Nearly a month after their tumultuous but successful convention, Republicans are divided over how to win the 2024 election.
While former President Trump focused on the size of the audience and criticized Vice President Harris for not making allies available for media interviews, some Republicans, such as former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, assessed that party leaders needed to “stop whining” and focus on policy.
Harris has outperformed Trump in the Decision Desk HQ/The Hill national polling average and has outperformed the former president in six of the seven battleground states since replacing President Biden at the top of the list of candidates.
Now Republicans are trying to figure out how to counter Harris’ momentum, a departure from the united front that firmly supported Trump at last month’s party convention in Milwaukee.
“What the Trump campaign needs to do is actually prosecute this case and speak out so voters can get beyond Harris’ celebrity coronation and understand her true record,” said Mark Lumpkin, a Republican lobbyist and former deputy campaign manager for Bush’s presidential campaign.
“How do we raise our voices? We need a unified voice that forces the corporate media to focus on issues that matter to Americans: inflation, immigration, crime. They need to ask the fundamental question: are we better off now than we were four years ago?” he said.
Haley, Trump’s main rival in this year’s Republican primary, called on Republicans to unite and elect Trump at the party’s convention in July, in her most explicit support for Trump since she withdrew her own presidential bid.
Less than a month later, with Harris emerging as a top candidate, Haley told Fox News that if Trump wanted to connect with voters, he needed to focus his message on substantive policies rather than crowd size.
“Nikki is largely right about traditional campaigning. Trump doesn’t run a traditional campaign. He doesn’t like name-calling, personal attacks or talking about policy because that’s not interesting to him,” said a former Trump campaign staffer.
The source added, “Republicans are united on their policy message, but Trump is unlikely to go along with it.”
Other Republican lawmakers have also called on Trump to deliver a more disciplined message.
Instead, the former president has used rallies, interviews and press conferences to complain about Harris and launch a series of personal attacks against the vice president, including suggesting at a national conference of black journalists that Harris had “gone black.”
Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) argued that Trump had “squandered” the goodwill he garnered after the assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania last month.
“There was a lot of sympathy for Trump at home and a big vacuum on the Democratic side. Trump’s popularity was at its peak right before he appeared with Hulk Hogan, followed by his speech at the Republican National Convention, which was one of the biggest missed opportunities in the history of American politics, and it’s all been downhill since,” Curbelo said. “It’s clear that Trump is showing the public that he’s not listening to anyone right now and is struggling to wrap his head around the new realities of the campaign.”
Earlier this month, the Harris campaign launched “Republicans for Harris,” touting endorsements from more than 25 Republicans, including former Trump aides Stephanie Grisham and Olivia Troy, and former Reps. Joe Walsh of Illinois and Susan Molinari of New York.
Haley’s comments on Fox and her criticism of the Trump campaign’s strategy reflect Republican fears about how Harris can win over the Democratic nominee, according to the Haley Voter Working Group, a group made up of Haley supporters who have been in contact with the Biden and Harris campaigns in an effort to win over more Republican voters.
“Ambassador Haley’s condemnation of President Trump’s current ‘strategy’ is a clear signal that Republicans are growing increasingly concerned about their chances of winning the November election. Alarm bells are surely ringing behind closed doors,” said Emily Matthews, a spokeswoman for the group.
Trump, in a conversation with Tesla founder Elon Musk on the social platform X on Monday, focused on issues such as inflation, slammed Harris as a “San Francisco liberal” and cited her record on fracking and police budget cuts.
The former president managed to avoid making inflammatory comments, unlike when he boasted about the attendance at his Jan. 6 rally by comparing it to the number of people attending Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
The Trump campaign defended its strategy, saying it led to “the most overwhelming primary victory in history” and that it remained the same in the general election.
“Not only is Kamala Harris responsible for Joe Biden’s failures, she’s also dangerously liberal. While she hides behind her staff, rolls back long-standing policies and refuses to answer questions about her positions, President Trump has made his platform clear through his ‘Make America Great Again’ and the 2024 Republican Platform to make America rich, strong and safe again,” said Caroline Leavitt, national spokesperson for the Trump campaign.
The Trump campaign has used several opportunities to attack Harris on various policy areas, particularly her work on root relocation issues. In North Carolina, Trump attacked Harris on the economy at a rally in Asheville on Wednesday, blaming her for rising prices and the economic woes of Americans.
But he has mostly portrayed her as a progressive and dangerously liberal, arguing that she is an extension of Biden on issues where she has previously attacked the president.
Meanwhile, Harris leads Trump by one point in battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. From the survey Cook Political Report Swing States Project.
According to The Hill/Decision Desk national polling average, based on 114 polls, Harris holds a 1.4 percentage point lead over Trump nationally.
With Harris closing in on Trump in the polls, some Republicans argue that the problem with the GOP’s strategy is one of discipline, and Trump struggles with discipline.
“Let’s use a college football analogy: It should be as easy to paint a woman of color from California as a crazy liberal as it is for Alabama to play Western Kentucky in its opener,” one former Bush administration aide said, “but executing the game plan requires at least an eighth-grade level of message discipline.”
