Trump shifts 2020 playbook to Biden, says he’s like Sanders. Will it work?
President Donald Trump and his campaign are rewriting their election-year playbook to shift focus to Joe Biden with tactics that seek to portray the former vice president as a carbon copy of Bernie Sanders.
Now that Biden is leading in Democratic delegates, the Trump campaign plans to move forward with what it has threatened for months — to characterize any Democratic opponent in the presidential race as far-left, regardless of the candidate’s policy proposals.
The Trump campaign is attempting to recast Biden as having radical positions on issues like immigration and abortion, as it has repeatedly done against Sanders, a self-identified democratic socialist.
“Because we don’t know who the President’s opponent will be, we are taking the opportunity to remind voters that Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden agree on most of the major issues in the Democrat primary,” Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said in a statement to McClatchy.
GOP strategists say it will be a tricky maneuver. Biden spent decades in the Senate before becoming vice president. He’s a well-known politician with the backing of the Democratic establishment.
The president’s recent statements about Biden could also prove problematic for the campaign’s efforts. Trump said that Biden is “sort of right down the middle” during a speech to conservatives at the end of February. At a town hall last week, he said Biden and Sanders are “two very different people.”
Those comments from Trump came as his aides began to characterize Biden and Sanders as “two sides of the same extreme coin” on issues that the Republican operatives believe will decide the presidential race.
Trump campaign tweets and videos in the past week have said Biden is in favor of “banning ALL deportations of illegal aliens” and effectively “instituting open borders,” supports ”raising taxes on middle-class American families and workers” and wants to make “American families and workers pay for health care for illegal aliens.”
“If Bernie has been the thought leader, the intellectual leader of the Democratic Party,” said Murtaugh in a Sunday evening call with reporters, “Joe Biden has fallen in line and adopted those positions, because it is the only way to be successful in the Democrat primary in 2020.”
Biden’s campaign disputed those characterizations of the Democrat’s positions but declined to rebut them individually.
Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo said in a statement to McClatchy that the former vice president’s success in places Trump needs to win has led to “desperate smears” that will not work.
“It’s painfully obvious that Donald Trump and his campaign are getting more scared to face Joe Biden by the day. And they should be. We saw huge turnout numbers on Super Tuesday — especially in swing districts — with Biden winning big in the places Trump needs to keep his job,” Ducklo said.
Trump campaign officials have long said they would make the argument that any of the Democratic contenders Trump could face would push the kind of big government policies that conservatives oppose. But they have increased the frequency of their hits on Biden as his polling advantage and performance in battleground states has risen.
Biden achieved double-digit wins in Michigan and Virginia in their Democatic primaries, and he had 856 delegates total as of Wednesday morning.
GOP firm Firehouse Strategies released a survey Monday that showed Biden in a statistical tie with Trump in three critical states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Trump leads by one to two points each, but both candidates’ support is within the poll’s margin of error.
Firehouse Strategies founding partner Alex Conant, an alumni of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said Trump must drive up Biden’s disapproval rating, and the best way to do that is to make Biden seem like his views are outside the mainstream.
“The challenge is Biden is a very known commodity,” Conant told McClatchy. “Most voters have known Joe Biden for a very long time and trying to rebrand him is going to be a challenge.”
Trump has been testing new lines of attack on Biden that are intended to do just that. Last week, he suggested at a bill signing ceremony that Biden would task Beto O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman who recently endorsed Biden for the Democratic nomination, with confiscating Americans’ guns.
“He’s left wing and he’s got all people that are left wing. And in many ways, he’s worse than Bernie,” Trump said of Biden. “Look at what he did with guns; he put Beto in charge of guns. Beto wants to get rid of guns, right? So that’s a bad — that’s a bad stance.”
Biden did say at a March rally that he wanted O’Rourke to “take care of the gun problem” with him and O’Rourke would “be the one who leads this effort,” but neither he nor O’Rourke advocated for a mandatory gun buyback program at the endorsement event. This week, Biden cursed at a man who accused him of wanting to “take away our guns,” telling him he was “full” of it.
Ryan Williams, a vice president at the Republican digital and marketing firm Targeted Victory, said the Trump campaign would be better off branding Biden as “a figure of the past who supported policies that failed,” particularly on the economy.
“Joe Biden certainly has liberal positions on issues, but it’s just not believable to paint him as a socialist like Bernie Sanders,” said Williams, who was a spokesman for Utah Sen. Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
Trump acknowledged at a town hall last week that he would need to adjust his strategy, now that Biden is the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.
The president told a Fox News audience he “was all set for Bernie, because I thought it was going to happen” before the political winds shifted.
“And now all of a sudden I have a whole different — you know, it’s a whole different deal. Two very different people,” Trump said. “I think, in a certain way, Bernie would be tougher because he’s got a base.”
But just a few days earlier at the Conservative Political Action Conference in late February, Trump had called Sanders “Crazy Bernie.” And when it came to Biden, he said, “With Joe, he’s sort of down the middle.”
This story was originally published March 11, 2020 at 12:28 PM.
