Raw Story

The Trump campaign is trying to learn from its mistakes in 2020, according to a new report by The New York Times — specifically, they want to stop accidentally pushing Democrats to the polls.

"The Trump officials ... said they had learned from mistakes of the last cycle," reported Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Shane Goldmacher. "One of Mr. Trump’s 2024 advisers said that the 2020 campaign had poorly anticipated which voters were actually persuadable, only to learn that as many as 80 percent of the people it believed could be swayed were actually hardened partisans, which led to costly wasted efforts. In some cases, the Trump campaign wound up driving Biden supporters to the polls, officials said."

Democratic in-person outreach operations were significantly reduced in the 2020 election, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The Trump team told The Times they are confident that, despite the recent downturn in polls since Vice President Kamala Harris took over as Democratic nominee, they still have the clearer path to win, specifically by flipping Pennsylvania and either Georgia or a combination of Arizona and Nevada. All of these states remain toss-ups in polling despite Democratic gains in recent weeks.

Above all, Trump's pollster Tony Fabrizio said Harris “has gotten the equivalent of the largest in-kind contribution of free media I think I have ever seen in all the years I’ve been doing presidential campaigns — and I’ve been doing it a long time — and even with that, we still have the advantage in the Electoral College.”

While the Trump campaign is vowing to better target voter outreach, the priority seems to be election monitoring; the campaign has also moved to recruit as many as 100,000 "poll watchers," which observers fear will be used to try to find pretexts to challenge the election in any battleground state Trump loses in November.

A state lawmaker in California is ditching the Democratic Party — after becoming the first Democrat to win her district in decades — and heading to the GOP, and revealed to a newspaper's editorial board what she called the "last straw."

State Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil was elected two years ago to represent the following counties: Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, Mono, Nevada, Placer, Stanislaus and Tuolumne.

Marcos Bretón, of The Sacramento Bee's editorial board, noted that while the switch would be "notable" in other states, it's "highly unusual" in California.

“This wasn’t a discussion I took lightly, but there was a last straw,” Alvarado-Gill told the Bee. “For me, the last straw was the Proposition 47 shenanigans, the ‘poison pill’ amendments.”

Read also: As LGBTQ library material comes under fire, California may ban book bans

Voters approved Prop. 47 a decade ago to reduce penalties for certain property crimes. Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Democrats in the state government unsuccessfully attempted to scuttle reform to the initiative in June.

"A law-and-order package of bills, including from Alvarado-Gil, were hijacked and loaded with amendments — ‘poison pills’ — that would have killed the bills if voters passed a Prop. 47 reform initiative in November," Bretón said.

Alvarado-Gil said Newsom was "very aggressive" in getting his party to "fall in line." She was among a few who refused.

"I was vocal about it...So I sat with that for a little while. The consideration of separating myself from the majority party, their tactics and a misalignment of our values has been percolating for some time," she said.

Former President Donald Trump's bizarre press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday was a desperate attempt to force the media's focus off Vice President Kamala Harris and back onto himself, argued former Trump administration communications official Alyssa Farah Griffin on CNN.

The problem is, she added, it wasn't the kind of attention that benefits him.

"We've seen Trump do this before, arrange a news conference when he doesn't like the way the news cycle is going," said anchor Kaitlan Collins. "But he is very clearly trying to get it back now from Harris, from her crowd sizes, from the momentum she's seeing. He was claiming there's only 1,500 people at her rally. It was closer to 15,000. What did you see in that press conference today?"

"I mean, it was an absolute dumpster fire of a press conference," said Griffin. "I don't know how you could frame it any other way."

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"He does feel like the focus is not on him," Griffin agreed. "She's getting a lot of attention and he's kind of getting into 'I alone can fix it' mode. I don't think advisers would have told him that 90 minutes of ranting and raving and re-litigating the former election is a useful way to be campaigning, but he did what he's going to do. He had shouted some of his greatest hits."

As for why he has been oddly absent from the campaign trail lately, Griffin continued, "I think that there is something to the fact that the last time he was in a battleground state was in Georgia. He went after the popular governor and his wife. That's not helpful in a swing state. So I think advisers are thinking, maybe have him do these interviews with influencers, maybe have him call into Fox News, but figure out, until he can hone a message and have some level of discipline, having him out there actually isn't that helpful."

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Talk show host and Republican insider Erick Erickson on Tuesday seemingly tried to sow division among Democrats after Vice President Kamala Harris passed over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to be her running mate.

"No Jews allowed at the top of the Democratic Party," Erickson wrote on Twitter on Tuesday morning.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader who happens to be Jewish, sent out a three-word response to Erickson's tweet: "News to me."

Schumer was the most high-profile critic to respond to Erickson, but far from the only one.

"Stop," wrote journalist Ron Fournier. "The top of the ticket is a Black-Asian nominee married to a Jew. She picked who she wanted to pick."

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Others noted that Erickson's criticism of the Democrats was ironic given that neither former President Donald Trump nor Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) are Jewish.

"Ah yes. JD Vance and Donald Trump are a regular klezmer band," wrote former Apple product designer and current entrepreneur Matty Gregg.

"Yes, I went to both JD Vance and Donald Trump's bar mitzvahs," cracked the Christian nationalist parody account Betty Bowers.

"Doug Emhoff is Jewish," noted Business Insider reporter Bryan Metzger. "Chuck Schumer is Jewish. There are 4 Jewish governors, all of whom are Democrats. Of the 35 Jewish members of Congress, just 2 are Republicans."

