The Trump campaign was built to fight Biden, and now it is changing to Harris

Donald Trump vs. Vice President Markarian Harris: Rebuilding America’s Future with the U.S.-Mexico Border

Less than a month ago, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was riding high: He was ahead in the polls, led a unified party at the Republican National Convention and had a disciplined message to defeat President Biden.

Vice President Harris’ entry to the race as the new Democratic nominee has erased his polling advantage, upended his messaging and forced a campaign built for battling Biden to recalibrate.

The strategy worked for Biden when Trump was unpopular. It was failing Biden when he was unpopular. Biden had lost the ability to foreground Trump’s sins and malignancies. It was failing in part because some voters had grown nostalgic for the Trump-era economy. It was failing in part because Biden’s age and stumbles kept turning attention back to Biden and his fitness for office, rather than keeping it on Trump and Trump’s fitness for office.

The main message has remained consistent, bashing the Democratic Party policies around immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border, amplified by Harris involvement in addressing the issue since taking office.

After he narrowly escaped being assassinated at a Pennsylvania rally, Donald Trump took the stage at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, confident that voters would support his vision for America’s future.

The 2016 Montanana Trump campaign has been dragged into the past, but hasn’t been on the trail since Biden dropped out

But in the weeks since Biden dropped out, the campaign has been dogged by bad news cycles — sometimes of his own creation — that have overshadowed the messaging against his new opponent.

During the National Association of Black Journalists conference last month, Trump claimed that Harris had turned black to gain political advantage. At a massive rally in Atlanta last week, held in the same arena where Harris appeared days before, Trump’s personal attacks on Georgia’s popular Republican Gov. Brian Kemp dominated more than criticism of Democrats.

His attacks on Harris, obsession with rally crowd size and off-the-cuff remarks recall his first run in the 2016 election. But this time he is not an unknown quantity capitalizing on anger and anti-establishment sentiment to surge past an unpopular opponent.

In Montana on Friday, Trump’s only rally of the week, an event in support of Montana GOP Senate nominee Tim Sheehy featured Trump speaking for nearly two hours, largely about his personal grievances and views of the presidential race.

In a new line of attack on Harris, the campaign played two video clips showing her making statements, one painting her as too progressive in her views around policing, gun restrictions and health care, and the other suggesting she was not smart enough.

He commented that the Democratic incumbent of Montana, Jon Tester, has the biggest stomach he has ever seen.

The last three weeks have been like a replay of several aspects of the 2016 campaign that some voters didn’t like and Republicans found weren’t as helpful.

Unlike 2016, Trump has not held as many rallies, in battleground states or in Republican strongholds. Since the beginning of July, Trump has had at least eight rallies and the Republican National Convention. In the same time frame in 2016 he had 22.

In a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago home Thursday, Trump said he was focused on other types of campaigning beyond large-scale rallies, and that he did not need to campaign as much, calling it a “stupid question” to ask why he hasn’t been on the trail as much.

“Because I’m leading by a lot,” he said. “And because I’m letting their convention go through, and I am campaigning a lot. I’m doing tremendous amounts of taping here, we have commercials that are at a level I don’t think that anybody’s ever done before. Plus, in certain cases, I see many of you in the room where I’m speaking to you on phones, I’m speaking to radio, I’m speaking to television.”

The NPR/PBS News/Marist survey has Harris with a 3-point lead over Trump and was the only one of its kind released in the last week.

The Mar-a-Lago press conference in which Trump bragged about the number of people at his rallies compared to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s classic “I Have a Dream” speech was used to attack Harris’ intelligence.

The debate against Biden was a factor in trying to get the president to end his campaign, especially because he is now no longer the clear favorite.

While Trump has not been as active on the campaign trail, his vice presidential pick Ohio Sen. JD Vance held multiple appearances this week, shadowing Harris and her new VP pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz across the Midwest.

After his own rocky rollout, Vance used lengthy media availabilities featuring local voters to contrast Republican policies on immigration, inflation and crime with those being touted by Democrats.

Kamala Harris: She’s going through a hard time, but she’s not going through what she has to do – and why she didn’t

“Everything that Kamala Harris touches has been a disaster, and we have got to kick her out of the United States government, not give her a promotion.”