With less than eight weeks before Election Day, each campaign is defining its final push by how it is spending its campaign funds. The Trump campaign told Fox News on Wednesday that it raised $210 million in August, its biggest month to date, but still short of the $365 million record set by the Biden campaign last month.
The strategies of the two opposing camps are totally different. The Biden campaign is tossing out its rule book — Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America — and instead is relying on air time almost exclusively.
Groundbreakers detailed how the Obama campaign transformed presidential campaigning through an aggressive ground game coupled with advanced information technology.
On the other hand, Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien is requiring every volunteer to read Groundbreakers before ringing a single doorbell or making a single phone call.
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Said Stepien:
Both campaigns are raising massive amounts of money, but have very different priorities about how to spend it. In addition to advertising, President Trump’s campaign has invested heavily in a muscular field operation and ground game that will turn out our voters, while the Biden campaign is waging almost exclusively an air war.
We like our strategy better.
By early August, the Trump campaign had more than 1,500 full-time paid staffers, with another 1,000 coming on board by the end of September. It already had 1.8 million volunteers in 23 states focusing on door-to-door canvassing and registering voters. At the time the campaign said they were hitting one million doors every week and had already conducted more than 70 million volunteer/voter contacts.
On the other hand, the Biden campaign was late to the game, not knowing for certain whom the party would be nominating until August 20. It also lagged in fundraising until after the convention was over, putting it way behind the Trump campaign.
In addition, a substantial lack of enthusiasm has weighed on the Biden campaign in its recruiting efforts.
The apparent advantage the Democrat candidate is enjoying in the polls could easily evaporate as voters will now be focusing more on the election and learning the differences between the candidates.
And any polling advantage may be ephemeral, according to JPMorgan’s stock market guru Marko Kolanovic, who just told his clients to adjust their portfolios in anticipation of a Trump victory. He warned that the “cancel culture” may be keeping Trump voters from speaking transparently to pollsters, giving Biden an artificial advantage in the polls by as much as five or six percent.
The Biden campaign is clearly losing ground among young black and Hispanic voters, and eight weeks is likely too short a period of time to reverse the trend. The campaign is also fighting an improving economy, a receding virus, and at least two historical models (the Primary Model and the S&P 500 Index model) giving Trump the advantage.
It’s well to remember that in 2016, the Clinton campaign raised and spent $1.2 billion, while the Trump campaign managed just half of that, and Clinton still lost.
Photo: AP Images
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, writing primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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