CMYK
Watertown Daily Times POLITICS
Trump targets 3 Rust Belt states ‘Born to be in it’
2020 STRATEGY:
President playing
defense as he opens
bid for re-election
By MARGARET TALEY, BILL ALLISON
and JENNIFER JACOBS
Bloomberg
WASHINGTON — As his
2020 campaign gears up,
President Donald Trump is
putting an early focus on the
three Rust Belt states that sent
him to the White House after
Republican losses in midterm
elections showed his support
in the region is fading.
Despite dominant fundrais-
ing, an established campaign
organization and the power
of incumbency, Trump risks
losing all three states in 2020:
Michigan, Pennsylvania and
Wisconsin. On Saturday, he
was to hold a campaign rally
in Green Bay, an event timed
to compete for cable-news
eyeballs with the White House
press corps’ annual charity
dinner.
Trump’s interest in the re-
gion is already being matched
by his top Democratic rivals
— former Vice President Joe
Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders
of Vermont — who are putting
their own emphasis on voters
in those areas.
The Trump campaign has
been going out of its way to
defend the territory. Senior
campaign officials traveled
to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,
early in the week to assure state
party officials the president has
a strategy and the organiza-
tion to again win. Trump chose
Grand Rapids, Mich., for his
first rally after Attorney General
William Barr announced that
Special Counsel Robert Mueller
hadn’t found evidence of a con-
spiracy between the president
or his associates and Russians
who interfered in the 2016 elec-
tion, but referred instances of
possible obstruction of justice
to Congress.
The president and his al-
President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden of the White House on Jan. 4.
lies talk optimistically about
expanding the electoral map
to states he lost in 2016, such
as Minnesota and New Hamp-
shire. But his Rust Belt focus
is an acknowledgment that he
may spend much of the 2020
campaign on defense, depend-
ing on the strength and appeal
of his eventual Democratic
challenger.
In Wisconsin, for example,
46 percent of registered voters
surveyed in a Marquette Law
School poll released earlier
this month said they would
definitely vote for someone
other than Trump in 2020.
Just 28 percent of voters said
they would definitely vote for
Trump.
As Trump rallies supporters
in Green Bay, he’ll be able to
tout data showing faster-than-
expected growth in the U.S.
economy. The Commerce De-
partment reported Friday that
gross domestic product rose at
a 3.2 percent annual rate in the
first quarter of 2019. “This is far
above expectations or projec-
tions,” he tweeted in response
to the figures, adding, “MAKE
AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Biden’s entry Thursday into
the field of Democratic hope-
fuls highlighted the president’s
vulnerabilities, even as Trump
moved quickly to try to dimin-
ish him. On Twitter, he ques-
tioned Biden’s intelligence,
dubbed him “Sleepy Joe” and
said that if Biden could survive
a primary against other Demo-
crats’ “sick and demented
ideas,” then “I will see you at
the Starting Gate!”
Biden’s campaign respond-
ed to the tweet Friday in an
email to supporters, calling
it “beneath the office of the
Presidency.” The email said
Democratic ideas aimed to
get the country back on track,
and said that Trump would be
the only person “making this
campaign ‘nasty.’” The email
ended by asking for donations.
Trump doesn’t need to win
all three of the Rust Belt states
to win a second term — pro-
vided he holds all other states
he won in 2016. But he needs
at least one, and he won them
by a scant combined 77,000
votes in 2016 out of nearly 14
million cast in the three states.
Rex Skupien, a realtor in
AL DRAGO/BLOOMBERG
White Cloud, Mich., volun-
teered to staff Trump’s rally in
Grand Rapids in March, man-
ning one of four locations at
the event where supporters
could pick up “Make America
Great Again” hats and other
merchandise. While he was
skeptical of the billionaire de-
veloper in 2016, Skupien said
he’s become a huge fan, do-
nating $305 to Trump’s 2020
campaign so far, mostly in in-
crements of $50 or less.
“President Trump is the
best thing that ever happened
to this country,” Skupien said.
“He’s not a politician. I’m so
sick of career politicians.”
Trump won Brown County,
Wis., which includes Green
Bay, by 13,828 votes over Hill-
ary Clinton. Rep. Mike Galla-
gher, a Republican first elected
in 2016 whose district includes
Green Bay, has steered an inde-
pendent course since coming
to Washington. He criticized
Trump for firing James Comey
from the top job at the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and
voted to overturn the national
emergency Trump declared
over border security.
O’Rourke adjusts
campaign style
COUNTERACTING CRITICISM: Texas Democrat
adds ‘vision,’ attack rhetoric to breezy pitch
By JENNA JOHNSON
Washington Post
As Beto O’Rourke pre-
pared last month to tell the
world that he would run for
president, Vanity Fair un-
veiled its April cover featur-
ing the Democrat from El
Paso, Texas, on a dusty road
with his pickup truck, his dog
and these words: “Man, I’m
just born to be in it.”
In the six weeks since
O’Rourke got in it, the former
congressman has gone from
the buzzy celebrity candidate
— the one trailed by dozens
of journalists, compared to
Barack Obama and photo-
graphed by Annie Leibovitz
— to just another Democrat
in a crowded field, struggling
to stand out as he adjusts his
message of unity to the Dem-
ocratic electorate’s anger
and demands for specifics.
With that magazine still on
the racks, O’Rourke is quickly
learning that this race is not go-
ing to be easy. When he kicked
off his campaign with a rally
in El Paso on March 30, more
than 1,000 supporters in all 50
states hosted watch parties.
Two Saturdays later, the cam-
paign could get only a third of
that number of hosts to orga-
nize door-knocking events.
O’Rourke, 46, has sub-
tly adjusted his campaign
style and tone in ways that
counteract the criticism and
mockery he has faced.
He has stopped jumping
atop counters and chairs
at events, as he did during
the early days of his cam-
paign, gestures that inspired
the Twitter account @Be-
toOnThings and some gentle
ribbing from fellow presiden-
Sunday, April 28, 2019 A5
tial hopeful Pete Buttigieg,
the mayor of South Bend,
Ind. Recently O’Rourke did
step onto a small wooden box
while speaking to hundreds
of University of Virginia
students crowded into an
atrium, but he decided mid-
event to step back down.
O’Rourke has stopped jok-
ing about being an absentee
father and regularly apolo-
gizing for benefiting from
white male privilege. He has
pushed back against asser-
tions that he’s a blank slate
who lacks experience and
has added a “vision” section
to his campaign website that
includes many of his broad
goals, including establishing
a universal health-care sys-
tem, increasing teacher pay,
reducing the cost of higher
education, reforming the
criminal justice system and
combating climate change.
O’Rourke’s handling of ma-
ny Democratic voters’ needs
for a rhetorically different ap-
proach has developed in full
view. In his 2018 U.S. Senate
campaign, O’Rourke favored
a sunny, optimistic pitch, only
rarely castigating his Republi-
can opponent, Sen. Ted Cruz.
He has tried to stay true to
that approach, but he now
calls the president “racist”
and regularly compares him
to Hitler, an escalation of his
prior criticism of Trump and
his administration.
He specifically began to
take aim at Education Sec-
retary Betsy DeVos after
hearing several voters do the
same, including a frustrated
retired educator in North
Carolina who called DeVos “a
lunatic.”