For the first time in the presidential campaign, donald trump is starting to fall behind — raised with more resources than Kamala Harris and trailing the vice president in some decisive state polls.
Gone are the specific attacks against President Joe Biden they had to discard, from his age to his family and his gallery of mistakes and gaffes.
Now, inside the Trump campaign, his advisers are settling on an overloaded messaging strategy on a familiar theme: attacking Harris as the most extreme caricature of a liberal they can muster.
And for a day at least, the former president on Wednesday stuck to the script.
“You know, nobody knew how radical she was, but he’s a smarter version of her, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said Wednesday on Fox & Friends, angering Harris’ pick for governor of Minnesota. Tim Walz as his running mate. “He’s probably about the same as Bernie Sanders. He’s probably more than Bernie Sanders.”
Trump added: “This is a passage that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.”
Trump’s advisers planned, regardless of who Harris chose as his vice presidential candidate, to label them as extremists, according to a campaign adviser who was granted anonymity to discuss internal matters. During the final days of Harris’ selection process, the Trump campaign focused particularly on three finalists — Walz, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and the Arizona senator. Marco Kelly.
The attacks underscore the Trump campaign’s central calculation: By casting Harris as a liberal outside the mainstream, they can stifle her appeal to swing voters in the Rust Belt and Sun Belt states who will determine the outcome of the election. And in the campaign’s portrayal of Harris and Walz — a former football coach and National Guard member from middle America — as extremists, rarely has the Republican Party’s commitment to the “liberal” mantra been so clear.
“The Harris-Walz ticket is the most radical in history,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an informal adviser to Trump, told POLITICO. “We won an issue-defined and ideologically focused campaign by a remarkable margin.”
Whether Trump will be able to adhere to that message remains in question — doing so would mark a departure from his approach to the race, given that Harris has replaced Biden as his opponent. In recent days, Trump has questioned Harris’s black identity, smeared her as having a “low IQ” and, while visiting Georgia, picked a fight with Brian Kemp, the popular governor of a swing state.
But the Trump campaign is working to keep the “liberal” nickname.
After Walz’s selection on Tuesday, the Trump campaign cast Harris as a “San Francisco liberal” and Walz as a “West Coast wannabe.” The next day, pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. released a TV ad calling Harris “dangerously liberal.”
Trump at Truth Social called Harris and Walz “the most radical left-wing duo in American history,” while his own running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, applied this criticism to his Democratic counterpart.
“This decision, to select Tim Walz, is another sign that she doesn’t care what the American people think,” Vance said Tuesday night on Fox News’ “Hannity.” “She’s only in this to obey the far-left radicals within her own party.”
Republicans are amplifying the message.
Ben Shapiro, the conservative commentator, called Walz a “Marxist Don Rickles.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called Walz an “Ilhan Omar-style Democrat,” referring to the liberal congressman from Minnesota. And at a POLITICO Live event in New York on Wednesday, Rep. André Garbarino (RN.Y.) said Harris “doubled down on an ultraliberal choice.”
Harris has taken progressive positions on some important issues, including the Green New Deal. But she has also frustrated progressive members of her party, notably over her record as a prosecutor and her withdrawal from Medicare for All midway through her 2019 presidential primary campaign.
Walz, however, has undergone something of an ideological shift since winning a seat in Congress in 2006. He has embraced some socially liberal policies, although he generally leaned more toward bipartisan, centrist legislation when he represented a red district in Congress. But after trading his congressional badge for a key to the governor’s mansion in Minnesota, he began promoting more progressive policies in the state.
His latest approach is exactly what Republicans rely on, including an executive order he issued that made Minnesota the first state to protect access to gender-affirming care. Republicans also criticized him for his military record and his response to protests in Minneapolis following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
But in general, it is the “liberal” label that the Trump campaign is trying hardest to apply to the Harris-Walz ticket.
“They cannot be let loose from their past liberal positions that they are desperately trying to get away from,” said Republican strategist Matt Gorman, who worked for the South Carolina senator. Tim Scottpresidential campaign.
It is unclear how effectively — and consistently — Trump will be able to prosecute this case.
Making the offense last, Gorman said, “requires discipline and the ability to deliver a message consistently.”
Jeff Coltin contributed to this report.
