The seismic shift in the presidential race has rattled former President Trump’s once-disciplined campaign and put the GOP nominee on the defensive for the first time in months.
Trump coasted through the Republican primary, managed to turn even negative headlines about his legal troubles into campaign and fundraising fodder and had consistently led President Biden in the polls as Biden struggled to break through or excite even his own base.
But that has changed in the short time since Biden ended his candidacy and Vice President Harris was elevated to the top of the ticket.
Harris has electrified the Democratic base and significantly closed the gap in the polls, while Trump has sparked backlash by targeting Harris over her race, her intelligence and her laugh.
“He’s like a poker player on tilt after losing a hand. He can’t stop making mistakes because he’s angry and panicked. He spent weeks gloating as if he’d already won this election and now he’s facing a massive enthusiasm gap with Democrats so fired up,” said Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist and founder of Authentic Campaigns.
“It’s easy to be disciplined when your opponent’s campaign is on fire,” Nellis said. “It’s harder when your opponent has all the momentum. I’ve seen it happen a thousand times.”
Trump’s 2024 campaign had largely avoided the kind of infighting and self-created controversies that often plagued his 2016 bid, his four years in office and his 2020 bid. His campaign leadership, namely Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, earned praise from Republicans as the former president swept through the primaries and was favored to defeat Biden in November.
But Trump, in the past week, has stirred drama with his own remarks, which Democrats have argued is a sign of concern over a tightening race.
Trump over the weekend told a gathering of conservative Christians that they wouldn’t have to vote again in four years, as he encouraged them to cast their ballot in November. When given an opportunity Monday to make clear what he meant, he did little to address the backlash from those who said he was suggesting there would be no more elections.
On Wednesday, Trump traveled to Chicago for the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention, where he created a firestorm as he clashed with ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott and falsely questioned Harris’s biracial heritage.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said.
The former president has also made a point of attacking Harris’s intelligence in recent public appearances. He has claimed she struggled to pass the bar exam, and in a Fox Business Network interview that aired Friday said multiple times that Harris is “not a smart person.”
In a statement, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said race and gender “have nothing to do with why Kamala Harris is the most unpopular Vice President in history.”
“President Trump is shining a light on Kamala and her campaign trying to rewrite history, from flip-flopping on fracking to lying about her role as Biden’s failed Border Czar,” Leavitt said. “If they are so brazen to lie to the American people on things that are so easily disproven, what else are they lying about.”
The campaign itself has focused squarely on attacking Harris over immigration and the southern border, launching an attack ad this week that described the vice president as “failed, weak, dangerously liberal.”
And Republicans have maintained that the issues are on their side. Polling has shown voters trust Trump on immigration and the economy, two topics that routinely rate at or near the top of surveys of voter concerns.
The question is whether Trump can remain focused on the issues without devolving into personal attacks that remind independent and moderate voters why they may not want to support him.
“There’s no question that he can do it,” former Trump White House press secretary Sean Spicer said. “If you look at the last couple cycles, he has gone after the candidates both in the primary and the general his way and it’s largely worked.
“That’s the one thing at the end of the day people need to remember,” Spicer said. “He’s done it his way and been successful.”
At a Wednesday rally in Pennsylvania, Trump went through Harris’s reversals on a number of issues, including on whether she would ban fracking, her support for a single-payer health care system and for reassessing police funding.
But he also underscored his own difficulties remaining focused on policy, at one point joking that his speechwriters “made me bored to tears” and asked the audience if they would mind him going off-script.
“I tend to go off about 75 percent of the time,” Trump quipped.
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