Trump's 11th Hour Campaign Gambit: Give Voters Cash
The President is a Communist.
The president ran successfully as a populist in 2016. But as he tries to recapture the formula, he’s running into some hurdles—mainly, his record.
Hitting the closing stretch of the election, and trailing by a substantial margin in the polls, Donald Trump is placing his political hopes on winning over voters with cold, hard cash.
Over the past month, the president and his team have coalesced around a series of policies that would result in billions of dollars being allocated to critical constituencies right as voting begins: a proposal to dramatically increase government lending in African American communities, an order to send seniors a $200 rebate card for prescription drug purchases, and a newfound desire for an ambitious stimulus package to deal with the fallout for COVID-19.
Critics view the tranche of ideas as tantamount to government-sanctioned voter buy-offs. Fiscal conservatives have privately bristled. But the president sees them as, perhaps, his last electoral panacea. The only question is, can he get the money out fast enough?
“It’s smart policy and smart politics,” said one senior Trump campaign adviser. The goal, the adviser added, was to reassert a frame that worked well in 2016: “One side views you as the forgotten man and forgotten woman worth fighting for, and the other side views you as deplorable and irredeemable.”
Trump’s frantic dash to get money into the hands of critical constituencies comes amid the backdrop of a campaign struggling for any political momentum at all. What’s surprised some observers is not that Trump’s now trying to spend his way out of that hole and into a second term, but that it took him this long to start doing so in the first place.
“It's a real head scratcher, and one we'll look back on as a huge mistake,” said GOP strategist Liam Donovan. “I think embracing the populist (and popular) part of the vision he was elected on could have mattered, but we're well past the point where these desperation heaves can change the trajectory of the race.”
Back in 2016, Trump ran for the presidency as an unorthodox Republican, one keen on reminding voters that he wanted to protect entitlement programs, revamp free trade deals, and spend copious sums on things like infrastructure. The recipe worked, barely. And for a while, Democrats scrambled to adjust to the possibility that the Republican Party had claimed the mantle of working-class populism.
But that panic began to fade as Trump began to govern, choosing to pursue Obamacare repeal, massive tax cuts, and a deregulatory agenda over things like infrastructure investments and lowering prescription drug prices. Looking back now, some Democrats can’t believe their luck.
“In terms of how he has governed, he has been a traditional, down the line, fiscal conservative on pretty much every issue,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA). “No question about it. If he had really governed in an economically populist way, I think he would have been in a stronger position.”
But the problem facing Trump, sources around his campaign have conceded, is not just that his governing agenda didn’t match his populist promises, it’s that his re-election campaign messaging abandoned those promises too. His opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, has many of the same vulnerabilities that Hillary Clinton had in 2016. Biden voted for major trade deals that Trump has argued led to the ruin of the rust belt. And Biden’s close ties to the credit card industry have provided grist for past opponents to accuse him of siding with corporate interests over consumers.
And yet, Trump has largely focused his attention elsewhere. Data put together by the firm Bully Pulpit Interactive tells the story of a re-election campaign leaning far more heavily on conspiracy theories and culture war issues than messages of economic recovery and relief. The Trump campaign has spent more than ten times as much on ads mentioning or pertaining to “far left/Antifa” of late than it has on ads concerning the economy, and more than 35 times as much as it has on ads mentioning trade, a signature Trump issue, according to that Bully Pulpit data.
From September 12 through October 3, the Trump campaign spent about $3,5 million on ads invoking terms such as “socialism,” “fake news,” and “Clinton,” compared to less than $130,000 on ads concerning the U.S. economy, about $400,000 on ones mentioning small businesses, and just $42,500 on those mentioning “trade.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps...ve-voters-cash
Originally Posted by Swordsmyth
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