Donald Trump leads in most national polls. Virginia, a blue state, is suddenly in play. Joe Biden’s campaign has dumped millions of dollars in advertising to little effect, while Trump’s campaign has been hoarding cash. Trump has purged the doubters and naysayers from his party, while Biden is facing a growing rebellion in his. Trump survived an assassination attempt; Biden is hobbled with COVID.
For Republicans gathered at their national convention, the news is good. Maybe a little too good.
“I am more confident than I have ever been,” says Nicole Kiprilov, a political consultant based in New York. “But the left has a history of being extremely coordinated and calculating. And so I think it’s so important to stay vigilant. I think they’re going to switch out Biden. Imagine they put in Michelle Obama. I don’t know what they have up their sleeve. Look at 2020. It was early voting, it was mail-in ballots, it was COVID. They orchestrated it all really well.”
Throughout this campaign and his two previous ones, Trump has portrayed his Democratic opponents as staggeringly incompetent except in their ability to steal elections and mercilessly gut Republicans. It is a mind-set that has spread throughout the party he leads.
“They tried to assassinate him. How much lower can they go?” says Christopher Anderson, a delegate from Maryland. “That shows you their damn desperation, when you try to kill your opponent. Vivek [Ramaswamy] used to say first they try to bribe you, second they try to prosecute you, and then they try to kill you. This happened directly with Trump.”
Asked who tried to bribe Trump, he thought for a second and said, “No, they skipped that part. He already got money so they couldn’t bribe him.”
Trump campaign officials and allies have publicly crowed about their superior position, believing that his legal travails have only strengthened their hand, and delighting in the infighting on the other side of the aisle. Asked privately, however, and they confess their doubts. They say the Republican field operation is leaner than in years past and relies on outside groups to do the bulk of the canvassing. There is concern that the so-called double-haters who registered unfavorable opinions of both Biden and Trump will stay home or vote third party. Or, relatedly, that an exhausted public starts tuning out the election entirely, leading to turnout that looks more like the midterms, where highly engaged voters who lean Democratic come out to the polls, than like most general elections, when turnout is much higher.
“This is the thing that keeps me up at night,” says someone close to the Trump campaign. “Our turnout models are just completely off.”
Although the campaign was once thought to be fought over six swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — Republican officials believe that the election will increasingly come down to just those last three as the Sun Belt states move more firmly into the Republican column. In order to win in the states in the upper midwest, Trump needs to prevent Black and Hispanic voters from returning to the Democratic fold after telling pollsters over the last year that they were at least Trump-curious.
“The biggest question for us is whether or not those voters come home to the Democrats,” says one Georgia-based GOP operative. “If what we are counting on is that they do not, it just seems like a dubious proposition from our end.”
Republicans believe that they are in far better place on the issues that dominated the midterms, especially on abortion, but are aware that they could rise in salience again, especially since so many abortion-related referenda will be on the ballot in states come the fall.
“No one here doesn’t recognize that the abortion thing has been just killing us,” says one Republican pollster. “The bleeding is going to have to stop at some point but it hasn’t yet and I am not sure it will in the next four months.”
Republican officials also fret that the disciplined Trump of late can’t continue on, that he can’t help but lash out at his enemies and call for the jailing and prosecution of Democrats while fixating on his false claims about a stolen election four years ago. Republicans are already planning a robust “election integrity” and poll-watching operation even though any such efforts will have a limited effect on the results but will go a long way to appeasing him. A Trump confident in victory is a Trump who worries Republicans, since it is a Trump confident in victory who does things like invite Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Lauren Boebert into his box at the convention and chooses a running mate that shores up his base instead of expanding his coalition.
But if there is a single big worry, it is just time. This current run of good fortune, Republicans say, cannot continue, and eventually the wheel of good fortune will turn back to the Democratic side.
“Each month, things keep getting better for us and the numbers keep getting better as more states become in play,” says Steve Scalise, the House majority leader. “I wish the election was tomorrow, but it is not.”
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