How the Trump Campaign Is Recalibrating, and Not Recalibrating, Against Kamala Harris: NPR

Less than a month ago, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was booming: he was leading in the polls, leading a united party at the Republican National Convention, and delivering a disciplined message to defeat President Biden.

Things have changed in the last few days.

Vice President Harris’s entry into the race as the new Democratic nominee has erased her polling lead, upended her message, and forced a campaign designed to counter Biden to recalibrate.

For much of 2024, Trump and his campaign were a well-oiled machine, built almost exclusively around the concept of bashing Biden as “weak, broken, and dishonest.” According to the polls, that message was working.

Before dropping out of the presidential race and after his disastrous performance in the June debate, Biden was losing to Trump in every major swing state, often by far outside the margin of error.

Since Harris emerged as his replacement, polls suggest she doesn’t have the same vulnerabilities or bad vibes as Biden, despite being his vice president. It took the Trump campaign a while to figure out what to highlight in attacking Harris.

The main message remained consistent, harshly criticizing the Democratic Party’s policy positions on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border, amplified by Harris’ involvement in addressing the issue since taking office.

After a failed assassination attempt on him at a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump took the stage triumphantly at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, the leader of a party completely under his control and confident that voters would support his vision for America’s future.

Bad news cycles

But in the weeks since Biden’s withdrawal, the campaign has been dogged by cycles of bad news, sometimes of his own making, that have overshadowed the messaging against his new opponent.

When Trump appeared at a National Association of Black Journalists conference last month, he falsely claimed that Harris “transformed herself into black” to gain political advantage. At a large rally in Atlanta last week, held in the same arena where Harris had appeared days earlier, Trump’s personal attacks on popular Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp outweighed his criticism of Democrats.

Trump’s social media posts and speeches at these events have also become more confusing, disjointed and rooted in resentment than in the earlier part of the cycle, when Biden’s age and poor performance often overshadowed polls showing that many voters believed Trump was too old to run again.

His attacks on Harris’s race, recent obsession with rally crowd size, and other off-the-cuff remarks harken back to his first run in 2016. But this time, he’s no unknown quantity, exploiting anger and anti-establishment sentiment to overcome an unpopular opponent.

In Montana on Friday, at Trump’s only rally of the week, an event in support of Montana Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy, Trump spoke for nearly two hours, largely about his personal grievances and his views on the presidential race.

In a sign of the campaign’s new line of attack against Harris, Trump played two video compilations of Harris’s past statements, one of which painted her as too progressive in her views on policing, gun restrictions and health care, while the other mocked her statements and suggested she wasn’t smart enough to be president.

He occasionally attacked Montana’s incumbent Democratic Senator Jon Tester, calling him too progressive and, in a non sequitur, observing that Tester has “the biggest stomach I’ve ever seen.”

Sheehy spoke for only ten minutes.

Fewer rallies than in 2016

The last three weeks have been a replay of several aspects of the 2016 campaign that some voters didn’t like and that Republicans felt weren’t as helpful.

Unlike 2016, Trump hasn’t held as many rallies, either in key states or in Republican strongholds. Since early July, Trump has held a total of eight rallies, plus the Republican National Convention. In 2016, he held 22 in the same span.

At a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago home on Thursday, Trump said he was focused on other types of campaigning besides large-scale rallies and didn’t need to do much campaigning, calling it a “stupid question” to ask why he hasn’t been as busy.

“Because I’m way ahead,” he said. “And because I’m letting their convention go on, and I’m doing a lot of campaigning. I’m doing a tremendous amount of recording here, we have commercials that are on a level that I don’t think anyone’s ever done before. Also, in some cases, I see a lot of you in the room where I’m talking to you on the phone, I’m talking to you on the radio, I’m talking to you on television.”

Harris has held a slim lead over Trump in several national polls released last week, including an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll showing Harris leading by 3 points on a surge in Democratic enthusiasm.

Trump also used the Mar-a-Lago press conference to attack Harris’ intelligence and brag about his rallies, falsely claiming that more people attended his January 6, 2021 rally than attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech.

Trump also said he would debate Harris on Sept. 10, setting up a face-off hosted by ABC that will take place as voters begin casting their ballots.

His earlier debate against Biden was a key factor in efforts to convince the president to end his bid for another term, and the massive forum could once again shake up the race at an important time, especially since Trump is no longer the clear frontrunner.

While Trump has not been as active on the campaign trail, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, his running mate pick, has made several appearances this week, following Harris and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, around the Midwest.

After his rocky launch, Vance used lengthy media interviews, including those with local voters, to contrast Republican policies on immigration, inflation and crime with those touted by Democrats.

“Kamala Harris has been such a disaster as vice president of this country that wherever she goes, chaos and uncertainty follows her,” he said in Philadelphia. “We have a war in Europe, we have a war in the Middle East that threatens to spiral out of control, we have chaos in the world’s financial markets.

“Everything Kamala Harris touches is a disaster, and we should kick her out of the United States government, not give her a promotion.”