The Trump team likes the contrast with Harris, who they feel comes off as inauthentic and overly rehearsed.
On Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris got an unfortunate 60th birthday surprise — a series of photos of her GOP opponent serving a shift at a McDonald’s drive-thru in Latrobe, Pa.
The drive-thru stunt was an eleventh-hour effort to troll Harris, who says she worked at a McDonald’s in the Bay Area of San Francisco but has gotten flak from Republicans for declining to provide many details about her time working there. But perhaps more important, it served as part of a broader effort to showcase the GOP nominee’s talent for casual in-person interactions in a dead-heat race where momentum may prove pivotal in getting across the finish line.
This cycle, Republican political operatives continue to boast publicly — and privately with their donors — about how Trump is performing better now in the RealClearPolitics battleground-state polling average than he was at the same point in the race in 2016 and 2020. With two weeks to go, he leads every single one of the top seven battlegrounds in RCP’s polling average.
And yet statistically, the race remains a coin flip. Other than possibly the 2000 presidential election, “I really do think it’s the election where the outcome is really most in doubt that I think I’ve ever seen,” says GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights.
One demographic area that has interested pollsters is the gender gap, with women favoring Harris by double digits this cycle in some surveys and men showing a similar swing toward Trump. But other parts of the electorate remain a mystery. “I don’t think we really have a good fix on what’s going to happen in the suburbs.” As Ruffini sees it, “there’s conflicting evidence” about whether Democrats are making gains there, or if Trump will earn some points with suburban voters who feel that the cost of living was lower under his presidency.
Still, after the Democratic ticket’s “brat” summer and Harris’s strong debate in early September, Republicans feel confident that the vibes are shifting their way now, when momentum matters most. From his latest McDonald’s drive-thru stunt to his casual “bro” podcast appearances in recent weeks, the former president’s campaign has made a deliberate effort to showcase his persona more on the campaign trail this cycle to engage low-propensity voters, particularly men, and turn them out to the polls.
“It’s not just his time hosting The Apprentice show. President Trump has been the best brand manager and communicator for himself and his businesses for his entire career,” Trump campaign strategist Brian Hughes said in an interview with National Review. “Part of what makes that work is that he is human. He is funny. He is thoughtful. There’s a lot about him that the mainstream media has created this caricature to try to avoid talking about or avoid showing.” Or as Hughes’s colleague Alex Bruesewitz put it an interview with Semafor this week: “What we’re doing better this time around than he’s ever done before is leveraging Trump as a person: The celebrity of Donald Trump, the unmatched aura of Donald Trump.”
Harris has raised a jaw-dropping $1 billion since emerging as the Democratic nominee. But with two weeks to go, she is losing steam on the polling front at a time when some voters still don’t know much about her or view her as too scripted on the stump.
The teleprompter-reliant Democratic nominee has worked to reverse this narrative by appearing more casual on the stump in unconventional-style interviews and sharing more personal details about herself — something she has long been uncomfortable with. “It feels immodest to me to talk about myself, which apparently I’m doing right now,” Harris said recently during an interview with radio host Howard Stern.
As the Wall Street Journal’s Annie Linskey observed this week, that strategy includes talking about her record collection, sharing that she owns a Glock, and even drinking a beer onstage live with late-night comedy host Stephen Colbert.
Naturally, Republicans say this strategy is falling flat. “If there’s one word to describe Donald Trump, it’s authentic,” Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley tells National Review in an interview. “Kamala Harris is not authentic. Her campaign right now is in free fall because they still don’t know how to portray her.”
Harris will try to bring abortion rights to the forefront of her campaign in the final stretch by making a campaign trip to red-leaning Houston, Texas, on Friday, as NR reported earlier today. And expanding on the themes she struck in her Democratic convention address in August, Harris has spent recent days campaigning alongside former representative Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) and making the case in battleground states that a second Trump administration “without guardrails” will be more chaotic than the first.
The democracy-versus-chaos pitch — beloved by Democratic activists and donors — has puzzled some Republicans, who see the strategy as a return to Joe Biden’s message in early 2024.
“I would be the first to cast out on this idea that there’s grand master plan behind everything,” says Ruffini, the GOP pollster. “When you’re in the final stretch, you’re probably more likely than not going to let your emotions get the better of you” when it comes to strategy.