Molly Murphy, the Impact Research president who did polling for Democratic campaigns, said during a Dole Institute of Politics forum at the University of Kansas that Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris responded well during the debate with Republican and former President Donald Trump to attacks on her intellect and ability to lead the nation. (Kansas Reflector screen capture from Dole Institute’s YouTube channel)
TOPEKA — The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump during a Pennsylvania campaign speech in July reinfored the Republican’s image as a relentless political combatant and was used effectively to sway undecided voters in final days of the campaign with Democrat Kamala Harris.
The Dole Institute of Politics invited a panel of campaign staff, strategists, pollsters and journalists to dissect the 2024 campaign for president. They appraised twists and turns of a race that marked Trump’s third bid for the presidency, withdrawal of President Joe Biden and the 107-day pivot to Harris. The economy, immigration, crime, foreign affairs, vice presidential picks and the future of democracy were part of the narrative, but the singular most dramatic event was the grazing of Trump’s right ear with a bullet from an AR-15-style rifle at an open-air rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Before ushered off the stage by Secret Service agents, a bloodied Trump pumped his right fist into the air and shouted “fight” to the terrified audience.
“It solidified an image very concretely of Donald Trump as a fighter and as a candidate that will fight for you,” said Alex Latcham, director of congressional engagement for Donald Trump for President. “You can’t script that moment, obviously. At the end of the day, it did harden people. They understood in a very tangible way how important this race was.”
Anita Dunn, who has been one of Biden’s closest advisors and worked on six Democratic presidential campaigns in the past 40 years, said pro-Trump super PACs relentlessly deployed assassination-attempt images of a defiant Trump during the last 10 days of the campaign.
“It was a powerful image to voters,” she said. “This was something that people really came back to as kind of a symbol of strength, but also a symbol of somebody who was a fighter and somebody who was going to stand up.”
Transition
Biden, who defeated Trump in 2020, welcomed the opportunity to face Trump again in the 2024 cycle. In June, political disaster began to unfold as Biden walked onto the debate stage in Atlanta and proceeded to convince many Americans he no longer had the stamina for the job. Eventually, backlash led Biden to step aside from the nomination in July. He said the most important objective was defeating Trump.
Francesca Chambers, White House correspondent for USA Today, said Wednesday during the panel discussion at the University of Kansas’ Dole Institute that she had spoken with voters frustrated Biden didn’t have the sense to step back earlier. She said Democrats were disappointed they wouldn’t be able to engage in a meaningful primary contest. Instead, Vice President Harris was annointed.
Harris, a former U.S. senator and attorney general from California, was given the job of quickly bringing Democrats together and figuring out how to outfox a GOP candidate who had served as president or had been running for the office since 2015.
Molly Murphy, the Impact Research president who did polling for the Biden and Harris campaigns, said Harris brought a sense of youth and vibrancy to the contest that was lacking in Biden’s campaign. She said Harris had state and federal government experience, but few voters had a sense of her accomplishments or what she was all about.
Harris would need to draw heavily from women voters and target young independent voters, Murphy said. Much of that attention, of course, was directed at seven swing states viewed as central to the campaign. Harris’ intellect was the first line of attack by conservatives, Murphy said.
“There was a lot of right-wing media even before the candidate switch about word salads, rambling answers, not being concise that was being ginned up as ‘she is not intelligent, she’s not smart.’ Obviously, there was some coded language there,” Murphy said.
Harris largely put to rest that criticism during her respectable showing in the September debate with Trump.
Latcham, who will serve Trump as deputy assistant to the president and director of the Office of Public Liaison, said the swap of Biden for Harris didn’t fundamentally change Trump’s focus on immigration and the border as well as inflation and the economy that had been outlined for the rematch with Biden.
“We worked to transfer those failures over to Kamala,” Latcham said.
Criminal?
In May, Trump was convicted of 34 felonies related to falsifying business records on payments to Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. Six months after those verdicts were read he became the first felon to be elected U.S. president.
In wake of voters’ decision in November, special counsel Jack Smith requested cases be dropped against Trump for trying to subvert the 2020 election and concealing classified documents at his Florida home. A Georgia election-subversion case also has been idled.
Normally, such legal chaos would have buried a political candidate. Not so with Trump. Most notably the hush-money charges triggered by prosecutor Alvin Bragg.
“I think the indictments, particularly the Alvin Bragg case in New York, that energized voters,” said Latcham, the Trump campaign operative.
Molly Ball, senior political correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, said Trump managed to make use of his legal problems. His GOP primary rivals were loathe to attack Trump on this point.
“The polls really shot up after that first indictment and never went back down in the primary,” Ball said. “In part, it was because the other candidates who were allegedly running against him all rallied around him.”
Chuck Todd, chief political analyst for NBC News, said Trump’s claim the judicial system was being subverted to undermine his credibility was accepted by voters who didn’t have trouble viewing most politicians as corrupt. One national poll showed 54% of Americans said the word “criminal” properly described Trump.
“There’s a fine line between being a criminal and being a fighter,” Todd said. “And, Trump used it to be a fighter. I’ve had plenty of voters say to me, ‘Yes, I know who he is. But you know … they’re all corrupt. So, give me somebody who is on my side.’”
Dunn, who worked for Biden, said it would have been a political mistake for the president to aggressively charge into legal issues involving Trump that were driven, in part, by the U.S. Department of Justice. It would have played into Trump’s theory the system was infected with political bias, she said.
“That’s going to feel very quaint in about six months,” Dunn predicted.
Odds and ends
Brendan Buck, a GOP strategist who worked with U.S. House Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner, said the selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Harris’ running mate didn’t move the needle in November. Walz was positioned by the media as a person who might be able to connect with male voters.
“He seemed like some sort of a Democrats’ imagination of what a red-state guy would look like,” Buck said. “That sort of Elmer Fudd impression — going hunting and everything.”
Ball, of the Wall Street Journal, said Walz didn’t do well in the vice presidential debate with J.D. Vance, the running mate for Trump and a U.S. senator from Ohio. She said Walz, who served in the U.S. House, didn’t look ready to be vice president.
Todd of NBC News said it didn’t appear the selection of Vance and Walz did much for voters, but both appeared to be beneficial to people at the top of the ballot.
“I think Vance was good for Trump’s psyche and that Walz was good for Harris’ psyche,” he said.
In the end, 77 million people voted for Trump and 75 million for Harris. The Electoral College went to Trump: 312 to 226.
Todd said most polling in the presidential race was reliable, but he expressed disdain with the concept of polling aggregation. He singled out RealClearPolitics and 538 for criticism.
“The only thing that has destroyed the reputation of polling is polling aggregators. 538 and RealClearPolitics mislead. They don’t help you understand polling,” he said.
