Coronavirus consumes Trump's reelection bid
When Donald Trump’s top campaign advisers met with the president in the White House on Wednesday, they came prepared with reams of polling data on his standing with voters eight months out from the election.
But Trump was focused on something else: The coronavirus.
Before the group could begin its long-planned presentation on the 2020 race, the president launched into a commentary about how travel from Europe was a “mess” and needed to be shut down. He ordered White House counsel Pat Cipollone and chief economist Larry Kudlow into the room to talk about ideas for addressing the pandemic. And he sent two other top aides, Jared Kushner and Hope Hicks, outside to draft a to-do list.
The episode illustrated how the coronavirus crisis has upended the election for both parties. Nearly every element of the presidential campaign is being adjusted or put on hold, from rallies to fundraising to staff work. Advertising campaigns are being paused and both parties are trying to gauge how to reach voters online.
“You could make a strong argument that the only thing that matters to the president’s reelection now is getting the response correct,” said Scott Jennings, who served as a top political aide in the George W. Bush White House. “No rally is going to save you if you are judged as having failed as the president."
Critical strategic decisions are also being put on hold. Senior Trump aides have been anxious to start a massive advertising campaign aimed at defining likely Democratic nominee Joe Biden before the general election campaign kicks into high gear — much like the barrage President Barack Obama unleashed on Mitt Romney in 2012. But with the coronavirus pandemic dominating the news, Republican officials see little point in hitting the airwaves now, saying it will likely have to wait.
Strategists are gaming out how the lack of in-person campaigning might affect Trump and Biden. Trump's signature megarallies, a source of psychic uplift for the president, are on ice. Biden, a tactile politician whose best moments are often on rope lines interacting one-on-one with voters, will be denied those opportunities for the foreseeable future.
Fundraising is also being disrupted. Biden has been forced to move his donor events online. And on Wednesday, the president scrapped a weekend appearance at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual conference in Las Vegas, as well as a much-anticipated fundraiser there with casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and a planned visit to Milwaukee next week.
Trump aides are uncertain when his rallies will resume. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office Thursday, Trump said he hadn't decided whether he would go forward with a March 25 event in Tampa, Fla.
“We have a lot of things that we're moving around because of what's happening and because I want to be here. This is the nerve center. I want to be right here,” he said. “I don’t want to be flying around in airplanes all over the place.”
Some Trump allies, however, are concerned about halting rallies. The president has long used the events as a primary means of reaching supporters, blowing off steam and setting a narrative. His campaign also uses them to gather data.
“Rallies are important to the Trump campaign and I’d worry about losing them because it would tilt a bit to Biden’s advantage,” said Michael Caputo, a campaign aide to Trump in 2016.
Biden has put the kibosh on upcoming rallies in Chicago and Miami, refashioning them as virtual events. The former vice president is also opting to hold smaller events, including roundtables and house parties.
The epidemic knocked the campaign off track this week. Biden was en route to a Cleveland rally on Tuesday to celebrate decisive primary victories when, midflight, the campaign canceled the rally and scrambled to find a new space for him to lap up free media. It settled on the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where only staff and press were allowed inside.
Instead of a celebratory backdrop that would have served as a momentum builder, only Biden and his wife, Jill, were in the camera shot as he delivered a sober speech. His staff stood at a distance behind a rope.
Bernie Sanders, who like Trump has made rallies a staple of his insurgent campaign, has also ditched large events for now.
The Trump campaign had been eager for months to get the canceled Las Vegas fundraiser with Adelson on the books. The White House also scrapped what was to be first lady Melania Trump’s first solo fundraiser, which had been scheduled for next week in Los Angeles, now placed under a state of emergency.
Biden has also aborted upcoming fundraisers, including two in Chicago. The campaign said it would be holding its fundraisers online indefinitely.
While the Trump campaign and its allies at the Republican National Committee are giving employees the option of teleworking, the Biden campaign has gone further. On Thursday, the former vice president’s effort distributed an internal memo informing employees at its Philadelphia headquarters that beginning this weekend they are to work from home. Staffers scattered across the country, meanwhile, will have the option of working from their homes or from short-term housing rentals.
The Sanders campaign similarly announced Thursday that all staff are to work from home.
(A Trump campaign official confirmed that it would be asking its employees who work at the Arlington, Va., headquarters to work at home March 13-16 while the office was sanitized.)
Field organizing, which of course can't be done entirely from home, has been made vastly more complicated by the outbreak. The RNC had been planning a National Week of Training next week — a nationwide effort to recruit and activate supporters and test the party’s get-out-the-vote operation. While some of those gatherings were initially to be in person, they are now slated to be held online and over the phone. The committee is also planning an upcoming online training day for volunteers.
After spending more than a year developing a massive digital infrastructure and database of contact information, the Trump campaign is betting it will be able to reach key voters online. The reelection effort recently set up a new website, ArmyforTrump.com, which is designed to be an online home for volunteers.
“The Trump campaign is built on data and uses technology to its highest advantages, so is better positioned to virtually engage voters than any other campaign,” said Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman.
The Biden campaign has also taken dramatic steps. In its Thursday memo, the campaign announced it is closing all field offices to the public and would instead be organizing “voters across the country through phone banking, text messaging, virtual events, and other distributed organizing models.”
Despite a series of key primaries taking place next week, the Sanders campaign said it would put a halt to all “door-to-door canvasses, instead moving to digital formats and outreach wherever possible.”
While Trump advisers are worried about how the president’s response to the coronavirus — and accompanying stock market crash — will affect his reelection hopes, they largely remain sanguine. But with schools and offices shutting down and people dying, they also said they recognized the accompanying political danger.
People familiar with Wednesday’s White House meeting said the president seemed to grasp the urgency of the situation.
Biden is using the crisis as an opportunity to cast himself as a steady leader who will return the country to normalcy after a turbulent Trump presidency. During a Thursday speech on the outbreak, Biden charged that “public fears are being compounded by a pervasive lack of trust in this president, fueled by his adversarial relationship with the truth.”
Biden then emphasized the need to embrace science, take the lead from experts, and be frank with the public — implying Trump has done the opposite.
“The No. 1 question right now,” said Ron Klain, a top Biden campaign adviser who coordinated the Obama administration’s response to an Ebola outbreak in late 2014, “is what’s your response to this coronavirus?”
