Daily Times (Primos, PA)

Clock is ticking on Trump comeback as early voting nears

- By Jonathan Lemire and Zeke Miller

WASHINGTON » It’s getting late early.

President Donald Trump is privately reassuring Republican­s anxious about his deficits to Democrat Joe Biden, noting there are three months until Election Day and reminding them of the late-breaking events that propelled his 2016 comeback.

But four years later, the dynamics are very different.

Aides are increasing­ly worried that the 2020 campaign may already be defined as a referendum on Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and will feature a historic shift to remote and early vote options. The president’s campaign is scrambling for a reset, pausing advertisem­ents while struggling to find both a cohesive message and a way to safely put the president on the road in front of voters.

Trump added to the tumult by publicly wondering if the election should be delayed while making the unfounded claim that the tilt toward mail-in balloting would lead to widespread voter fraud. That suggestion drew a rare rebuke from Republican­s, many of whom quietly warned the White House that it could be interprete­d as an admission that the president was losing and could hurt their chances of retaining the Senate.

And they warned that time is running out: The first state to hold early voting, the vital battlegrou­nd of North Carolina, begins the process Sept. 4.

“He’s losing and the trajectory of the race is moving away from him,” said Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser on Republican John McCain’s 2008 presidenti­al campaign and an opponent of Trump’s reelection. “People vote at a moment in time: Even if there is something of a political recovery for the president in October, that is irrelevant for those who already voted.”

A sudden halt in Trump’s expensive television advertisem­ents last week highlighte­d the campaign’s challenge. It came just two weeks after a staffing shakeup and two months after Trump’s previous campaign manager unleashed a “Death Star” ad blitz on Biden that only coincided with the president’s support falling even further.

The campaign downplayed the ad pause, saying that the new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, wanted to analyze when and where Trump’s advertisin­g message was being delivered. A significan­t amount of TV ad time has already been reserved from Labor Day until the election, and the campaign said it would reboot its advertisin­g on Monday.

The purchase was made with an eye on the new electoral calendar. The old adage that most of America doesn’t start paying attention to a campaign until Labor Day has been tossed aside in a year in which the novel coronaviru­s has killed more than 150,000 people in the U.S. and rewritten the rules of American society.

The new ad campaign will be a national buy but also target states that are among the earliest to vote. Trump campaign officials said the focus in August will be on states where more than half of the ballots will be cast before Election Day.

“The digital countdown clock on the wall may say 90-some days, but we all know the calendar is condensed with early voting,” said campaign communicat­ions director Tim Murtaugh.

Still, the Trump campaign has been wavering for weeks.

It has struggled to land effective blows on Biden. Trump and his allies have recently sought to tie Biden to the extreme leftist elements of his party, an uneasy fit for a moderate who has been in the public eye for more than four decades.

The campaign has all but pulled the plug on competing in Michigan and, privately, acknowledg­es deficits in vital battlegrou­nd states like Florida, Wisconsin and Arizona, though it insists the margins are manageable and smaller than what is reflected in public polling. They also downplayed the chances of losing reliably Republican states, though Trump did make a campaign stop in Texas last week.

 ?? EVAN VUCCI — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE ?? In this June 20, 2020, file photo President Donald Trump arrives on stage to speak at a campaign rally at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Okla. Trump is privately reassuring Republican­s anxious about his deficits to Democrat Joe Biden, noting there are three months until Election Day and reminding them of the late-breaking events that propelled his 2016 comeback.
EVAN VUCCI — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE In this June 20, 2020, file photo President Donald Trump arrives on stage to speak at a campaign rally at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Okla. Trump is privately reassuring Republican­s anxious about his deficits to Democrat Joe Biden, noting there are three months until Election Day and reminding them of the late-breaking events that propelled his 2016 comeback.

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