The Sunday after the June 27 presidential debate, Donald Trump’s top advisers went to bed hoping that Democratic concern about President Joe Biden’s performance would subside and give way to a new round of headlines at the start of the new week.
But when they woke up the next morning to the intensifying Democratic calamity, they began plotting the extraordinary potential scenario of Biden stepping aside.
Behind the scenes, between preparing for a convention and an assassination attempt that would rock the country, they also studied the field of potential Democratic candidates, grilled Trump against a possible replacement, and began launching more soft attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris, believing she would be the most likely heir to the candidacy.
Now, with Biden announcing that he will not run for re-election, the seeds of this work are already on display. Just hours after Biden dropped out of the race and supported his vice president on Sunday (21), Trump’s campaign managers released a scathing statement linking Harris to the administration’s policies. Meanwhile, a group that collects aligned campaign donations has run ads in some swing states trying to cast Harris as someone who enabled Biden to perform when he was clearly diminished.
Trump also worked quickly to gain an advantage over whoever his next opponent was, suggesting that the next debate move from being held on ABC, seen as progressive, to the more Republican-friendly Fox News studios.
Biden, Trump wrote on social media, “was not fit to run for President and certainly is not fit to serve – and never has been!”
The Trump campaign’s three-week struggle to prepare for the unprecedented may have started as a contingency, but it has now become an urgent necessity. Throughout last year, Trump maintained that he did not expect Biden’s candidacy to last until November. Yet neither he nor his campaign took serious steps to prepare for this outcome.
Instead, Trump’s team orchestrated a demanding campaign to defeat Biden. Millions of dollars have already been spent on models to predict outcomes in key battlegrounds, implementing a sophisticated data operation and preparing an advertising campaign to contrast the two candidates. It’s a campaign built around the assumption that Trump would face an 81-year-old man whose physical and mental state had become enough of a negative to make enough voters ignore the Republican candidate’s many flaws.
Now, much of that work will be thrown away or at least must be reimagined for a race completely altered by recent events. Whether Democrats choose Harris or someone else, Trump, the oldest major party candidate in history, becomes the candidate whose age worries some voters.
“The real value that (Harris) brings is simply that Democrats don’t have to worry about whether their nominee can meet the minimum fitness threshold for office,” said a Republican strategist who asked not to be identified to speak freely. . “That means this will be a real campaign.”
Ready-made attack ads
For a while, Republicans gleefully watched the chaos unfolding on the Democratic side, and Trump sat quietly for a few weeks while Biden fumbled with the fallout. But it quickly became widely recognized in the Trump camp that Biden’s departure would also throw his own campaign into uncertainty.
As calls for Biden to resign reached a fever pitch in early July, the Trump campaign began researching Democratic National Committee rules and statutes to understand the internal processes that would occur if Biden stepped aside, according to a senior campaign official. of Trump.
The Republican team also began testing new lines of attack on Harris — someone they had largely ignored since she was sworn in as vice president. That included spreading fresh criticism of the California Democrat in Trump’s speeches and encouraging the former president’s surrogates to do the same, according to two senior Trump advisers.
Some of these new attacks revealed themselves at the Republican National Convention last week, where Harris was easily the second most criticized Democrat on stage, behind Biden.
Now that the moment has come, Trump’s team is planning a series of negative ads against Harris’ record, not only under the Biden administration but also during her time as a prosecutor and attorney general in California, a source told CNN. The message will come from both the campaign and at least one group of supporters aligned with the former president.
While polls have shown that Harris is the best-known among the potential Democratic candidates to replace Biden, Trump’s advisers and allies say most Americans don’t know much about her, creating an opening to define her for the public.
The main pro-Trump funder group, MAGA Inc., released a new 30-second commercial on Sunday, shared for the first time on social media, previewing the attack plan. The ad accused Harris of “covering up Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline.” And it releases clips of Harris praising Biden’s performance as president, saying: “Our president is in good shape, in good health, tireless, vibrant, and I have no doubt about the strength of the work we’ve done.”
The group, which has so far spent $77 million on ads to boost Trump, announced plans to run the ad in the key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita hinted last week that the campaign intends to exploit the fact that Harris supported Biden in the months leading up to the debate, when the president’s performance raised concerns about his resilience.
“Do you know how many files we have on this?” LaCivita said Thursday at an event outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Along these lines, Republicans argued that Biden should immediately resign as president if he concludes that he will not be able to serve another four-year term.
Trump’s campaign and allies also plan to argue that Harris is the person in the administration responsible for the border — a key theme in GOP messaging this year — after Biden nominated her in 2021 to combat the root causes of migration from Central America. . They also intend to link it to the country’s inflation problems and are plotting similar messages about crime that they previously prepared for Biden.
“Over the past four years, she has signed off on Biden’s open border policies and green scams that have driven up the cost of housing and groceries,” Trump’s new running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, said Sunday after Biden endorsed Harris. “She owns all these flaws.”
It’s unclear, however, whether voters who for months have told pollsters they feared a 2020 rematch will gravitate toward a new face. Many voters — including those who intended to vote for Trump when he faced Biden — have deeply negative views of the former president and have expressed a desire to abandon him.
Harris also has an opportunity to re-energize Democrats who have become disenchanted with Biden’s presidency. A veteran Republican strategist said Trump should prepare for Georgia — which Democrats have begun to believe is out of reach — to become competitive again.
“Biden was struggling with black voters and young voters,” the strategist said. “It seems to me that Kamala will probably do better with these groups. The question is how much.”
Brian Bartlett, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said Trump could also face new headwinds in swing states depending on who is chosen to join the Democratic ticket as vice president.
“The writing has been on the wall for a while now, so I would expect them to be pretty prepared with messaging and opposition and things like that,” Bartlett said. “The biggest potential challenge I see is if (Harris) picks a running mate who could flip part of the blue wall or other key swing states.”
Some of these names have already been circulated as possible vice presidential picks, including Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper.
The Trump campaign prepared dossiers on some of these individuals, believing they could also emerge as potential successors, which one of the senior advisers referred to as “folders full of investigation.” Other names they studied include Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Governor Gavin Newsom, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and congressional leaders.
But most of their focus in recent weeks has centered on Harris, they said, including conducting internal polling to test her in a matchup against Trump, a second senior adviser said.
Asked whether they had begun testing Trump versus other Democrats in polls, LaCivita responded last week in exasperation: “We are a capable operation. What the hell do you think?”
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