After pausing their multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to review their strategy, the Trump campaign plans to launch new ads tomorrow depicting Joe Biden as a puppet “controlled by the radical left.”
The Trump campaign’s most recent internal polls show the “puppet of the left” attack on Biden is beginning to resonate with voters.
And it sets the campaign up to attack Biden’s vice presidential selection.
“The ‘radical left’ is a placeholder for Biden’s VP pick,” one adviser told Axios.
The new ads will get into specific policy areas, likely including taxes.
Trump campaign officials are frustrated that Biden’s “very unfavorables” aren’t as high as they’d like them.
Voters don’t intensely despise him the way many despised Hillary Clinton.
And several Trump advisers have said they doubt they can find a line of attack that will make Biden as hated as Clinton was in 2016.
Instead, Team Trump is trying to persuade voters that if they vote for Biden, they’re not actually electing this amiable, moderate old man.
The only way they believe they can sufficiently toxify Biden is to convince voters that he’s an empty vessel to be filled by the policies of the “radical left.”
That’s why the Trump campaign has made so much of Biden’s policy partnerships with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
This strategy makes Biden’s VP pick especially important for Team Trump, advisers say.
If Biden’s running mate is hard to depict as a wild-eyed radical, this empty vessel strategy won’t pack the same punch.
But if Biden picks somebody who has higher “very unfavorables” than he does, watch for the Trump campaign to try to persuade the public that this VP bogey-woman is actually the person they are electing president.
Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser, put it this way: “Biden’s VP pick is effectively his political living will, for a candidate who has already said he’s merely a transition to the next Democrat and has refused to commit to serving a second term.”
The Trump campaign spent much of Saturday attacking Biden for considering Rep. Karen Bass to be his VP.
They’re attacking Bass because they see an opportunity to tag Biden with views and associations — her public comments sympathetic to Fidel Castro — that are toxic to a substantial number of voters in Florida.
Biden has been running ahead of Trump in the must-win state for the GOP all year.
The Trump campaign held a press call Saturday with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez to amplify this line of attack.
Andrew Bates, director of Biden’s rapid response, said, “The American people know Joe Biden. And after seven consecutive months of failed leadership during the worst public health crisis in generations, they know that our nation’s capacity to join the rest of the world in beating back COVID-19 has been crippled by one overriding burden: Donald Trump.”
“That’s why the Trump campaign is locked in a sad and pathetic cycle of bimonthly, shambolic message ‘resets’ — all of which are based on the same recycled lies that voters have seen through countless times before.”
Joe Biden will make the all-important decision about who will be his vice presidential candidate in the coming days.
A former vice president himself, Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has committed to selecting a woman as his running mate, and a number of high-profile public figures are seen as the top contenders.
Those include: Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and Bass.
While he is expected to make a decision next week, Biden is unlikely to publicly announce whom he is selecting until the second week of August, according to a source familiar with the process.