Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump, speaks during a campaign event in Uniondale, N.Y., on Sept. 18.Frank Franklin II/The Associated Press
With six weeks remaining in the 2024 presidential election campaign, it increasingly seems as if Donald Trump and his advisers know something that no one else in American politics knows.
Otherwise a candidate in a close struggle with a rival who seems to be building momentum wouldn’t have spent a campaign day in Montana, which Mr. Trump won by a 57-41 margin in 2020, and which Republicans have carried in the past seven elections.
Otherwise a candidate scratching for advantage wouldn’t be seen in New York, which has gone Democratic in the past nine elections; where Mr. Trump was defeated in a 61-38 per cent landslide in 2020; and where he’s been shunned for decades by the high-toned elites he once courted with extravagant gestures, but who now regard him with special enmity as a vulgarian without peer.
Otherwise a one-time mogul who made his fortune in the conventional environs of the real estate business (with a diversion into casinos, an airline and small undertakings, including a university) wouldn’t spend additional time courting cryptocurrency supporters – decidedly male, decidedly conservative – who have been devoted to him for months while 75 per cent of Americans are skeptical of digital currencies, according to a Pew Research Center poll, and thus may look askance at his enthusiasm.
Otherwise a candidate worried about winning Pennsylvania, with large Jewish populations in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, wouldn’t snipe at this constituency, where he needs the vote of every Orthodox and passionately pro-Israel Jew.
Otherwise a candidate advocating a comprehensive overhaul of American political culture wouldn’t spend precious campaign time vowing to protect vaping against regulators. Mr. Trump did so after receiving a large contribution from the tobacco lobby, a vulnerability for a candidate determined to change how Washington works and diminish the influence of capital power brokers. Moreover, one study found that the largest group of vapers are between 12 and 40, which includes an age group of voters particularly vulnerable to the appeals of Kamala Harris.
Otherwise a candidate who made a blooper for the ages in asserting that immigrants have eaten pets in Springfield, Ohio, wouldn’t be planning to schedule a campaign stop there. (Rob Rue, the city’s Republican mayor, has said the claim lacks credibility, and Mike DeWine, the state’s two-term Republican Governor, described the claim on ABC’s This Week as “a piece of garbage.”)
Otherwise he wouldn’t have been golfing in Florida, where he is confident of victory, on the day earlier this month when he was apparently targeted for assassination. Every day in these past weeks counts.
Otherwise he wouldn’t have flown around with Laura Loomer, a right-wing extremist who believes the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States were “an inside job.” Otherwise he wouldn’t have said of the most popular entertainer on the planet, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
Otherwise a candidate with an advantage on issues such as immigration and the economy wouldn’t deliver rally speeches that seem more like An Evening at the Improv than the kind of campaign address George H.W. Bush or Mitt Romney might deliver.
“Trump is communicating with a sector of the public that feels left behind,” said Scott Reed, campaign manager for Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican nominee. “He’s running a campaign aimed at his base. But he’s hanging in there.”
Indeed, the New York Times/Siena College poll results released Monday showed Mr. Trump strengthening his position in critical Southern battlegrounds.
“Trump has his own campaign, and his own theory of the race,” said Tad Devine, a veteran Democratic campaign strategist.
That theory is in direct conflict with long-established informal rules for a presidential campaign.
Those rules call for shoring up a candidate’s base in areas where victory is not certain, not spending time in safe states, such as Montana, where the electoral votes are all but assured. They call for using time, along with money – the most important campaign resource – carefully and prudently, not frittering it away in leisure pursuits like a September golf outing.
They call for putting controversies behind the candidate, not doubling down on falsehoods and errors, such as Mr. Trump’s claim about the pets in Springfield. They call for efforts to widen the campaign’s attraction, not dwelling on matters, like cryptocurrencies, with fringe appeal.
And they call for avoiding remarks that make it more difficult for people already bucking their natural constituencies to split from the rest of their voting group. Mr. Trump made such a remark when, in trying to build support among Jewish voters, he said that they – who on average have given the Democratic nominee 71 per cent of their vote since 1968 – ”would have a lot to do with” an election in which he was defeated.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters, took issue with Mr. Trump’s remarks, saying on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that the former president should avoid putting the onus of the election on Jews. “Talk about crime, talk about the economy, talk about inflation, talk about the border,” he said. “That’s the way you persuade people in this country.”
Mr. Trump’s deviations from Mr. Graham’s advice and from these basic guidelines underline how dramatically the Trump campaign veers from the usual political playbook, and reflect the impulses and inclinations of the candidate himself.