With less than three months to go until Election Day, Donald Trump’s campaign this week tried again to hit the reset button. “We’re going to run like we’re the underdog,” Trump’s new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, told Fox News on Monday. Before Stepien spoke, the Trump team released two new television ads targeting Joe Biden, who, thus far, has proved an elusive foe. One features a montage of Biden with Senator Bernie Sanders and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and claims that Biden “has embraced the policies of the radical left.” The other shows a woman of color silently holding up printed cards, the last two of which say “I’M AFRAID TO SAY THIS OUT LOUD… I WON’T RISK MY CHILDREN’S FUTURE WITH BIDEN.”
These ads seem to have come from the same playbook that Trump has been relying on for months now, with little success if you believe the polls. To get a better idea of how the campaign is trying to motivate the President’s loyal supporters and reach out to less committed ones, I downloaded the campaign’s official app, which promised to supply me with “exclusive content and campaign updates.” For a couple of days, I dived into the online Trump world, which turned out to be an immersive experience.
After registering, I was immediately invited to sign up and watch some of the app’s proprietorial video content, including “Triggered,” a show that features the President’s son Donald Trump, Jr., and “Theology Thursday with Speaker Gingrich.” As I waited for these examples of must-see viewing to begin, I watched another show, which had been recorded a few days previously. “The Right View” is the Trump campaign’s version of “The View,” the popular daily talk show that airs on ABC. The four hosts were Lara Trump, the President’s daughter-in-law; Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former prosecutor and Fox News host who is dating Donald Trump, Jr.; Katrina Pierson, a Tea Party activist who was a spokesperson for Trump’s 2016 campaign; and Mercedes Schlapp, a Republican communications operative who served in the Trump White House from 2017 to 2019.
What the hosts lacked in objectivity, they more than made up for in vitriol toward Biden and the Democrats. “It’s really horrifying to see what these people are doing,” Lara Trump said, in reference to Democratic efforts to expand mail-in voting in Nevada and other states. After conducting an interview with Kaya Jones, a conservative pop singer, the hosts then discussed the Trump campaign’s two new ads, while carefully omitting how misleading they are. (One of the ads claims that Biden supports defunding the police and raising taxes on the middle class. He backs neither.) The hosts repeatedly tore into the Democratic candidate. “They will go to any lengths possible to try and prop up Joe Biden, like a ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ skit,” Lara Trump said. “They can’t be real thinking this guy can be President,” Guilfoyle said. “He can’t find his own way out of his home.” The “socialists” who controlled Biden were hoping to use him “as a tool to advance their radical agenda and tear this country apart,” she went on.
Things continued in this vein for close to fifty minutes, interspersed by pop-up ads offering Trump merchandise, such as a “MAGA Mama” T-shirt. The show was slickly produced, and it captured the essence of the Trump campaign, which has come down to employing scare tactics, many of which are racially coded; claiming Biden is mentally impaired; and trying to suppress the Democratic vote by challenging mail-in voting and other efforts to insure that an election during a pandemic can be held safely and fairly. Notably absent from the episode of “The Right View” that I watched was any serious discussion of the coronavirus, which has claimed more than a hundred and sixty thousand American lives, or any real defense of Trump’s record. Evidently, the Trump campaign doesn’t like its chances if the election turns into a referendum on its candidate’s performance in office. So it’s doing all it can to change the subject.
That approach is also clear in the campaign’s Facebook ads, which are just as voluminous as they were in 2016. “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem,” one says. “Joe Biden has ABSOLUTELY lost his mind,” another proclaims. Between early May and August 6th, the Trump campaign spent $60.2 million on Facebook, while the Biden campaign spent just $29.5 million, according to Facebook’s own records. Some of this difference was offset by spending by Democratic groups that are not directly under the control of the Biden campaign, such as the Priorities USA super PAC. But just as it did in 2016, the Trump campaign is placing a great deal of emphasis on Facebook for fund-raising and reaching persuadable voters.
That doesn’t mean it’s neglecting more traditional campaigning methods, such as canvassing and conducting voter-registration drives. At a moment when the Biden campaign has largely abandoned physical efforts to contact voters because of the pandemic, relying instead on phone calls, texts, and digital outreach, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have recruited mask-wearing canvassers, who they claim are knocking on more than a million doors a week. “From now to Election Day, voters may only see one campaign at their doors,” Elliott Echols, the R.N.C.’s national field director, told Politico. “We can do this safely for President Trump and Republicans up and down the ballot.”
Republicans have also made extensive efforts to register new G.O.P. voters, particularly in some key battleground states. In Pennsylvania, for example, “Republicans have added about 165,000 net voters, while Democrats added only about 30,000,” since 2016, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported last week. “Democrats still maintain an 800,000-voter edge over Republicans. But that’s down from 936,000 in 2016, when Trump still won the state by less than 1%.”
Despite all these efforts, the polls show Trump trailing Biden, as they have all year. In FiveThirtyEight’s poll average, the margin between the two candidates on Saturday morning was 7.8 percentage points. That’s down a bit from the nine-point advantage that Biden held a couple of weeks ago, but it still represents a substantial gap. Trump is also trailing Biden in most of the battleground states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which he won narrowly in 2016 to put together a majority in the Electoral College.
During his interview with Fox News, Stepien sought to downplay the public polls, pointing out that most of them had Trump behind in 2016, as well. He also claimed that the campaign’s internal polls show a “strong standing” for the President. Some of the campaign’s recent actions suggest otherwise, though. After putting television ads on hold last month, when Stepien replaced Brad Parscale as campaign manager, this week it resumed advertising in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina—all states that Trump won in 2016, but where polls currently show him trailing or in very tight races with Biden.
The latest ad buy is just the beginning. Both campaigns have raised obscene amounts of money—earlier this week, the Trump campaign announced it had more than three hundred million dollars in the bank, and Biden’s said it has nearly two hundred and fifty million. Between now and November 3rd, anybody who lives in a battleground state is going to be blitzed by political ads from both parties, on all of their devices. With so many ads running, they are likely to cancel each other out, at least to some extent. Trump may well need something more seismic to shift things in his favor.
