US election 2020: Donald Trump fights to the finish
As the US election campaign hurtles to the finish, Donald Trump’s travel schedule speaks volumes about his grim predicament.
As the US election campaign hurtles into its final weeks, Donald Trump’s travel schedule speaks volumes about the challenge he faces to win a second term in the White House.
In his comeback week on the campaign trail after recovering from COVID-19, the rejuvenated President is being forced to spend his time campaigning in states he won easily in 2016.
This week, Trump held rallies in Iowa, North Carolina and even deep-red Georgia — states he won four year ago and that were not considered to be in remote danger until recently.
As George Conway, a Republican and founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project put it: “Macon, Georgia? You’re in very dire straits if you have to shore up support there.”
With less than three weeks to go before the November 3 poll, Trump is in dire straits, but he is not out of the contest just yet. The President is once again crisscrossing the country doing what he does best, campaigning in front large, roaring crowds, as he searches desperately for a way to turn the tide against his Democrat rival, Joe Biden. His campaign team is trying to work out a road map for Trump to somehow reach the 270 electoral college votes he needs for victory in the face of polls that are relentlessly negative for him.
“He’s in trouble, there’s no question. By every traditional measuring stick, this looks like a Biden landslide,” says Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for president George W. Bush.
But Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh disputes those who are already burying Trump. “If we believe public media polls, then we would be talking about Hillary Clinton’s re-election right now,” he says. “The choice in this campaign boils down to this: Who do you trust to restore the economy to greatness, the President who has done it once already and is already doing it again or Joe Biden and his 47-year record in Washington?”
Could Murtaugh be right? Could the polls once again be wrongly discounting Trump just as they did in 2016? Certainly there is a disconnect between what the polls say and the impression you get when driving through the swing states Trump won from the Democrats in 2016.
I have travelled extensively through the midwest and the south during this campaign and there are far more Trump signs than Biden signs in people’s yards.
Trump supporters — and not just those at his rallies — are louder, more overt and more enthusiastic in their support for the President than Democrats are for Biden. This is merely anecdotal and may speak more to the type of supporter Trump attracts. But road trips through swing states right now expose a clear gap in the enthusiasm generated by each candidate.
Yet the statistics say otherwise — the public polls are far darker for Trump than they were in 2016 when they wrongly pointed to a victory for Clinton. Biden leads Trump nationally by 9.2 points, just down from 10.2 early this week, which was his largest lead this year. Biden also leads by more than six points in the key battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and enjoys a 2.7 point lead in Florida, a state that Trump must win.
The Trump campaign points out that at this stage of the race in 2016, Clinton was leading Trump nationally by seven points and she still lost. But that was Clinton’s high point and Trump’s comeback in 2016 was sparked by the FBI’s decision to reopen the Clinton private email investigation. This time Trump is still searching for the game changer he needs.
The turbulent events of recent months have failed to give Trump any momentum. Biden has maintained a remarkably stable lead despite the Republican and Democratic party conventions, the violent riots in several US cities and Trump catching COVID-19.
The only event that has moved the race was the adverse reaction of voters to Trump’s bullying performance in the first presidential debate, which pushed Biden’s lead from roughly seven to 10 points.
Republicans are hoping Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings this week for conservative Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett will energise Trump supporters. Barrett’s polished performance was impressive, but polls show Americans are evenly split on whether her nomination should be pushed through before the election. The nomination of another conservative judge will excite Trump voters, allowing him to boast that he has appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court during his term.
But Democrats also have used the hearings to highlight claims that Barrett poses a threat to the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, and the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v Wade that legalised abortion in the US — both laws that enjoy majority support in the US, according to polls. Given this, Barrett’s looming confirmation is likely only to deepen the partisan divide rather than woo undecided voters into either camp. The net impact of her confirmation on the overall race will probably be close to zero.
Trump has finetuned his stump speech for the final weeks of his campaign to centre on several key themes: that he is the best candidate to revive America’s economy; that he will restore law and order in American cities and that Biden is a puppet of the socialist left who would undo the Trump agenda.
Trump is using his rallies to zero in on some of the weaknesses in Biden’s campaign. These include Biden’s refusal to say whether he would pack the Supreme Court to dilute the influence of conservative judges. Trump also has relentlessly attacked Biden’s refusal to distance himself more clearly from the left’s utopian climate change plan, the Green New Deal. In addition Trump has hurt Biden on the issue of fracking by misrepresenting — but with some effect — Biden’s half in, half out policy on fracking of oil and natural gas, an industry that supports thousands of jobs in swing states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Each of these issues shows the influence that the left-wing of the Democratic Party is exerting over Biden, giving Trump oxygen to claim that Biden is captive to the socialist Bernie Sanders wing of the Democrats. But as veteran Republican pollster Whit Ayres says: “The President’s closing argument seems to be that Joe Biden and the Democrats will destroy your life. It is clear that demonising Joe Biden is a much more formidable task than demonising Hillary Clinton.”
In the past 48 hours Trump has also been energised by a New York Post story that claims Biden may have spoken with his son Hunter Biden about his business dealings in Ukraine, contrary to Biden’s assertion. Biden’s campaign has denied the story.
