Have Donald Trump’s rallies become a political turnoff?
The rallies in fact run the risk of losing voters for the Republican presidential candidate, given his tendency for damaging impromptu remarks. He should try holding town halls instead.
So far this year, Donald Trump has appeared in 37 political rallies, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard’s Ash Center. His record rally total in one year was 83 in 2020, a presidential election year when Mr Trump came up short.
In his recent hour-long press conference, Mr Trump said he would spare reporters “a whole course on economics,” but here is an economic principle he no doubt understands: the point of diminishing returns. The Trump rallies are there. They no longer produce significant additional votes for Mr Trump. Something more is needed.
It’s no overstatement to say the Trump rallies are his reason for being. They provide repeated personal and political validation. But the Trump rallies have become like Grateful Dead concerts, with many of the same Deadheads, now Trumpians, showing up (apologies to former Deadheads).
I saw a fellow recently who said he’d been to more than 70 Trump rallies.
This isn’t to say the Trump rallies are a waste of time. They hold the base, without which the Trump phenomenon evaporates. The problem is the rallies produce no net gain. In fact, the rallies may now run the risk of losing votes, given the opportunity for Mr Trump to make damaging impromptu remarks, which have become more frequent.
Democratic operatives are open about the extent to which Mr Trump is programmable. Kamala Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, is the designated Trump button-pusher.
In exploiting the short intervals between Mr Trump’s volatile remarks, the Harris camp’s goal is to unsettle the small percentage of undecided voters in the seven swing states. An additional risk for Mr Trump’s rally-heavy campaign strategy is that it may have begun to suppress turnout among tentative Republicans.
Anecdotally, there seem to be a swath of Trump-inclined voters who understand the consequences of a Harris victory but who have become despondent over Mr Trump’s performance and say they may not vote for him.
None of this is to minimise the past importance of the Trump rallies, which helped win him the presidency in 2016. Times change. The 2016 election was overwhelmingly about tapping into emotions. The election eight years later is more about the particulars of inflation, economic policy, maintenance of domestic order and a turbulent world.
Apart from hosting rallies and having a conversation with Elon Musk on X to mobilise first-time or low-interest voters, Mr Trump’s biggest voter outreach venue looks as if it will be his one or more debates with Ms. Harris. But the debates, however important, are dangerous because they elevate familiar problems. Antagonising Mr Trump produces such predictable outbursts of exaggeration that neither Ms. Harris nor the moderators will be able to resist poking the bear. The net gains from debates among gettable voters for Mr Trump are likely small.
He submitted to a press conference last week and plans to do another this Thursday in New Jersey. This is intended to draw a contrast between Mr Trump and the Harris avoidance strategy, and it does.
But press conferences also reveal a recurring Trump malady: He gets too hot in these settings, too tense. He becomes combative because he likes being combative, and, yes, it can be grimly entertaining. But his out-of-left-field riffs, such as comparing the size of his Jan. 6 Washington Mall crowd to that of Martin Luther King Jr., can’t possibly have reassured uncommitted voters. Another net loss.
To win this election, Donald Trump needs to chill. He needs to find a campaign venue whose structure will keep him relatively calm. That’s not a rally, an acceptance speech, a one-on-one with a journalist or a press conference. All are Trump time bombs.
At the risk of sounding delusional, there is an alternative: Mr Trump should hold town halls with uncommitted voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.
All the Republican primary candidates did town halls, which are real events with real people of the sort Mr Trump believes he can relate to. In-state voters want to see candidates engaging with people like themselves, whether urbanites, blue-collar workers or metro-area suburbanites.
The average American, like those at the GOP convention, is perfectly capable of asking intelligent questions without the press’s gotcha tone. It would be the campaign’s job to weed out paid provocateurs.
Mr Trump is much better than Ms Harris in these more intimate settings. She’s terrible, because she has no stable beliefs and stumbles trying to qualify her answers. There is virtually no chance of her submitting to a town hall before the election. It’s the teleprompter or bust for Ms Harris.
A town-hall format is also the venue most likely to keep Mr Trump on message, because the participating voters will themselves be totally on message. Mr Trump can be good at turning such exchanges into conversations, and there’s much he needs to explain about his second-term policy alternatives to what Biden-Harris has done.
If instead Mr Trump’s strategy remains trying to tear apart Ms. Harris personally, so be it. But the Trumpians at those big rallies had better come to grips with the possibility that it’s a farewell tour.
The Wall St Journal
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