President Trump’s new campaign manager laid out his strategy on Thursday, saying the aim was to contrast Joe Biden’s record with that of Trump’s and to win “each day” from now until the election.
Trump replaced Brad Parscale with Bill Stepien on Wednesday night after weeks of poor polls and a campaign that has struggled to adapt to life under COVID-19.
“With 109 days left, our goal is clear – to win each day we have left until election day. If we win more days than Joe Biden wins, President Trump will be re-elected,” he said in his first public statement after taking up the role. “We will expose Joe Biden as a hapless tool of the extreme left and contrast his failures with the undeniable successes of President Trump.”
The campaign has struggled to define Biden in the minds of voters — often a crucial element of an incumbent’s reelection strategy.
Stepien said his predecessor would remain intimately involved in the campaign’s data and technology work.
And he said opinion polls were failing to reflect Trump’s support.
“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. It won’t work.”
Parscale had been under mounting pressure for weeks. His high profile and extended absences from the campaign’s Arlington headquarters, spending time instead at his Florida home, irked Trump.
The final straw came when he boasted that a million people had signed up for the president’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Barely 6,000 attended.
Insiders said Jason Miller, taken on by the campaign as an adviser last month, had effectively taken charge of strategy. But Parscale’s Wednesday evening demotion took many by surprise.
While Parscale only entered politics in 2015, running Trump’s data operation, Stepien is a veteran operative, working for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
The shake-up comes as aides have struggled to develop an alternative to the mass rallies that proved so effective in 2016. An attempt to hold a smaller outdoor rally at a New Hampshire airfield on Saturday was postponed as a tropical storm moved up the coast, and the campaign currently has no future in-person events listed.
And in a further sign of the problems posed by COVID-19 in an election year, the Republican National Committee on Thursday announced it was scaling back plans for its convention in Jacksonville, Florida, next month.
