For the first time in the presidential campaign, Donald Trump is starting to fall behind — out-fundraised by Kamala Harris and trailing the vice president in some battleground state polls.
Gone are the specific attacks against President Joe Biden they’ve had to discard, from his age to his family to his gallery of missteps and gaffes.
Now, inside Trump’s campaign, his advisers are settling on a supercharged messaging strategy on a familiar theme: Attack Harris as the most extreme caricature of a liberal they can muster.
And for one day, at least, the former president on Wednesday stayed on script.
“You know, nobody knew how radical left she was, but he’s a smarter version of her, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said Wednesday on Fox & Friends, blistering Harris’ choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. “He’s probably about the same as Bernie Sanders. He’s probably more so than Bernie Sanders.”
Trump added, “This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.”
Trump advisers were planning, regardless of who Harris picked for her vice presidential nominee, to label them as extreme, according to a campaign adviser granted anonymity to discuss internal matters. During the final days of the Harris selection process, the Trump campaign had been particularly focused on three finalists — Walz, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly.
The attacks underscore the central calculation of the Trump campaign: that by casting Harris as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal, they can tamp down her appeal to the swing voters in the Rust Belt and Sun Belt states that will determine the outcome of the election. And in the campaign’s portrayal of Harris and Walz — a former football coach and National Guard member from middle America — as extremists, rarely has the GOP’s commitment to the “liberal” mantra been so clear.
“The Harris-Walz ticket is the most radical in history,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an informal Trump adviser, told POLITICO. “We win an issue-defined, ideologically-focused campaign by a remarkable margin.”
Whether Trump can adhere to that message is still in question — doing so would mark a departure from his approach to the race since Harris replaced Biden as his opponent. In recent days, Trump has questioned Harris’ Black identity, smeared her as “low IQ” and, while visiting Georgia, picked a fight with Brian Kemp, the popular governor of a swing state.
But the Trump campaign is laboring to make the “liberal” moniker stick.
Following Walz’s selection on Tuesday, the Trump campaign cast Harris as a “San Francisco liberal” and Walz as a “West Coast wannabe.” The next day, the pro-Trump MAGA Inc. super PAC released a TV ad calling Harris “dangerously liberal.”
Trump on Truth Social called Harris and Walz “the most Radical Left duo in American history,” while his own running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, was applying that critique to his Democratic counterpart.
“This decision, selecting Tim Walz, is another sign that she doesn’t care what the American people think,” Vance said Tuesday evening on the Fox News show “Hannity.” “She is only in this to obey the far-left radicals within her own party.”
Republicans are amplifying the message.
Ben Shapiro, the conservative commentator, called Walz a “Marxist Don Rickles.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called Walz an “Ilhan Omar-style Democrat,” referring to the liberal Minnesota congressmember. And at a POLITICO Live event in New York on Wednesday, Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) said Harris had “doubled down on going with an ultra-liberal pick.”
Harris has taken progressive stances on some major issues, including the Green New Deal. But she has also frustrated progressive members of her party, including for her record as a prosecutor and her shift away from Medicare for All by the midpoint of her presidential primary campaign in 2019.
Walz, meanwhile, has undergone something of an ideological shift since winning a congressional seat in 2006. He embraced some socially liberal policies, though he generally leaned more into bipartisan and centrist legislating when he represented a red district in Congress. But after trading his congressional pin for a key to the governor’s mansion in Minnesota, he began advancing more progressive policies in the state.
His more recent approach is exactly what Republicans are leaning on, including an executive order he issued that made Minnesota the first state to protect access to gender-affirming care. Republicans have also hit him on his military record and for his response to the protests in Minneapolis following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
But generally, it’s the ‘liberal’ tag that the Trump campaign is working hardest to apply to the Harris-Walz ticket.
“They can’t be let off the hook for their past liberal positions that they’re desperately trying to run from,” said Republican strategist Matt Gorman, who worked for South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott’s presidential campaign.
How effectively — and consistently — Trump will be able to prosecute that case is unclear.
Making the attack stick, Gorman said, “requires discipline and the ability to push a message consistently.”
Jeff Coltin contributed to this report.
