Donald Trump's 2024 Campaign Now Has What It Lacked in 2020

The stage certainly appears to be set for former president Donald Trump to sweep New Hampshire and the rest of the GOP primary. All signs from polling indicate that Ron DeSantis voters are most likely to swing over to Trump, leaving Nikki Haley at or near her ceiling in the polls - and possibly in the returns.

Trump has the benefits of de facto incumbency, popularity among the Republican base, and a slew of partisan prosecutors indicting him and giving credence to the idea of a weaponized justice system. These are all factors that have certainly endeared Trump to his base voters, and to a large chunk of Republican base voters as well. However, that does not appear to be all there is to bring Trump to new highs in the polling - both in the primary and in the general election.

For a while, I've suspected that Trump polled high because voters assumed he was inevitable. It wasn't a huge percentage of voters who believed this - maybe 6-9 percent of the total Republican voters who were being polled. I think, though, that there is more to it. A "sense of inevitability" doesn't explain why powerful (and popular) Iowa figures like Kim Reynolds and Bob Vander Plaats couldn't get conservatives and evangelicals to rally around DeSantis instead of Trump. However, there is an explanation that does explain things a little more clearly.

After the 2020 election, I wrote that one of Trump's biggest campaign flaws was that he couldn't stay on message to save his life... well, to save his campaign, anyway.

For starters, Trump was undisciplined when it came to messaging. He was seen as weak on the handling of COVID-19, but strong on the economy. Instead of focusing exclusively on the latter, he kept attacking the former. He would respond to anyone and everyone who criticized him on the handling of the virus, get into his usual petty squabbles quite publicly, address the economy in sporadic and inconsistent ways, and did not really seem to get how bad the virus was in some areas of the country.
Because he couldn’t stick to his strongest message in a consistent way, Trump opened the door for Biden to hit him where he was weakest.

READ MORE: Why Donald Trump Lost

Yes, COVID-19 and the economic shutdown did massive damage to Trump, but the fact that he couldn't get his own message out there hurt him. A lot. But now, nearly four years later, he is doing way better at staying on message, and his campaign is doing a better job of making the ads fit the right message.

POLITICO has a breakdown of this in its morning newsletter.

An underappreciated feature of Trump’s strength against Haley in New Hampshire is that Trump has run a far more issues-based campaign than she has.
While Trump’s personal insults and off-the-wall comments attract most of the media attention, Trump’s TV advertising over the last few days has been highly disciplined.
It focuses on just two issues: immigration, hitting Haley from the right with specific references to unpopular (in a GOP primary) things she’s said, and Social Security, attacking her from the left by claiming she will raise the retirement age and gut benefits. Haley’s ads, meanwhile, are about electability, general exhaustion with Trump and Biden, and generational change.
The experience of watching the evening news goes something like this: three positive Haley ads in which you learn she’s a fresh face but almost nothing about her policy positions, followed by two Trump attack ads that are purely about her policy positions. In his prepared remarks at his rallies, he hammers these same two issues early, generally before he goes off on the more colorful tangents that get so much attention. The Trump onslaught has defined Haley in ways she never did herself.

Now, this is messaging for a primary rather than a general election, and we have yet to see what, if anything, Trump has learned from 2020 (other than the belief that it was stolen). But the current issues-based strategy is working for him.

Anecdotally, I notice this bleeding through even in his speeches. A friend texted me the other night saying Trump was going on about "de-banking" and "electric cars." This may not mean very much to the moderate/undecided voters, and it may not mean much to general election voters, but it means a hell of a lot to conservatives right now, who are reminded that Trump ran as a fighter and a man who wants to burn the current system down.

If Trump's team, which seems to be handling both the campaign and the candidate well, can keep the Trump Train on the track, then that polling showing Trump beating Joe Biden in November might come to pass. A lot of things can change between now and then, but things are increasingly looking good for Trump and bad for Biden.