on the states that won him 2016. On Friday, Vice President Mike Pence visited Madison, Wisconsin, where he delivered a speech defining the choice facing people in November as between “freedom and opportunity, and socialism and decline.” It marked his second trip to the state inside a month.
The abiding hope for some insiders now is that the faltering polls and stuttering campaign would help Trump find the laser focus he displayed last time.
“The good news for us is that I think Trump runs better when he’s behind,” said a Republican donor. “That was part of the magic victory dust in 2016.”
