Why has the faltering Trump campaign stopped buying ads?
Last Friday, the Trump campaign temporarily suspended its advertising spending for what it described as “a review and fine-tuning of the campaign’s strategy”. It was a small news item on another day dominated by the pandemic burning through America. It was significant, however, because it underscored a fundamental problem with the Trump campaign thus far.
The election of 2020 is unlike recent elections, where the race for the presidency would revolve around six key battlegrounds – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina. Any other year, Joe Biden’s path to victory and Trump’s to re-election, would pass directly through those states. 2020 is different. Even before the pandemic, Trump was looking at a difficult path to re-election. With the pandemic, he’s looking at a map that has changed hue in a matter of months.
A state such as Texas should not be in play for Joe Biden in 2020, yet he currently sits tied with Trump. Demographically, the state is certainly adopting a more purple hue – purple being the shade between red and blue and indicative of a swing state – but that wasn’t expected in this or even the next election. Trump (and the pandemic) has exacerbated that shift, meaning that Republicans now need to spend money in a state they would have previously considered safe.
More frightening for Republicans is that the Lone Star State is far from alone. Biden now has more than one path to the White House and Republican must obstruct him while also knowing that money spent defending Trump leaves less money to spend down the ticket on fights for Congress and local legislatures. This could get very expensive for Republicans very quickly.
Any fool can, of course, spend money. The key is to spend it strategically. In terms of a political campaign, the strategy is informed by messaging and that’s where the Trump team has struggled. They still have no unified theme. Until just a few months ago, Trump assumed he would be running on the economy but that’s now bust. He still boasts about the market but that’s quite different to the economy, where charts have a distinctive Great Depression vibe about them. That means fighting on the record of his opponent, which isn’t easy with a centrist such as Biden. Trump wanted to fight Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, which is why it was always important that the Democrats picked a moderate. Now they’re seeing the wisdom of that choice. Trump cannot lay a glove on Biden.
A recent ad, for example, addressed leftist proposals to “defund the police”. The ad begins with an elderly lady hearing somebody breaking into her home. She rings the police, only to get an answerphone message: “You have reached 911. I’m sorry there’s nobody here to answer your emergency call.” In bold letters, the ad proclaims: “YOU WON’T BE SAFE IN JOE BIDEN’S AMERICA”. It would be effective if it weren’t for the fact that Biden long since got ahead of the defunding issue. As soon as it broke, he said he didn’t agree with the proposal and has repeated that point in almost every interview since.
More effective for Trump, arguably, has been the scenes of rioting around federal buildings. Cynical calculation certainly informed his deployment of federal troops into American cities but not entirely. After dark, the peaceful protests have given way to more violent agitators who have given Trump a justification for shouting about the “violent left”.
He might be right, but that doesn’t mean “violent left” equates easily with Joe Biden, a man known for excessive hugging and crying a bit too much. Also, the same troops have now given even more potent ammunition to Trump’s opponents. The Lincoln Project – run by Republicans – has produced an especially punchy ad showing federal troops attacking and gassing “moms”. Even when he wins, Trump finds himself losing.
The Trump campaign entered August still searching for its guiding theme and a way to demonise its opponent. They need a clear message otherwise the enormously expensive media markets places like in Texas and Florida will take no time making their sizable budget look less sizable. The story is still developing and it’s impossible to guess what message they eventually develop. If the shift does come, however, we shouldn’t be surprised it’s not directed towards Biden but, rather, the legitimacy of the November election.
Early in his presidency, the US Postal Service found itself the subject of this president’s anger. At the time, it seemed a strange preoccupation but obvious once explained. It wasn’t the USPS that Trump hated but Jeff Bezos, the richest guy on the planet (with a fortune dwarfing Trump’s fabled pile), founder of Amazon (therefore the true exponent of “the art of the deal”), but also the owner of the Washington Post. Amazon’s success was partly reliant on the deal it had struck with the Post Office to deliver its parcels. Trump, therefore, accused Amazon of using government money to subsidize its business.
As is usual with Trump, whatever legitimate point he might have raised was undercut by pettiness and jealousy. The story fizzed for a while but then became lost amid the noise, until, that is, earlier this year when the unlikely name “Louis DeJoy” entered the story. DeJoy is a Trump megadonor, a North Carolina businessman, but also the person picked by Donald Trump to become the new Postmaster General.
It was DeJoy who recently stopped paying mail staff the overtime required to sort and deliver mail. With a literal flick of a switch – a switch in Postmaster General – Trump found a mechanism by which he could delay America’s mail. The Post Office is now struggling with huge backlogs, which will get worse during an election when people will be cautious about attending polling stations and choose instead to vote by mail. Given that the rules of many states involve a cut off beyond which any late-arriving ballot is ruled invalid, how can any election run under those conditions be considered legitimate? Or, that, at least, is the question the Trump campaign might now shift to asking.
Strategically, it’s a brilliant example of out-of-the-box thinking if it weren’t also so dismally antidemocratic. Yet what we’re perhaps seeing is the election turning from the traditional issues that most affect the country to the issue of the election itself. Needless to say, a “meta-election” would also be so profoundly Trumpian, given the past four years have been spent not achieving much in terms of policy but rowing, often violently, about rules and process.
America has managed to elect presidents through all the difficult moments in its history so there’s a powerful historical precedent – not least the constitutionality of the fixed political cycle –that means a delay won’t happen. Yet, in any less partisan times, postponing the election would have been a cogent argument given that polling stations pose a legitimate threat to people’s lives. These are not less partisan times, however, and Democrats would never countenance any situation where Trump might benefit from a bump should the economy show signs of recovery in 2021.
The President has no legitimate way to delay the November election – and those in Congress that do have already ruled it out – but Trump can now work to delegitimise the result, and, at some point, the latter might begin to resemble the former. This might explain Trump’s reticence to spend now. His fight is no longer with Biden but with what he sees as the unfairness of the vote. We’re already deep into unknown territory and, as unlikely as it might seem, America could yet begin 2021 with anywhere between 0 and 2 “winners” of the November election.