As the Votes Begin to Roll in, Donald Trump Has Already Failed | Opinion

Former President Donald Trump’s primary strategy for defeating Kamala Harris has failed, miserably. And he has no one to blame but himself.
Trump and his team knew from day one that the best path to victory for the deeply unpopular former president, who has never received more than 47 percent of the vote in any election, was not paved by making himself more popular but rather by making Harris less popular.
Defining Harris before she could define herself, and make her deeply unpopular with the public, in the critical weeks that included a debate and Labor Day, when many voters just started to tune into the presidential race, was job number one, two, and three for Trump if he wanted the keys to Air Force One back.
But recent polling from NBC shows how badly Trump has failed at that essential task. The poll found a 16-point rise in Harris’ favorability since July, when she was still President Joe Biden’s running mate. That rise represents the biggest jump in popularity for any major-party presidential candidate in the 35-year history of the NBC News poll.
A double digit rise in popularity in the middle of a heated presidential campaign is simply unheard of. And in a country as deeply divided as ours, where politicians usually rank close to used car salesmen and communicable diseases in terms of popularity, it is truly an amazing feat.
While Harris and her team have run a nearly flawless campaign and deserve a ton of credit, Trump had one job—to define Harris—and he has failed at it. Spectacularly.
If Harris is standing on the West Front of the Capitol on Jan. 20 next year being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, the past 10 weeks, and the inability of Trump and Republicans to drag down her popularity, is going to be a big part of the reason why.
Trump’s failure wasn’t due to a lack of time or resources. He’s had 10 weeks and hundreds of millions of dollars. It was simply the failure of an erratic, narcissistic, lazy, self-destructive candidate whose political powers have always been more mythical than real.
Over the critical 10 weeks between Biden dropping out and early voting starting, Trump has spent more time on his golf courses than in swing states. Spent more time peddling conspiracy theories about people eating dogs than defining Harris. And has wasted his uncanny ability to control news cycles to ramble incoherently about how windmills cause cancer, Hannibal Lecter, relitigate the 2020 election and rant about a series of grievances that even the most religious Fox News watchers have a hard time following rather than drive a clear message against Harris.
There is no more valuable resource than the candidate’s time in a campaign. And in a mind-boggling move, Trump, never one to pass up the opportunity to enrich himself, has diverted his valuable time in these critical weeks to selling watches, crypto coins, shoes, and a coffee table book. While Trump may be laughing all the way to the bank at the gullibility of his supporters to continue to fork over their hard-earned money to his latest scam, Harris and Democrats might get the last laugh at his self-destructive ability to put his own self-indulgence above all else.
With voting starting in many states, the clock has probably run out on Trump and his team to substantially change Harris’s favorability.
So, has Trump squandered his chance at winning the White House?
Far too soon to say that.
But with growing evidence that the Republicans’ traditional Electoral College advantage is shrinking, and with Harris having more cash on hand than Trump, clear momentum, and a better get-out-the-vote organizing army, with just over a month to Election Day, you would rather be her than him.
And if she is victorious in the end, Republicans will look back at Trump’s failure to execute the most basic of strategies over the last 10 weeks as a big reason why.
Doug Gordon is a Democratic strategist and co-founder of UpShift Strategies who has worked on numerous federal, state, and local campaigns and on Capitol Hill. He is on Twitter/X at @dgordon52.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.