WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — If Donald Trump adapts to the reality of his new race Kamala HarrisHis campaign is counting on younger male voters to give him an edge in November in a presidential election they believe he will lose.
Trump and his Republican campaign now face a very different race than just three weeks ago, before President Joe Biden has given up his candidacyWhile they acknowledge that the polls have shifted to Harris’s Democratic nominee, they argue that the fundamentals of the race have not changed. Voters are deeply disappointed with the direction of the country, and the economy in particular.
“What has happened is we have had a kind of out-of-body experience where we have suspended reality for a couple of weeks,” Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio told reporters Thursday at a briefing in West Palm Beach on the current state of the race.
It was a message Trump repeated during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago club.
“The honeymoon period is over,” he insisted, downplaying the crowd Harris drew and his new opponent. “Let me tell you: We have the enthusiasm.”
Campaign officials credit Harris with energizing the Democratic base and her team with leading the fundraising effort. But they insist they have more than enough to do what they need to do to win. Trump’s campaign and affiliates reported raising $138.7 million in July — far short of the eye-popping $310 million Harris reported. Her campaign started August with more money on hand.
With less than three months to go, senior campaign officials are zeroing in on a group of voters they believe will hold the key to victory. The targets, who they say make up about 11% of the electorate in key states, tend to be younger and disproportionately male and moderate. While more than half are white, they are more likely to be nonwhite, particularly Asians and Hispanics, than the broader electorate.
They are particularly frustrated with the economy, including their personal finances, and are pessimistic that the situation will improve.
“It’s a very narrow group of people that we’re trying to reach,” Fabrizio said of the effort. Because these voters aren’t engaging with traditional news sources and have ditched cable TV for streaming services, the campaign has worked to reach them in new ways.
“There’s a reason we do podcasts. There’s a reason we do Adin Ross,” Fabrizio said, referring to the controversial internet personality who ended his interview with the former president earlier this week by giving him a Tesla Cybertruck covered in images of Trump raising his fist after his assassination attempt.
“There’s a reason we do all this stuff. You know what these people are watching for? MMA, Adin Ross,” he said. “MMA” refers to mixed martial arts.
Trump campaign officials acknowledge that the Democratic base is now motivated in a way it wasn’t when Biden was the nominee. Harris, they say, is likely to do better than Biden would have with black voters, particularly women and older men.
But they argue that Harris is doing little to appeal to swing voters. And they plan to spend the next 80+ days painting her as a radical liberal and an incumbent voter rather than a changemaker, tying her to the Biden administration’s most unpopular policies.
“There is a lot more information about her that they don’t know that they’re going to hear. And we’re going to make sure they get it,” Fabrizio said.
They believe that at the end of the race, neither candidate will be well-liked, but that voters will still choose the candidate they believe will make the most improvement to their economic situation.
They pointed to a phrase Harris has used to refer to Trump’s presidency — “We’re not going back” — as particularly ill-conceived, given that some voters say things were better when Trump was in office than they are now.
Trump campaign officials said they now have staff on the ground in 18 states, ranging from crucial battlegrounds to states like Virginia where Democrats were favored, and that they hope to be able to deploy that staff.
The campaign says it now has hundreds of paid staff and has opened more than 300 Trump and Republican offices in states where the election remains uncertain.
But much of their efforts depend on volunteers and outside organizations.
They are trying to replicate a model they used successfully during the GOP primaries in Iowa this winter, where volunteer “caucus captains” were given a list of 10 neighbors they promised to send to the polls. The campaign has credited that model for boosting turnout on a brutally cold and icy caucus night.
The “Trump Force 47” program targets low- and medium-inclined voters. Volunteers will campaign, write postcards, phone bank and organize their neighbors.
So far, 12,000 captains have been trained and given voter target lists, officials said. Another 30,000 have volunteered, and more than 2,000 per week are expected to be trained between now and Election Day.
Much of the campaign will also rely on outside groups. They will run paid campaigns and build campaigns to get more people out to the polls. This is possible thanks to new guidelines from the Federal Election Commission. These guidelines allow campaigns to work with outside groups in ways that were not previously allowed.
According to the campaign, more than 1,000 paid voters are on the ground in states where the election is uncertain. They are also working to register about 1.6 million voters in those competitive areas.