"Name the current Republican Jewish Governors," challenged Michigan State Sen. Jeremy Moss. "Name the current Republican Jewish US Senators. Don’t strain too hard to look them up. Despite the gaslighting, the overwhelming majority of Jewish voters are part of a liberal voting bloc."

Call it the Kamabla conundrum.

Former President Donald Trump's failed attempts to dub Vice President Kamala Harris with a snarky moniker spell trouble for the Republican nominee's political campaign, legal experts say.

"'Kamabla' is almost certainly a wild swing that won't connect," Andrew Wroe, senior lecturer in American politics at University of Kent, in England, told Newsweek Tuesday. "It's just not clear what it means."

Wroe praised Trump's past ability to dub his political opponents with nasty nicknames that stuck, such as "Crooked Hillary" and "Little Marco." But he threw his hands up in the air when it came to "Laffin' Kamala."

"Trump is a master of identifying an opponent's key weakness and capturing it in a pithy and derogatory nickname," Wroe said. "Trump's efforts to land a similar punch on Kamala Harris have so far failed, despite trying many different combinations."

Trump's inability to land a nickname for Harris suggests a bigger problem with his presidential reelection campaign and its inability to pivot after President Joe Biden decided to step aside, Wroe argued.

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"He knew Biden's weaknesses, as did the wider electorate, and 'Sleepy Joe' was one of his greatest punches," Wroe said. "He wishes Biden was his opponent and is struggling to refocus his campaign on Kamala Harris."

Political scientist Thomas Gift agreed 'Kamabla' and 'Kamala Crash' have yet to do the work Trump needs them to do.

"Trump's difficulty in smearing Kamala Harris with a nickname is a lot like his campaign at the moment," Gift told Newsweek. "It's throwing things at the wall, but nothing seems to be sticking."

Meanwhile, Harris' running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) appears to have earned his position on the ticket thanks in part to his own deft political messaging, reports show.

Democrats across the nation echo the now-viral speech in which the midwestern former school teacher likened Trump and the MAGA right to name-calling bullies.

"These guys are just weird, that's who they are," Walz said. "We're not afraid of weird people. We're a little bit creeped out, but we're not afraid."

Dozens of House Democrats on Tuesday called on the president of the Heritage Foundation to disclose the details of Project 2025's so-called "Fourth Pillar," a section of the far-right agenda that has been kept under wraps as Republican nominee Donald Trump attempts—unconvincingly—to distance himself from the unpopular project.

In a letter to Roberts, Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and 36 other congressional Democrats highlighted the "glaring problem" that Project 2025's Fourth Pillar "remains shrouded in secrecy" despite organizers' pledge to be "an open book" about their agenda.

"You have conspicuously declined to publish or disclose any of the prioritized early actions that we believe would obviously be the most important parts of Project 2025," the Democrats wrote. "The immediate executive orders, emergency declarations, presidential directives, and other measures are likely to have profound impacts on the American people and their government. Therefore, we believe it is overwhelmingly in the public interest for you to actually keep your 'open book' promise by disclosing the 'Fourth Pillar' of Project 2025, and we hope you'll consider explaining why, unlike the first three pillars, you have been keeping it secret for so long."

"If the published part of your 'second American revolution' is so extreme that it has alarmed millions of Americans, including many conservatives, what additional controversy are you worried about?"

The lawmakers urged Kevin Roberts, who recently suggested bloodshed could follow if the left refuses to capitulate to Trump and his far-right movement, to meet with members of Congress on Capitol Hill to discuss the Fourth Pillar and other elements of the Project 2025 agenda.

"You have intimated that the reason for keeping this 'Fourth Pillar' of Project 2025 secret is that it is too controversial for the public to see. With all due respect, if the published part of your 'second American revolution' is so extreme that it has alarmed millions of Americans, including many conservatives, what additional controversy are you worried about?" the House Democrats asked. "It is time to stop hiding the ball on what we are concerned could very well be the most radical, extreme, and dangerous parts of Project 2025."

Project 2025's website provides a brief summary characterizing the Fourth Pillar as "our 180-day Transition Playbook" that "includes a comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency."

Spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 was crafted with the help of around 110 conservative groups and at least 140 former Trump administration officials, and its authors have released a 922-page agenda outlining their sweeping plans to gut worker protections and climate regulations, accelerate Medicare privatization, abolish the Department of Education, and much more.

Survey data shows the project, which has become a focal point for Democrats ahead of the November election, has become increasingly unpopular as more and more Americans are informed about its far-right policy proposals.

In June, as Common Dreamsreported, Huffman and other congressional Democrats launched the Stop Project 2025 Task Force in an attempt to counter "this right-wing plot to undermine democracy."

"We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it's too late," Huffman said at the time.

Trump, meanwhile, recently claimed he knows "nothing" about Project 2025, a statement one of his former advisers called "totally false."

One of the key architects of Project 2025, Russell Vought, served as head of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump and is "likely in line for high-ranking post" if the former president wins another White House term, according toThe Associated Press. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump's running mate, praised Roberts in what The Guardiancharacterized as a "glowing forward" to the Heritage Foundation president's soon-to-be-published book.

Despite public efforts by the Trump campaign to distance itself from Project 2025—and vice versa—analysts at Center for American Progress Action noted last week that there is significant "overlap" between Project 2025 and Trump's 2024 campaign platform.

"In fact, President Trump already attempted to implement key policy components of Project 2025 during his first term, with varying degrees of success," the analysis wrote. "Project 2025 was designed to remove the guardrails that prevented President Trump from enacting his baser instincts and priorities in his first term."