Trump’s Team Struggles to Blunt Kamala Harris’ Momentum
(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is suddenly playing catch-up, racing to find ways to blunt the wave of momentum behind Kamala Harris since the vice president jumped into the race.
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Just two weeks ago, the Trump team was so ebullient that some officials were warning against overconfidence. The former president had survived an assassination attempt, locked up the nomination and was gaining in the polls. His campaign was targeting states, including Minnesota and Virginia, it once thought out of reach.
But President Joe Biden’s abrupt exit upended the contest and Harris — who Republicans had long dismissed as a weak candidate — has galvanized Democratic voters and donors, muting the jubilation in the Trump camp.
So far, the Trump campaign has yet to settle on effective messages to attack Harris, a Black and Asian-American woman who at 59 is nearly two decades younger than her Republican rival. Some early efforts from Republicans drew consternation even from Trump allies as overly sexist and racist.
Trump and his vice presidential nominee, Ohio Senator JD Vance, are stepping up appearances and the campaign is mounting a major advertising blitz in key battleground states to get its message out. Vance, meanwhile, has faced scrutiny for his past criticism of childless women, exacerbating an existing polling deficit the campaign has with female voters.
“They’re going to overplay their hand,” said GOP strategist and former Republican National Committee spokesperson Lisa Camooso Miller, comparing the predicament to peaking in high school. “How can two white dudes who are wrong on women’s issues go after a Black female candidate and do it right?”
Polling Shift
The Harris campaign is now mounting its own advertising surge across many of the same states Trump is targeting. Among those is Arizona, which the Biden campaign had all but written off but Democrats now see as in play. A record $200 million fundraising haul has erased Trump’s financial lead in just a week.
Polls show Harris has made up the deficit to Trump nationally that Biden had suffered as pressure grew on him earlier this month to pull out of the race after a disastrous debate performance in June.
Harris is in a statistical tie with Trump in the seven swing states that will likely decide the election, as the vice president rides a wave of enthusiasm among young, female and Black voters, according to the latest Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll. Harris was backed by 48% of voters to 47% for Trump, within the poll’s margin of error.
The Trump campaign and its allies argue that the enthusiasm behind Harris will fade as their attacks on her record begin to register with voters.
“Democrats got their shotgun wedding, but we’ll be cutting the honeymoon short,” said Taylor Budowich, who leads Trump’s main Super PAC Make America Great Again Inc.
In a string of rallies and other appearances in recent days, Trump has stepped up attacks on Harris, painting her as “a radical left lunatic” and “incompetent.” The new television campaigns lambast her as Biden’s “border czar,” seeking to tie her to the administration’s immigration policy, widely unpopular among voters.
“The message is all over the place right now and there isn’t a clear signal from the Trump side about what they prefer,” Terry Haines, founder of Pangea Policy, told Bloomberg Surveillance Tuesday. “By comparison, the Harris folks have been very disciplined.”
Trump, on Tuesday, continued the attacks, claiming in a radio interview that Harris who is married to Jewish man, “doesn’t like Jewish people.”
Campaign Blitz
Stepping up his campaign schedule as the pressure mounts, Trump has also added events with audiences beyond the friendly crowds he’s tended to favor. He’s scheduled to participate in a discussion with journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists Conference on Wednesday.
Even on relatively friendly media outlets, Trump has faced questions about his choice of Vance, a populist firebrand whose history of controversial comments about women has provided rich fodder for Democratic attacks.
Asked on Fox News last week if he still supported Vance even after Harris entered the race, Trump said “yeah, he’s fantastic.”
Still, Trump and Vance largely have taken separate paths on the campaign trail. Even when they’ve appeared at the same events, Vance has been given lesser roles separate from Trump, raising eyebrows among Republicans.
Trump’s run is unprecedented as he faces a slew of ongoing legal woes. He was found guilty on 34 felony counts earlier this year, and faces other pending indictments, though most action in those cases has been delayed past the November election.
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