Program Note
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Today’s Post
On Saturday, in a special follow-up post to my regular Polling Week in Review, I mentioned that the Trump campaign has pulled its advertising from Arizona. The rationale, according to the campaign, was to coordinate its advertising strategy with the onset of early voting, which in Arizona begins on October 7th. That means that, in a state Trump won in 2016 but polls show Biden winning in 2020, the campaign is going to go dark for a whole month of the final two months of the election. Does that make sense to you? It shouldn’t. But, the Times on Tuesday gave us some insight to what might be going on. The TL:DR of it is this: Trump is running out of money.
Now, you might ask how it is possible that Trump could raise a billion dollars and waste almost all of it before the fall of the election. I will offer as evidence the fact that Trump could not make a casino profitable. A casino; let that sink in. He’s a terrible businessman; a serial bankruptcy declarer. Since he will not tolerate any bad news and won’t listen to anyone who says no to his crazy ideas, his campaign is a lot like what his administration is now. A collection of low-talent yes men (they are mostly men) who are really no better than the president himself. If Trump created a family business of grifters, a foundation of grifters, and an administration of grifters, why would anyone think his campaign would be different?
The campaign has raised a lot of money, and for a while Biden was far behind. No long. The burn rate at the Trump campaign has been high and mostly fruitless. According to the Times, “Of the $1.1 billon his campaign and the party raised from the beginning of 2019 through July, more than $800 million has already been spent. Now some people inside the campaign are forecasting what was once unthinkable: a cash crunch with less than 60 days until the election, according to Republican officials briefed on the matter.”
This is not rocket science. Corruption and incompetence follow a man like Trump wherever he goes because the former is what he does and the latter is what he is. It’s the opposite of Obama. Some folks were worried about whether Obama had the experience to run a large, important operation like the federal government without scandal. But, once October hit it was pretty obvious from how well-run and drama-free his campaign was that he would fit right into the job from the get-go. And he did. Regardless of what you think of Obama’s policies, if you are being honest you have to admit that it was one of the best-run administrations we’ve ever had. And now, for the past four years, we’ve had the worst. Not one of the worst. The worst.
Trump’s response to the news that his campaign is essentially bankrupt was to announce that he would throw in $100 million of his own money to the campaign. This is the most revelatory part of the entire story. First, this is Trump admitting that the campaign is broke (or on the verge of broke). Second, there is no way he is going to put his own money into the campaign. He said he would self-fund in 2016 and he didn’t throw anything into the pot. Third, maybe he will throw millions of dollars into the campaign. Considering he won’t pay for anything himself (remember: he had his foundation pay for personal trinkets like a portrait of himself), what would it mean for him to do this? It would signal to me two things: (1) the money he puts in is not his and (2) he is scared to death about facing criminal charges once he is out of office. The money will come from donors or Putin or anywhere else. I doubt he even has $100 million of liquidity that he can use for campaign expenditures. Maybe he does, but he won’t spend it on the campaign unless point (2) is the only thing motivating him to stay in the race. And it certainly might be.
According to the Times, “interviews with more than a dozen current and former campaign aides and Trump allies, and a review of thousands of items in federal campaign filings, show that the president’s campaign and the R.N.C. developed some profligate habits as they burned through hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Of course, it is not true that the campaign is completely out of money. But, indications are very clear that it is running out of it. Going dark in Arizona is not a smart move for a campaign that probably cannot win the election while losing the state. As you may recall, I am generally a proponent of the “rational campaign” school of elections. Normally, we can tell how good or poorly a campaign is doing by paying attention to how it deploys resources. Assuming the campaign is behaving rationally, the withdrawal from Arizona for the entire month of September has to be seen as a sign that they are either running out of money or they think it’s a strong likelihood should they continue to spend. However, if you look back at my discussion of how incompetent Trumpland is, then perhaps this campaign is an exception to the rational campaign model. There is one thing that might separate an earlier, incompetent and possibly corrupt campaign from a later rational campaign. That is the firing/demotion of Brad Parscale and the hiring of Bill Stepien.
Parscale had no experience running a campaign – any political campaign – before Trump hired him to run his 2020 reelect. What Parscale did, however, was enrich himself off the campaign coffers while Trump family members and their significant others all did the same thing. Stepien is a professional political operative from New Jersey. You might remember him as one of the players in Gov, Chris Christie’s (R-NJ) Bridgegate scandal several years ago. Based on its interviews with GOP insiders, the Times notes that “[s]ince Bill Stepien replaced Mr. Parscale in July, the campaign has imposed a series of belt-tightening measures that have reshaped initiatives, including hiring practices, travel and the advertising budget.”
According to the Times, Trump acts as his own campaign manager. This is consistent with Michael Cohen’s recent Rachel Maddow interview in which he claims that Trump is a micromanager. (This has also been covered in the Washington Post.) So, maybe that allowed Parscale to sit back, do nothing, and spend money on himself. The Times reported that “Mr. Parscale has been the focus of intense scrutiny and news coverage about his operation and whether he was making an outsize amount of money from the campaign. Those articles have focused attention on his purchases of property and cars in Florida, where he lives, and became a source of irritation for the president, who saw them as a distraction.” Stepien may be taking a stronger position at running things, but it seems apparent that Trump is still interfering in tactical campaign efforts. He certainly is undermining whatever message Stepien and Hope Hicks are trying to craft.
Perhaps the biggest reason why Parscale was fired/demoted: “Mr. Parscale was also visible in ways that campaign managers typically aren’t, appearing in a campaign ad and having his name listed on fund-raising events.” With Trump, it is all about Trump. He hates it when other people get attention.
Who knows how this will turn out for the campaign? Will Stepien last the next 60 days? At what point will Trump blame him for how bad things are going? Seriously, that’s going to happen. Even if the campaign somehow turns things around, Trump will never give Stepien credit – at least not the credit he might deserve.
But, getting back to being broke, Medium Buying reports that the Trump campaign has cancelled advertising not just in Arizona, but Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The campaign is running ads this week in Florida (where Trump is closing the gap with Biden), Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. With the exception of Minnesota, these are all states Trump won in 2016 (and he narrowly missed in the Badger State). Compare this to the Biden campaign advertising spending: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump is not just playing defense while Biden is on the offensive, but may be functionally conceding Arizona, Iowa, Ohio, and Pennsylvania by suspending advertising in September. These four states – all ones Trump won in 2016 – are close, and two of them have GOP incumbents running for reelection in competitive Senate races. If either Biden or Trump go dark in these states in the middle of the fall campaign, as Trump is actually doing, the chances of a one, two, or even three point swing to the other candidate (in this case, Biden) are plausible. Trump may be able to find a way to win without one or two of those states (though it’s highly unlikely), but he can’t win if he loses all four.