Name: Donald Trump is catching Sleepy Joe napping in his election surge
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Donald Trump is catching Sleepy Joe napping in his election surge

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An American election cycle runs for two years, and longer if you count the fundraising run-up. But an doesn’t get going until after the Labor Day holiday on the first Monday in September.The current election cycle has been running for nearly four years – since the morning of 9 November 2016, when a stricken Hillary Clinton conceded to . And it has barely begun. This is why , or at least the handlers who work his Twitter feed and give him his cocoa, should be very worried by the .Donald Trump makes so much noise that we miss the stealthy, subtle moves that count. The two-ring circus is now in town:&nbsp;first submitted to the faux-democratic theater of the televised ‘town hall’, a nightmare out of Norman Rockwell in which pre-selected questions are fended off by pre-prepared answers.The real action is elsewhere. "Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness,"&nbsp;Sun Tzu counsels. As in The Art of War, so in The Art of the Deal. While the Democrats are fighting a chimera, a formless fantasy of their own creation, Trump, the Sun Tzu from Queens, is quietly winning his war.In 2016, the Democrats refused to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s victory. Most of the media felt the same way. The losers of 2016 have remained in campaign mode throughout this term, tracking popularity polls instead of policy moves, and delegitimizing Trump when they might have been addressing the failure of their ground game in a Rust Belt that Hillary Clinton barely visited.Trump has abetted this distraction. He too has remained in campaign mode. Throughout this term, he has continued to hold rallies for the base – as though his power is not constitutional but charismatic, populist not procedural.One result of this is that while Biden’s campaign is trying to gather momentum, team Trump is already running at warp speed. The Covid-19 suspension masked this advantage: for months, neither candidate could meet the voters. But now the mask is off.Last Tuesday alone, Trump talked to Fox News for forty-five minutes, presided over the signing of the Abraham Accords at the White House, and then delivered a series of dramatic monologues for his town hall on ABC.Meanwhile Biden somehow managed to describe the Biden-Harris campaign as the ‘Harris-Biden’ campaign, and responded to a softball question about getting veterans back to work in civilian life with pure gibberish: ‘if you were a quartermaster, you can sure in hell take care runnin’ a, you know, department store, uh, thing, you know, where, in the second floor of the ladies department or whatever, you know what I mean?’The Sun Tzu of Queens is jetting around the Midwest on Air Force One and delivering stand-up routines to thousands. Biden is lost without a teleprompter, but stranded when he has one. His personality, or what remains of it, is his strongest suit, but his team won’t let him near the public. They fear the idiocies that might come out of his mouth, and they fear the virus that might go up his nose.A presidential election is not so much a popularity contest as a war for the Electoral College, fought on the battlegrounds of the swing states. In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote by 780,000 votes but won the Electoral College. The popular vote, whatever the Democrats say, does not decide who wins the White House.Trump took six of the ten most competitive states in 2016. His margins in delegate-rich Pennsylvania and Florida were tight: 1.2 per cent in both. In Michigan, it was tighter still: 0.3 percent. Look at the polls, and Trump is on track to win these states again.In Florida, three polls taken over the last week show that Biden’s lead has shrunk to within the margin of error. A Marist College poll shows Trump and Biden neck and neck on 48 per cent each, and a Florida Atlantic poll has them matched at 50 per cent each.Trump is making inroads into the Latino vote too. At this point in the 2016 campaign, Marist College reported that Hillary Clinton was leading Trump 59 per cent to 36 per cent among Latinos in Miami-Dade County. Marist now places Trump on 47 percent and Biden on 46 percent.Clinton won Florida’s Latino vote by 27 per cent in 2016. Marist reports that Trump has closed that gap to 17 per cent. Trump already leads Biden among white voters.In a state with a high Latino population, many of them Cuban and anti-communist, Trump is opening a new path to victory in November. And not just in Florida: a, a third of Latinos identify as Republican, and Trump’s share of their support is rising in Texas and Arizona too.In Pennsylvania, Biden’s lead is also within the margin of error overall. Since 2016, the Republicans have aggressively built up their voter registration in the state, and have closed the gap to only 150,000. In southwestern Pennsylvania, the Democrats’ war on coal and natural gas is pushing union members, once the backbone of the white working-class vote, into Trump’s camp. In Luzerne County, which voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but Trump in 2016, the Democratic state senator now calls himself an Independent and caucuses with the Republicans.Biden’s lead appears to be greater in Michigan, but,, the Democrats have built no ground game there. And as everyone knows, the polls almost always underrate Trump’s support. If the Democrats are repeating their errors of 2016 in Michigan, they will repeat their failures.argues that if Michigan and Pennsylvania’s black voters had supported Clinton in the way they supported Obama in 2008 and 2012, then she would have won those states. The margin of difference was as small as 5 per cent – and Trump is indubitably more popular with African Americans, especially the under-thirties, than John McCain was in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012.The Democrats have banked that demography is behind them, and that the ‘browning of America’ will grow their coalition. But the Republicans, and Trump in particular, are clearly picking up votes from the diversified electorate. November will be close, but Trump is quietly eroding the Democrats’ traditional base in the crucial states while he loudly dominates the news cycle. And we haven’t even had the yet.Related TopicsThe Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our.You need to be a subscriber to join the conversation. 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An American election cycle runs for two years, and longer if you count the fundraising run-up. But an doesn’t get going until after the Labor Day holiday on the first Monday in September.The current election cycle has been running for nearly four years – since the morning of 9 November 2016, when a stricken Hillary Clinton conceded to . And it has barely begun. This is why , or at least the handlers who work his Twitter feed and give him his cocoa, should be very worried by the .Donald Trump makes so much noise that we miss the stealthy, subtle moves that count. The two-ring circus is now...

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Dominic Green

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Donald Trump is catching Sleepy Joe napping in his election surge

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