Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is hoping to capture gullible voters at personal finance seminars and concerts. Political aides to Vice President Kamala Harris think wearing a coat can help their candidate do the same.
With two months to go before Election Day, the two camps are pouring money, time and energy into one of the most difficult tasks in modern elections: finding and winning over a small fraction of voters who live in one of seven battleground states. t has yet chosen a side – or in some cases, undecided whether to vote.
“It’s a small but critical segment of the electorate,” said Nick Trainer, Trump’s 2020 campaign political director. “On the battlefields, it’s not hundreds of thousands, but tens of thousands of voters.”
That could be all it takes to determine who will be sworn in as president in January.
There’s no silver bullet that can move them all in one direction — it’s hard to herd them, like millions of cats, because they have different reasons for being undecided — but both campaigns see the economy as a major concern of passing subgroups. a set of swing selectors.
“These persuasive voters have a less fragmented issue matrix than is typical in many ways,” said one senior Trump campaign official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to be candid about strategy and tactics. “And that’s because of the overwhelming concern about the economy.”
The official said some credulous voters listed other issues as their top concerns, but “a larger share was economic and affordability issues.”
This helps explain why Trump has promised to create a “national economic renaissance” if elected, and why he beat Harris.
“He wants four more years to implement a radical leftist agenda that poses a fundamental threat to the well-being of every American family and America itself.” Trump said Thursday In a statement to the Economic Club of New York.
At the same time, Harris is racing to establish himself as a champion of the hard-hitting people. Of the few proposals the Democratic Party has made since electing Trump to take over, most have focused on providing government assistance — for parents, small business owners and first-time homebuyers.
A source familiar with the Harris campaign’s efforts to appeal to undecided voters said a large part of the strategy will focus on economic messaging and economic proposals.
Part of that strategy means pushing back on Republican attempts to paint Harris as a liberal who will be more concerned with “increasing the safety net for immigrants and other people who don’t work” than working on how many Americans can’t pay their wages. pays their bills and meets their basic needs financially.
“A campaign that focused on big philosophical issues like ‘democracy’ didn’t succeed because people couldn’t relate to it,” the person said, referring to a central theme of President Joe Biden’s campaign before dropping out on July 21. “Freedom succeeds when people think about how it affects them.”
The person also said Harris talked about how he would improve people’s lives – rather than history-making nature part of her campaign’s efforts to appeal to undecided voters and those hesitant to vote for a Black and South Asian woman.
“I think people are going to fall apart sooner than they expect, because let’s step back for a second, there are two things working against her: She’s a woman and she’s black,” he said. “And I think this country, in particular, has a hard time seeing a woman in that role for some reason. It feels like it’s one of those ‘get into the voting booth’ moments for people who are on the fence.”
After several election cycles about the fundamentals of both parties, focusing on swing voters is back in vogue. Two big reasons for the renewal: the proximity of the last presidential election and the abundance of political money.
Identifying, persuading, and getting voters to vote is more expensive than simply getting voters who already support a candidate to go to the polls.
According to a Trump campaign official, this means the Trump campaign is constantly gathering information about potential voters. From the initial datasets, the campaign built models designed to predict which voters might be persuaded based on various characteristics and tendencies.
“Then you test it by asking the same kind of information that goes into the modeled audience [the model] to see if it’s been approved,” the aide said. “We’re in a constant re-approval process.”
Harris campaign officials said “affiliated” organizing, which includes supporters attending community events, is the most effective way to reach undecided voters. That’s the mindset that has Harris campaign aides in Milwaukee and Trump allies riding coattails at financial seminars.