Donald Trump has replaced his boasting with begging just days after losing his front-runner position in Iowa and his firm lead over Ben Carson nationally.
Much of the bravado the Republican presidential hopeful has shown in past stump speeches was absent Tuesday when pleaded with supporters in Sioux City, Iowa to help him recover his edge in the earliest voting state.
“Iowa, will you get your numbers up, please?” Trump asked the crowd of about 2,500 while promising to do “such a good job” on the campaign trail if he’s able to reverse his slumping poll numbers in the state.
One Republican insider says the vulnerability Trump displayed yesterday in Iowa could precipitate an even further decline in his support.
“It could backfire,” Ford O’Connell, a veteran campaign strategist and political analyst, told the Washington Examiner.
“Trump’s biggest asset has been his perception of inevitability and ability to play the media like a fiddle. The one thing he doesn’t want, is to have that perception of inevitability pierced,” he added.
“He showed weakness, and that was very un-Trump-like,” added Cartney McCracken, a Democratic strategist and partner at the progressive Control Point Group.
“He seemed desperate, but I don’t think he was necessarily begging,” she said.
Trump also told Hawkeye State voters during his campaign rally Tuesday, “If I lose Iowa, I will never speak to you people again.”
“I think he was throwing a temper tantrum — a Trump tantrum — and it was insulting to voters,” McCraken said before comparing the billionaire’s White House bid to a reality TV show and his poll numbers to television ratings.
“Voters are either going to respond positively or negatively. And if they respond negatively, his ratings are going to continue to drop and we all know what happens when ratings drop, the show goes off air,” she said.
Both O’Connell and McCracken predict Trump will head into the third GOP debate Wednesday ready to discredit Carson, the soft-spoken former neurosurgeon, as a candidate.
O’Connell said Trump has to “find a way to make [Carson] look unpresidential” while McCracken believes Trump could direct some of his punches at the electorate.
“I think he’s going to attack voters for not putting him first and he’ll continue the same rhetoric as last night,” McCracken said, referring to the billionaire’s comments in Iowa.
“Either he can do really well tonight, reenergize those voters and go back up to No. 1, or he can have a less than stellar performance and give a lot of other candidates the opportunity to continue on up,” she said.
Trump is first in the Washington Examiner’s presidential power rankings and will take center stage at the third debate, hosted by CNBC, in Boulder, Colo. The debate will air at 8 p.m. ET and be preceded by an undercard debate featuring candidates polling below 3 percent nationally.
