The race has been upended with the replacement of President Biden. But the Trump team said Thursday morning that “the fundamentals of the race have not changed.”
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Former President Donald J. Trump, seen speaking at a campaign rally in Harrisburg, Penn., has had arguably his worst three weeks of the election cycle since President Biden withdrew from the race.
Since replacing President Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris has been punctuating her rallies with a new slogan: “We’re not going back.”
Former President Donald J. Trump’s top advisers believe that tagline is a mistake. Their theory of the case, with less than 90 days to go in the election, is that the American people are nostalgic for the Trump presidency — and, specifically, for the Trump economy and lower prices.
During a background briefing with a group of reporters at a hotel in West Palm Beach on Thursday morning, hours before Mr. Trump held a news conference, a group of senior campaign officials — who, with few exceptions, spoke on the condition of anonymity to give a candid assessment of the state of the race — insisted that the structure of the race still benefits the former president even as Ms. Harris has risen in the polls.
“They know, as we do, that the fundamentals of the race have not changed,” said Tony Fabrizio, Mr. Trump’s top pollster, referring to the Harris campaign. “Because when you ask voters whether they’d rather return to the Trump economy or stay with the Biden economy, we win that two to one.”
Mr. Trump has had arguably his worst three weeks of this election cycle, with Ms. Harris pulling around level in the polls and the former president undercutting his campaign’s policy arguments with blatant race baiting, falsely claiming Ms. Harris only recently embraced her Black identity.
His team believes that he still holds the advantage in the Electoral College. Their path is straightforward: If Mr. Trump holds North Carolina and flips only two states that Mr. Biden won in 2020, Pennsylvania and Georgia, that gets him to 270 electoral votes and victory. But advisers noted he could also pair Pennsylvania with Arizona and Nevada, as well, among other paths to the presidency.
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Source: nytimes.com
