Donald Trump relaunches campaign as funds flood in for Joe Biden

Donald Trump will attempt to revive his bid for re-election with a new attack advert against Joe Biden.

During a tough July for the White House Donald Trump failed to dent Joe Biden’s poll lead. Picture: AFP

President Donald Trump will attempt to revive his bid for re-election on Monday with a new attack advert against his presumptive Democratic rival Joe Biden and a fresh strategy targeting early-voting states.

During a tough July for the White House the president failed to significantly dent Mr Biden’s polling lead, which averages more than 7 percentage points nationally.

Coronavirus cases exploded across the country, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression deepened and Republican officials at all levels uncharacteristically broke ranks to dismiss Mr Trump’s suggestion that the election might need to be postponed because of concerns over voter fraud.

“It would be truly sad if it wasn’t so scary that- Joe Biden- could be in charge of the nuclear football.” - @DonaldTrumpJr #WattersWorld pic.twitter.com/zYW7UhHNJJ

— Watters' World (@WattersWorld) August 2, 2020

The campaign’s struggle to craft a winning message has taken on extra urgency because of the failure to contain the pandemic, which is expected to persuade more Americans than ever to vote by post, meaning that they will place their vote well before election day on November 3.

Bill Stepien, who became the campaign’s manager two weeks ago, pulled most of its national advertising off TV last week to conserve funds while a new plan took shape. “It would be malpractice if we didn’t re-examine that we are spending money in the right places on the right message,” he told Politico.

Mr Trump filed for re-election on the same day that he took office in 2017 and has built a deeper war chest than any candidate in history at this stage, but he has already spent most of it, and Mr Biden, who is now out-raising him, has almost as much cash on hand.

The Trump campaign invested less than $1 million on airtime in the final week of July, having spent between $9 million and $12 million in each of the preceding four weeks, according to data from the political-advert tracker Kantar/CMAG. Mr Biden’s campaign spent more than $10 million on advertising last week according to the data, which was cited by The Wall Street Journal.

The distribution of the two campaigns’ spending was also revealing. For now at least the president’s campaign has ceded turf in Michigan, a state that he flipped from the Democrats in 2016 and which has long been regarded as one of the key battlegrounds. Since mid-July the Trump campaign has spent less than $100,000 on TV advertising there, while investing more than that in ten other states, including Georgia, Iowa and Ohio. Mr Trump won comfortably four years ago in those states that were not expected to be competitive until recently.

America First, the main political funding committee supporting his re-election, has also stopped spending in Michigan. The Biden campaign has been boosting its spending in Michigan since mid-June, and invested $1 million there last week. On Thursday it also announced a seven-figure digital and television ad buy in Ohio. On Sunday, a CBS News poll showed Mr Biden with a single percentage-point lead in Georgia.

The new approach is expected to target contested states that will begin in-person and postal voting by the end of next month. Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania meet those criteria, as does Michigan.

Mr Trump previewed the fresh offensive in a tweet on Friday that renewed his charge that Mr Biden had become a hostage to the far-left faction in his party. “We are doing a new ad campaign on Sleepy Joe Biden that will be out on Monday,” he wrote. “He has been brought even further LEFT than Crazy Bernie Sanders ever thought possible.”

Democrats on Sunday continued to exploit Mr Trump’s proposal to delay the election, which he lacks the authority to carry out.

“I don’t think he plans to leave the White House,” James Clyburn, the highest-ranking black politician in Congress and a close ally of Mr Biden, told CNN. He compared the president’s “strongarm tactics” to those of Mussolini. “I believe that he plans to install himself in some kind of emergency way to continue to hold on to office,” he said.

Mr Trump’s White House chief of staff told CBS that the president had simply been raising concerns about the security of postal ballots when he sent his tweet. Mark Meadows said: “We’re going to hold an election on November 3 and the president is going to win.”

The Times