WASHINGTON
(AP) — President Donald Trump is sharpening his focus on his most
ardent base of supporters as concern grows inside his campaign that his
standing in the battleground states that will decide the 2020 election
is slipping.
Trump
turned his attention this week to “left wing mobs” toppling Confederate
monuments and visited the nation’s southern border to spotlight
progress on his 2016 campaign promise to build a U.S.-Mexico border
wall.
He
ignored public health experts warning Americans to avoid large
gatherings by holding two large campaign events in Oklahoma and Arizona,
parts of the country where coronavirus infections are surging.
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With
his rhetorical turn, Trump is feeding red meat issues to a base that
helped spur his upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But he risks
appearing to ignore larger issues that are jolting the country, like
the pandemic and racial injustice, while underplaying economic issues,
even though polling shows that to be an area where Trump performs
relatively well.
“This
might be the only path for him at this point,” said Dan Schnur, who
served as a campaign adviser to Arizona Sen. John McCain and California
Gov. Pete Wilson. “Most of the center is no longer available to him.
Motivating his base is not just his best available strategy. It might be
the only one.”
The
president’s advisers believe there are few undecideds when it comes to
Trump, with only a sliver of voters who may change their mind and warm
to him. The more effective use of resources is to make sure those who
like him turn out to vote, according to campaign and White House
officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal
strategy.
Trump
takes a measure of comfort in the fact that he found himself in a
similar position in 2016. Polls throughout his race against Clinton
showed him with a deficit, often just as wide as some polls now suggest,
before he closed that gap in the final days of the campaign as the base
coalesced around him.
As
he did with Clinton, Trump has tried to drive up Democratic rival Joe
Biden’s negatives, pushing unsubstantiated claims about his mental
acuity and his son Hunter’s business dealings. But Trump so far has had
little success in driving Biden into the deeply negative territory where
Clinton found herself.
Biden’s
campaign is confident that the circumstances for Trump, who now has a
well-established political record, have complicated his ability to drag
down his opponent with a barrage of attacks.
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“The
reality is this is a different election than 2016 was,” said Symone
Sanders, a senior adviser to the Biden campaign. “In 2016, a lot of
voters went to the polls asking what kind of president Trump would be.
It’s no longer a theory of what kind of president Donald Trump will be.”
Trump
hopes to get as much of that base to turn out while persuading the
voters who have shown tepid enthusiasm for Biden to stay home. Indeed,
while many national and battleground polls show Trump trailing Biden,
surveys have suggested that some of the former vice president’s support
is lukewarm.
Trump’s
team feels confident that approximately 40% of the electorate supports
him and notes his approval rating has remained unusually stable during
his term. The president’s campaign advisers believe it comes down to
getting a bigger proportion of the smaller group of people who love
Trump to turn out than the larger group of voters who express tepid
support for Biden.
With
that in mind, the campaign has renewed its focus on plays to please the
base. Among them: the border wall and other hard-line immigration
executive orders; a promise to produce a list of conservative Supreme
Court nominees; public consideration of acknowledging Israel’s
annexation of parts of the West Bank to satisfy evangelicals; and, most
strikingly, a focus on reopening the nation’s economy over publicly
dwelling on the pandemic.
South
Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s closest allies in
Congress, said Trump can win with “a little more message discipline” and
a focus on policies that separate him and Biden.
“Just make it more about policy and less about your personality,” Graham told reporters.
Last
weekend, Trump held a big-arena rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that drew a
relatively sparse crowd for a president who is used to overflow
audiences. He then took part on Tuesday in a jam-packed event at a
Phoenix megachurch — albeit in a smaller venue — for young
conservatives. Both are the sort of events that Trump is counting on
helping him turn the tide.
“Nov.
3 is a big day,” Trump told attendees at a Students for Trump event in
Phoenix. “Get out. Get the parents, get the friends, get the husband,
get the wife, get everybody.”
Arizona
has emerged as a growing hot spot for the virus, and Phoenix’s
Democratic mayor, Kate Gallego, implored that such an event — most
participants declined to wear masks and didn’t practice social
distancing — could not be safely carried out.
Karen
Kedrowski, a political scientist at Iowa State University, said such
events help Trump echo ardent conservatives’ frustrations that the
lockdown has lasted too long. But Trump’s attempt to amplify his message
through mass gatherings is perilous.
“The
president sees the need to electrify his base,” Kedrowski said. “But
what happens to the president if two weeks from now rally attendees are
becoming sick and spreading the virus in their communities?”
During
the event, Trump, who had stirred up controversy by using the racist
phrase “kung flu” to describe COVID-19, was reflecting on the many names
he’s heard the coronavirus called.
When he heard the pejorative yelled from the crowd, Trump smiled and said it, too. The audience roared in approval.
Biden
surrogates, including vice presidential contender Sen. Tammy Duckworth,
called out Trump for it. Still, Biden is being careful not to get
dragged into a culture war.
“We
have not let Donald Trump’s antics distract us from our message,”
Sanders said. “At the same time, we’re not going to sit back and allow
him to disparage large swaths of the electorate.”
___
Madhani reported from Chicago.
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