The Trump campaign is trying to learn from its mistakes in 2020, according to a new report by The New York Times — specifically, they want to stop accidentally pushing Democrats to the polls.
"The Trump officials ... said they had learned from mistakes of the last cycle," reported Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Shane Goldmacher. "One of Mr. Trump’s 2024 advisers said that the 2020 campaign had poorly anticipated which voters were actually persuadable, only to learn that as many as 80 percent of the people it believed could be swayed were actually hardened partisans, which led to costly wasted efforts. In some cases, the Trump campaign wound up driving Biden supporters to the polls, officials said."
Democratic in-person outreach operations were significantly reduced in the 2020 election, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The Trump team told The Times they are confident that, despite the recent downturn in polls since Vice President Kamala Harris took over as Democratic nominee, they still have the clearer path to win, specifically by flipping Pennsylvania and either Georgia or a combination of Arizona and Nevada. All of these states remain toss-ups in polling despite Democratic gains in recent weeks.
Above all, Trump's pollster Tony Fabrizio said Harris “has gotten the equivalent of the largest in-kind contribution of free media I think I have ever seen in all the years I’ve been doing presidential campaigns — and I’ve been doing it a long time — and even with that, we still have the advantage in the Electoral College.”
While the Trump campaign is vowing to better target voter outreach, the priority seems to be election monitoring; the campaign has also moved to recruit as many as 100,000 "poll watchers," which observers fear will be used to try to find pretexts to challenge the election in any battleground state Trump loses in November.
