Trump is favored to win, despite his campaign

Donald Trump seems to be playing a diabolical four-dimensional chess strategy this year. He must figure he is a lock to win — and wants the result to be so close, while offending every conventional sensibility, that the D..C political and media establishment will never get over the 2024 election result. 

After all, no presidential campaign can really be this terrible. 

He has focused on the wrong issues, left powerful attack points off the table, sent bad direct mail, and shown no message discipline. Even Trump’s McDonald’s stunt was too late in the game. And now, with the former president’s latest fiasco — insulting two demographics where he’s hoped to make big gains — it’s hard to pick out much that’s been done right. 

Most campaign professionals and longtime political observers will tell you that the big issues turn politics. The Carville aphorism — “It’s the economy, stupid” — was true for decades before he coined the phrase. Trump put that law of politics to the test. 

Incomprehensibly, Trump has chosen to make inflation an afterthought in his campaign. Never mind that it has been by far the top issue for voters and independents for more than two years (currently, 96 percent think inflation is important, including 77 percent who say it’s “very important”). Never mind that voters overwhelmingly disapprove of President Biden’s handling of the issue. For Trump, inflation is a nuisance issue he won’t take seriously.

He should have announced an inflation-fighting plan this spring. Any half-witted political operation could have come up with a plan that sounded good. Instead, Trump dawdled until August and pulled out the weakest nonsense I’ve ever heard about a major issue. Trump’s plan? Drill for more oil and tell his Cabinet to figure it out — stat! 

Not only has Trump breezed past inflation, but his tariff love affair has given Vice President Kamala Harris a lifeline on the issue. Although some of a tariff increase would be absorbed by producers, not all of it would — and that makes tariffs inflationary. Harris has taken some liberties calling his plan a national sales tax, but it gives her an attack line to muddle an issue she can’t win on.

Even Trump’s focus on immigration is off. The surge in illegal immigration definitely is a concern for voters and a weak point for Harris. But Trump has decided to talk only about the criminal dimension, ignoring the effect that millions of additional people has on housing demand and therefore housing costs. 

Crime and drugs are a definite problem for many, but rising housing costs is a problem for practically everybody. JD Vance did mention the inflation-immigration connection once in the VP debate, but then it disappeared. So, Team Trump can’t claim ignorance. That Trump and Vance would choose to talk about a few immigrants eating pets (allegedly) and not on illegal immigration causing rents and house prices to spiral upwards for tens of millions is incomprehensible. 

Even something as basic as Trump’s turnout mail is terrible. I get mailers from both the Trump and Harris campaigns — and the Harris stuff is hands-down smarter and better. The Trump mail that floods my inbox just repeats talking points. There are no numbers. The illegal immigration points don’t include the number of illegals, how many are estimated to be criminals or statistics on rising crime. When fentanyl deaths under Biden are mentioned, the number is left out (close to 200,000 in 2021 and 2022, or nearly 250 per day).  

Worst of all, when inflation is in the mailer (and it’s never the top bullet point), there’s no mention of the cost to the average household. Telling me prices are “skyrocketing” is interesting, but telling me that “Bidenflation” is costing me almost $1,000 per month would be infuriating. This is political advertising 101. Yet Trump and his fumbling message mavens can’t get it right. 

Even so, Trump’s bad campaign likely won’t matter. The polling has slowly shifted to the ex-president nationally and in the battleground states. To be sure, his lead is tenuous, but the RealClearPolitics average has Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin within 1 point. Trump is only trailing in Michigan — and such a narrow margin is hardly any lead for Harris. 

With the polls very close, handicapping the final result is a challenge. Which poll do you believe? Early voting has been much stronger for Republicans than in 2020. But whether that is a real surge or just the Trump base shifting the timing of its vote is unknown. at least banking those votes prevents people from changing their minds or missing Election Day.

Trump was underestimated in 2016 and 2020. Though imperfect, betting markets do help cut through the noise and allow some aggregation of the information at hand in terms of what people expect. In these, Trump has been rising, reaching a odds greater than 63 percent. That sounds about right. 

The Harris campaign has hardly been mistake-free. Stuck in its own propaganda bubble, they it must have figured that swapping her in for Biden would be enough to beat Trump on its own. The VP’s keep-away strategy with both the mainstream and alternate media was a big screw-up, from which she is furiously trying to dig out.

Harris's choice of Tim Walz instead of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running-mate might cost her Pennsylvania and the election. Walz has been a zero, at best. His own trenchant analysis is apt — he’s a knucklehead. 

But the real problem for Harris is Joe Biden. Ignoring inflation, failing on the border, a disastrous national security policy (or non-policy) and denial of his own cognitive decline set Trump up for success. Compounding matters, Biden’s refusal to resign and let Harris ascend to the presidency was a colossal blunder. Biden hovers over her candidacy like an ominous cloud, occasionally spitting out thunderbolts of stupidity. 

Trump is the favorite, but he is not a lock to win. And that has been the case for the last year. If Harris and the Democrats ever thought that beating Trump would be easy, they were only fooling themselves. 

Keith Naughton is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm, and a former Pennsylvania political campaign consultant.