Sick of this election? That’s just what Donald Trump wants.
With the days ticking down to a precious few, the Trump campaign is making use of every moment to drive their strategy home. But it’s not a traditional “get out the vote” effort. In fact, his team isn’t really interested in bringing voters to the polls.
Back in May, newly anointed, he told Bloomberg Businessweek he would harness “the movement” to challenge Clinton in states Republicans haven’t carried in years: New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Connecticut, California. “I’m going to do phenomenally,” he predicted. Yet neither Trump’s campaign nor the RNC has prioritized registering and mobilizing the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees who are Trump’s most obvious source of new votes, as
Instead, Trump’s campaign—and Trump’s own words—are driving an opposite strategy. A keep the voters disgusted strategy. A keep-away the vote movement.
Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official.
And that strategy has two big tent poles: sexism, and racism.
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The Trump campaign is specifically targeting groups they feel lean toward Clinton, and they’re making sure that the news is kept full of information that discourages those groups of voters.
Why does Trump continually bring up the Trans Pacific Partnership even though Hillary disavowed the deal months ago? Because he wants to keep Sanders voters thinking that Clinton will betray them.
Why does Trump trot out Bill Clinton’s parade of accusers? Not to counter the charges against him, but in hopes that young women will be disgusted enough to just sit the election out.
Bringing up the two decade old speech in which Hillary mentioned the concept of “super predators?” That’s designed to make African-Americans stay home. Trump’s team is pushing particularly hard on that front.
On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”
The Donald Trump campaign is targeting hidden Facebook posts at African-Americans because they “know” it will depress the vote of “these people.”
Donald Trump’s campaign is negative. In every way you can imagine.
