A Trump campaign built to battle Biden is forced to recalibrate to Kamala Harris

Less than a month ago, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was riding high: He was ahead in the polls, led a unified party at the Republican National Convention and had a disciplined message to defeat President Biden.

In recent days, things have changed.

Vice President Harris’ entry to the race as the new Democratic nominee has erased his polling advantage, upended his messaging and forced a campaign built for battling Biden to recalibrate.

For most of 2024, Trump and his campaign were a well-oiled machine built almost exclusively around pummeling Biden as “weak, failed, and dishonest.” According to polling, that messaging was working.

Before dropping out of the presidential race and after his disastrous debate performance in June, Biden was losing to Trump in every major battleground state, often outside the margin of error.

Since Harris emerged as his replacement, polling suggests she does not have the same vulnerabilities or negative vibes as Biden, despite being his vice president. It has taken the Trump campaign some time to figure out what to highlight in attacking Harris.

The main message has remained consistent, blasting the Democratic Party’s policy stances around immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border, amplified by Harris’ involvement in tackling the issue since taking office.

After a failed assassination attempt against him at a Pennsylvania rally, Trump triumphantly took the stage in Milwaukee at the Republican National Convention as head of a party completely in his control and confident that voters would support his vision for America’s future.

Cycles of bad news

But in the weeks since Biden dropped out, the campaign has been dogged by bad news cycles — sometimes of his own creation — that have overshadowed the messaging against his new opponent.

When Trump appeared at a National Association of Black Journalists conference last month, he falsely claimed Harris “turned Black” to gain political advantage. At a massive rally in Atlanta last week, held in the same arena where Harris appeared days before, Trump’s personal attacks on Georgia’s popular Republican Gov. Brian Kemp dominated more than criticism of Democrats.

Trump’s posts on social media and speeches at these events have also become more meandering, disjointed and rooted in grievance compared to earlier in the cycle, when Biden’s age and poor performance often overshadowed polling that found many voters thought Trump was too old to run again, too.

His attacks on Harris’ race, recent obsession with rally crowd size and other off-the-cuff remarks hearken back to his first run in 2016. But this time he is not an unknown quantity capitalizing on anger and anti-establishment sentiment to surge past an unpopular opponent.

In Montana on Friday, Trump’s only rally of the week, an event in support of Montana GOP Senate nominee Tim Sheehy featured Trump speaking for nearly two hours, largely about his personal grievances and views of the presidential race.

In a sign of the campaign’s new line of attack on Harris, Trump played two video compilations of Harris’ prior statements, one painting her as too progressive in her views around policing, gun restrictions and health care — while the other mocked statements she made and implied she was not smart enough to be president.

He occasionally attacked Montana's Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Tester as too liberal and, in one non sequitur, remarked Tester has “got the biggest stomach I have ever seen.”

Sheehy spoke for just ten minutes.

Fewer rallies than in 2016

The last three weeks have been like a replay of several aspects of the 2016 campaign that some voters didn’t like and Republicans found weren’t as helpful.

Unlike 2016, Trump has not held as many rallies, in battleground states or in Republican strongholds. Since the beginning of July, Trump has held a total of eight rallies, plus the Republican National Convention. In 2016, he had 22 in the same time frame.

In a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago home Thursday, Trump said he was focused on other types of campaigning beyond large-scale rallies, and that he did not need to campaign as much, calling it a “stupid question” to ask why he hasn’t been on the trail as much.

“Because I'm leading by a lot,” he said. “And because I'm letting their convention go through, and I am campaigning a lot. I'm doing tremendous amounts of taping here, we have commercials that are at a level I don't think that anybody's ever done before. Plus, in certain cases, I see many of you in the room where I'm speaking to you on phones, I'm speaking to radio, I'm speaking to television.”

Harris has taken a slight lead over Trump in several national polls released in the last week, including an NPR/PBS News/Marist survey that has Harris with a 3-point lead thanks to a surge in Democratic enthusiasm.

Trump also used the Mar-a-Lago press conference to attack Harris' intelligence and brag about the audience at his rallies, falsely claiming that more people attended his Jan. 6, 2021, rally than Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech.

Trump also said he would debate Harris on Sept. 10, setting up a showdown hosted by ABC that will come as voters begin casting their ballots.

His earlier debate against Biden was a key factor in efforts to get the president to end his campaign for another term, and the massive forum could again shake up the race at an important time, especially because Trump is no longer the clear favorite.

While Trump has not been as active on the campaign trail, his vice presidential pick Ohio Sen. JD Vance held multiple appearances this week, shadowing Harris and her new VP pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz across the Midwest.

After his own rocky rollout, Vance used lengthy media availabilities featuring local voters to contrast Republican policies on immigration, inflation and crime with those being touted by Democrats.

“Kamala Harris has been such a disaster as vice president of this country, that everywhere she goes, chaos and uncertainty follow,” he said in Philadelphia. “We’ve got a war in Europe, we’ve got a war in the Middle East that threatens to spiral out of control, we've got chaos in the world financial markets.

"Everything that Kamala Harris touches has been a disaster, and we have got to kick her out of the United States government, not give her a promotion.”