Trump NH rally to recharge campaign is on hold
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s last political rally, in Oklahoma, showed the risks of campaigning in the age of coronavirus.
His planned rally in New Hampshire could be a test run for how such big campaign events will go forward in the future – if they go on at all.
“This rally is really a make-or-break moment for Trump,” said Dan Eberhart, an energy company executive and GOP fundraiser. “This needs to be a success to prove out the strategy that in this kind of COVID environment, these kinds of rallies still have legs, still have purpose and that this type of campaigning can continue.”
So far the latest push isn’t going according to plan: The White House and Trump campaign announced Friday that the New Hampshire rally expected on Saturday would be postponed. Trump officials cited Tropical Storm Fay in postponing the event and vowed to reschedule soon.
Trump’s New Hampshire rally, which was to be held at an airport hangar at the Portsmouth International Airport at Pease, was planned as the president is trying to recharge his struggling campaign as coronavirus cases spike and polls show him trailing the presumptive Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden.
The event was shadowed by questions over what went wrong at his rally last month in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Even amid lingering concerns over the coronavirus pandemic, campaign officials hyped that event and boasted that they had received requests for 1 million tickets. Turnout was far smaller than expected, with just 6,200 people showing up and leaving Trump addressing a lot of empty seats in a 19,000-capacity arena.
What’s more, eight campaign staffers on the advance team and two Secret Service agents who worked in Tulsa ahead of that event tested positive for coronavirus. Tulsa’s top health official said Wednesday that the rally and the protests that accompanied it might have contributed to the city’s recent surge in coronavirus cases.
The event that had been set for Saturday would have been Trump’s second in-person rally since much of the country went into lockdown over coronavirus. The number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. has topped 3.1 million; more than 133,000 Americans have died from the disease.
The Trump campaign said it intended to distribute face masks at the event and would have encouraged attendees to wear them, even though Trump himself has resisted wearing a mask in public.
In New Hampshire, the rally has raised red flags for many local officials concerned about the potential spread of coronavirus from the event. A handful of Portsmouth officials want to mandate that face masks be worn by people attending the event, but Mayor Rick Becksted doesn’t favor such a mandatory policy and says the city has no jurisdiction over the federally owned land where the event will be held.
Republican Gov. Chris Sununu has said it is “imperative” attendees at the rally wear masks but that he won’t mandate them. Sununu has said he plans to meet Trump at the airport when he arrives, but that he won’t attend the rally.
Holding political rallies while much of the nation is concerned about coronavirus poses real risks for Trump, said David McLennan, a political science professor at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina.
“He is a visual reminder of the coronavirus as he speaks,” McLennan said. “He’s speaking in front of big, often unmasked crowds – and sometimes notso-big crowds – at a time when everybody is paying attention to these (coronavirus) numbers to some degree.
“That being said, I’m not sure the president has any other tools for his campaign. He’s kind of between a rock and a hard place in that that’s what he did in 2016 to great effect.”
Trump is trying to replicate the campaign formula that worked well for him in 2016, said Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire.
“The old saying is campaigns are ultimately reflections of the candidate,” Scala said. “I think for the candidate’s own morale, he feels the need to be out and about and doing these sorts of things that served him well the last time he ran for office.”
What some fear will come along with the rally is a spike in coronavirus in a state that has fewer than 6,000 reported cases.
“Living in New Hampshire feels a bit like living in a bubble because in the state the numbers of cases is very low and the number of hospitalizations is low,” Scala said. “All of the metrics point in the right direction. But for a New Hampshire voter looking around the country, we feel very much like an island.
“So for the president to come in does feel a bit like it’s impinging on that bubble. There are all of those concerns of what he brings with him . ... Will it cause a spike in cases?”
Regardless, Trump needs a robust turnout to reboot his campaign and move on from what happened in Tulsa, Eberhart said.
“The rallies are a barometer of voter sentiment, the living embodiment of Trump’s slumping popularity,” he said. “If the New Hampshire crowd is anemic, it sends the signal to donors that public support for the president is subpar and that they may be throwing good money after bad.”