2020 race: Three big themes in Trump’s re-election plan

Donald Trump shows his signature on an Executive Order on Safe Policing for Safe Communities, earlier today. Picture: AFP.

It’s pretty easy to summarise Donald Trump’s political position: His re-election bid is in serious trouble.

The US President trails Democrat Joe Biden by 8.1 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of the latest national polls. He is behind in almost all public polling in the half-dozen most important swing states.

Unemployment, the most politically sensitive of economic indicators, has rocketed upward because of the coronavirus and is certain to still be at historic highs by the November 3 election. Over the last 15 times a sitting US president has sought re-election, only three of those presidents have run with unemployment rates that rose over the year before the voting, according to research by the Mehlman Castagnetti Rosen & Thomas lobbying firm. All three — Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush — lost.

The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that a stunning 80 per cent of Americans think the country is out of control. There is no formidable third-party candidate emerging to siphon away anti-Trump votes from the Democrats the way the Libertarian and Green candidates did in 2016. Trump has a solid base, but he is a divisive figure who hasn’t really expanded it.

Ordinarily, such metrics would spell doom. But….

This is no ordinary time, Trump is no ordinary politician, and ordinary metrics may not apply over the 4½ months before the election. The President has a cash and a social-media advantage over Biden, and an advantage in the Electoral College that would allow him to again lose the popular vote, and even a couple of those important swing states, and still win the election.

Perhaps most important, a clear campaign script is emerging for Trump. It has three parts: celebrate a recovering economy, bash China and proclaim himself the candidate of law and order. In each case, Trump is seeking to turn what could be a drag into an advantage.

On the economy, the Trump calculation will be that, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the economy’s direction, not its objective condition, will matter most by Election Day. If the economy has hit bottom in the current second quarter, starts climbing back in the third quarter and is on an upswing as the fourth quarter starts, the economic narrative is simple: Trump had a strong economy, wasn’t responsible for its collapse and already has led the recovery.

Critically, the Journal/NBC News poll found that voters prefer Trump over Biden to handle the economy — the only clear issue advantage he has right now, but perhaps the most important one.

On China, Trump hasn’t achieved the wholesale revision of the trade relationship he promised. But he has a preliminary trade deal that has Beijing buying more American goods, pushing China back to the top of the list of American trading partners.

Trump’s critics will claim that all this has done is move the trading relationship back to where it was before he shook it up. His claim will be that without his toughness China would have continued gaining a long-term commercial advantage.

More broadly, the tough-on-China theme has growing resonance as Americans increasingly place blame on Beijing for failing to do more to stop the coronavirus before it leapt to the broader world. Trump doesn’t get good marks for how he handled the pandemic, but to many voters China is the bigger villain of all in this tale. And Trump isn’t going to be outflanked when it comes to confronting China.

On the concern over racial injustice that has spread across America since the killing of George Floyd at police hands in Minneapolis and the ensuing unrest, there is nothing subtle about the ground Trump is staking out. On Monday, he tweeted out, simply and without elaboration: “LAW & ORDER!” That was the seventh time in two weeks he has tweeted that unadorned message.

Again, this represents a Trumpian attempt to turn a liability into an asset. Many will blame him for letting the country slip out of control, but he is counting on voters who think a strongman is the person who can reassert control.

Overhanging all this, Trump advisers say, is a broader theme to knit together the disparate pieces: The problems on display right now show that old institutions have failed America, and the President remains the agent of change that Biden can’t be because of his entanglements with those institutions. “To be clear, it is impossible for Joe Biden to cast himself as a candidate of change,” says one Trump campaign adviser.

It’s a steep hill for Trump to climb. But if Democrats grow over-confident, and assume Trump’s current travails are the final chapter in this book, they do so at their own peril.

The Wall Street Journal