The Post relied on alleged emails derived from a computer hard drive purporting to show correspondence from Hunter Biden. Twitter and Facebook considered the story so dubious they have limited access to it, promoting claims of liberal bias by the tech giants. It is too early to tell how this story will play into the campaign, but early signs suggest that, even if accurate, it is too vague to be a game changer.
Polls show Trump’s strongest argument for re-election with voters is his record on the economy, which was buoyant before the pandemic. Most voters say Trump would be better than Biden in managing the post-pandemic economic recovery. If Trump pulls off a surprise win, this is most likely to be the issue that drives it.
“The choice facing American is simple,” Trump told the Economic Club of New York this week in his hyperbolic style. “It’s the choice between historic prosperity under my pro-American policies or very crippling poverty and steep depression under the radical left. And that’s what you’ll have … a depression.”
But Trump’s problem is that these issues are not gaining enough traction with voters and time is fast running out. Looming above all in the final weeks of this election campaign is the coronavirus and the belief of roughly two in three Americans that Trump has mishandled it. This is the albatross around Trump’s neck.
Trump’s call, as a survivor of COVID, not to let the coronavirus “dominate your life” is popular with many Republicans who want to prioritise the economy over fighting the virus. But it rings hollow for many in a country where COVID has killed more than 215,000 Americans, thrown millions out of work, closed schools across the nation and turned normal life upside down.
Despite the President’s claims this week that the US is making “tremendous progress” on the coronavirus, the country is experiencing a new wave of infections on the eve of the election. The growing infection rate is slowing down the growth in new jobs and the economic recovery as people retreat back to their homes to stay safe.
Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz has warned that if Americans do not feel optimistic about the direction of the pandemic and the economy on election day, “I think we could lose the White House and both houses of congress, that it could be a bloodbath of Watergate proportions.”
Biden’s solid lead in the polls has allowed him to continue his low-key election campaign, which focuses on small, COVID-safe gatherings. It is a dull campaign compared with the theatrics of the large rock-concert style rallies that Trump holds with Air Force One as the backdrop. Yet the Biden campaign knows it has an election-winning lead and is reluctant to suddenly change gears and adopt a high-profile, high-risk approach in the final weeks unless it has to.
Biden’s two central messages — that he will unite the country and that Trump has mismanaged the pandemic — are resonating with voters. And despite Biden’s low profile, he is proving to be a quietly effective retail politician on the campaign trail.
Biden went to the key swing state of Florida this week to try to woo older voters as polls show the pandemic is hurting Trump’s support among those over 65.
“How many of you have been unable to hug your grandkids in the last seven months?” Biden asked a group of seniors in Florida. He reminded them of how Trump at his rallies boasted of how the virus “affects virtually nobody”, just “elderly people” with “heart and other problems”.
“He was talking about seniors. He was talking about you,” Biden said. “You’ve worked hard your whole life, contributing to society, building a family. You deserve security.”
On the economy and jobs, Biden has tried to turn the tables on Trump by directing his pitch at the white working Democrats in the midwest who switched to Trump in 2016. Biden is embracing Trump-style “kitchen table” politics and accusing the President of neglecting the American worker — exactly what Trump did to Clinton in 2016.
“I view this campaign between Scranton (Biden’s working-class home town) and Park Avenue,” Biden told auto union workers in Toledo, Ohio, this week. “Like a lot of you, I spent a lot of my life with guys like Donald Trump looking down on me, guys who thought they were better than me because they had a lot of money. He’s turned his back on you. I will never do that.” Biden is trying to steal back Trump’s “forgotten people” by claiming it is Trump who has forgotten them.
Yet the greatest challenge facing the Trump campaign is not white male workers or seniors but suburban women, who have scored Trump more harshly than any other demographic.
Biden leads Trump by nine points among all suburban voters and by a thumping 28 points among suburban women, according to a Washington Post poll released this week. Suburban women have turned their backs on Trump over his handling of the virus and over his combative style. Trump has tried in vain to win them back through his law and order pitch, promising to safeguard their suburbs from violent riots and crime.
At his rally in Florida this week, Trump literally pleaded for suburban women to come back to him. “So can I ask you to do me a favour, suburban women, will you please like me? Please. Please,” he asked. “I saved your damn neighbourhood, OK?”
Despite these ominous signs for Trump, 2020 has been the year for surprises. Anything could happen in these coming weeks to shake up the race and Trump is a gifted gut-instinct politician who people underestimate at their peril. But, with each day, the odds are growing that the Trump show, which has held America and the world in thrall for more than four years, may be coming to an end.
Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.
More Coverage
Read related topics:Donald Trump
Join the conversation
A weakened Iran still has a major deterrent: the nuclear option
With Hezbollah reeling and its missiles failing to do much damage, attention turns to the threat posed by Tehran’s nuclear program. How close is it to a bomb and what can Israel and the US do in response?
Read more
Hurricane Milton: Biden says evacuations are ‘a matter of life and death’
As the second huge hurricane in as many weeks rumbled toward Florida’s west coast, a sense of looming catastrophe spread as people raced to board up homes and flee.
Read more