If former President Donald Trump wants to return to the White House, he has to get serious about winning the āground war.ā
Social media memes did not elect him in 2016 ā his relentless schedule of campaign rallies did.
But this month, the Republican nominee is taking a break from the campaign trail, while the Democrats bask in the publicity of their national convention.
Is this wise?
Trump held 27 rallies in August 2016, according to CNBC, yet this time he has only a handful.
Instead, he returned to X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, for an interview with its larger-than-life impresario, Elon Musk.
It is a move straight out of the playbook that failed to get Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis the Republican nomination.
DeSantis kicked off his doomed campaign with a Musk interview in May of last year.
Social media has a place in 21st-century campaigning, but it isnāt where elections are won.
Then again, before Trumpās stunning upset eight years ago, the conventional wisdom was that rallies didnāt win elections, either.
They were Trumpās secret weapon ā a tactic so old-fashioned that Hillary Clintonās top-dollar political professionals didnāt dream it could change the course of the contest.
The top-dollar consultants were wrong, and Clinton paid for her campaignās complacency.
She expected to win an āair war,ā with her sideās 2-to-1 fundraising edge over Trumpās effort translating into overwhelming dominance in television ads.
But by showing up in places no nominee from either party had set foot in for a generation, Trump convinced voters in the vital Rust Belt battlegrounds that he cared about Americans the elites had written off.
Whether or not Wisconsinites, Pennsylvanians and Michiganders got to attend a Trump rally in person, the candidateās personal presence in some of the less fashionable zip codes in their states made an impression ā in a way slick television commercials didnāt.
Trump couldnāt run a ground war the same way in 2020, of course, amid COVID fears and lockdowns.
Without the advantage his rallies gave him, he lost.
Joe Biden was an absentee on the campaign trail, much as heās been an absentee as president, too.
In the circumstances, it didnāt matter ā and Biden might have hoped he could win the same way this November even without COVID to cover for him.
That was a vain hope even before the presidentās debate meltdown:
Trump wouldnāt have had to barnstorm the battleground states with anything like the energy he marshaled in 2016 to outdo Biden, given the presidentās decrepitude.
But now that Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, Trump canāt afford to be any less vigorous than he was when he took on Clinton.
Heās eight years older, but his stamina remains remarkable ā all the more so for a man who was nearly slain by an assassinās bullet just a month ago.
He had the vim to deliver a 92-minute acceptance speech at the Republican convention, longer than some of his listeners could last.
The question now is less whether Trump is capable of campaigning like itās 2016 than whether he sees a need to.
He has tools at his disposal now that he didnāt have then, chief among them a better-funded, more professional campaign team.
But the best team that money could buy only led Clinton to defeat.
Whatever new strengths Trump thinks heās acquired, heād be reckless to rely on them rather than on the one thing that worked before: going straight to the voters.
That means not only holding more rallies but also augmenting his operation in the battlegrounds, where early yet persistent reports say Republican organizing lags behind the Democratsā.
Harrisā party perfected a new kind of campaign in 2020, just as Trump reinvented an old one with his in-person politicking four years before.
The Democrats head into the final phase of this yearās contest with a strategy for mail-in and early voting that Republicans were utterly unprepared for four years ago.
Has the GOP since caught up?
Trump can hardly count on it ā not after the partyās lackluster results in the 2022 midterms.
Only once in the past 32 years has a Republican received more votes in a presidential contest than the Democrat.
Except for President George W. Bushās reelection in 2004, Democrats have won the popular vote every time since 1992.
Itās not just recent polls that make Trump out to be the underdog in this race ā the underlying electoral makeup of the country favors Democrats for the White House.
Trump defied polling and history alike when he demolished the Democratsā āblue wallā in the industrial heartland two cycles ago.
He did it by just by showing up, in the flesh, which is exactly what he needs to do again.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
(Featured image credit:Ā Screen Capture/CSPAN)
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporterās byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contactĀ [email protected].