Trump’s Non-Campaign Campaign: GOP Field Runs Circles around Former President on the Trail

Donald Trump’s absence at the first GOP primary debate is just the latest example of the former president’s unprecedented refusal to make his case directly to voters.

In the months leading up to debate night in Milwaukee, other contenders have been traversing the early primary states, shaking hands with voters and holding intimate grassroots events. But Trump has held fewer than 40 campaign events since entering the race way back in November, and just 17 of those events have been in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, according to a National Review analysis.

Instead of returning time and time again to woo early primary voters, Trump has attended a sparse number of events spread across seven states: Florida, Texas, Indiana, Georgia, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

By contrast, Trump’s closest competitor, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, has made 78 campaign stops in the early primary states since entering the race six months after Trump, his campaign told NR. Forty-eight of those stops were in Iowa, with another 23 stops in New Hampshire and seven in South Carolina. Since DeSantis entered the race on May 24, Trump has made just nine campaign stops in the early primary states.

“Ron DeSantis will continue to blanket the early states because he knows this nomination must be earned,” DeSantis spokesperson Bryan Griffin said. “He will not be outworked and will put in the effort necessary to win the primary, bring Republicans together, and beat Joe Biden. We cannot afford to do anything less in this election cycle because so much is at stake if the Democrats win.”

While Trump visited the Iowa fair earlier this month, he was the only major candidate who did not accept Governor Kim Reynolds’s invitation to participate in her “fair side” chats. He also chose not to participate in the Des Moines Register soapbox. Other candidates spent entire days at the fair in the sweltering heat participating in Iowa fair traditions, while Trump was in and out in under two hours.

Reynolds told Fox News Sunday that she doesn’t expect Iowans to give Trump a pass for skipping the state-fair events the other candidates participated in. Voters “expect him to be here, they want to interact,” she said.

Former vice president Mike Pence, who entered the race on June 5, has made at least 15 campaign stops in Iowa and more than ten in New Hampshire, according to his campaign.

Chris Christie entered the race one day after Pence and has run a lean, insurgent-style campaign focused almost exclusively on New Hampshire, making six appearances in the state, by NR’s count. Trump, meanwhile, has been to the Granite State only five times since announcing more than six months earlier. Christie also visited New Hampshire twice before officially entering the race and has made one campaign visit to Columbia, S.C., in July.

Senator Tim Scott has held 20 events in Iowa, nine events in New Hampshire, and twelve events in his home state of South Carolina since joining the race in late May, his campaign said.

Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley was the second candidate to enter the race, back in February. She has done 36 grassroots events in Iowa, 45 grassroots events in New Hampshire, and seven rallies in South Carolina, her campaign told NR.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who entered the race shortly after and has been a noted “Energizer bunny” on the campaign trail, appearing at more than 184 events since entering the race in February, days after Haley, his campaign said. One hundred and five of those events have taken place in early primary states.

New Hampshire political analyst Scott Spradling told me it is “extremely important” for candidates to be on the ground and meeting voters. Voters know Trump is capable of delivering raucous rallies for his die-hard supporters, but that doesn’t prove to undecided voters that he’s capable of engaging one-on-one and responding to tough questions, Spradling said.

“I think that the skipping of certain things, he’s got a base that with a large field will help him. But as the field dwindles, it may hurt him in the long run,” he said. “He can actually get away with skipping a debate and it’s not going to affect his poll numbers any. But the farther we go into this process, the higher the stakes will become and the harder it’s going to be for him to be successful, to actually win in November, versus winning in one state in the spring.”

While the non-Trump candidates have held numerous intimate town-hall style events, Trump’s lighter campaign schedule includes participation in two televised town halls, appearances at several private local GOP events, including the South Carolina Republican Party’s Silver Elephant Dinner and the Federation of Republican Women Lilac Luncheon, as well as several of the massive rallies that he has become known for, including in Pickens, S.C., and Council Bluffs, Iowa.

During a swing through Iowa ahead of his scheduled town hall with Fox News, Trump did make an appearance at a packed local restaurant, the Machine Shed. His first two campaign events in January were to a small crowd at the New Hampshire Republican Party’s annual meeting and an event with about 200 people in the South Carolina state capitol building alongside Governor Henry McMaster and Senator Lindsey Graham.

Local officials and strategists I spoke to in Iowa and New Hampshire stressed the importance of meeting face-to-face with voters in the early primary states, but were mixed on whether the requirement is as important for Trump, who already has sky-high name recognition.

Iowa senate president Amy Sinclair, who has endorsed DeSantis in the race, told me she believes Trump’s “absence in Iowa and his strange attacks on our wildly popular governor” have already hurt him in the polls.

While a new Des Moines Register and NBC News poll found Trump holds a 20-plus-point lead over DeSantis, Sinclair said the more interesting story told by the poll is that Trump, a former president with significant name ID and media attention, is only polling at 42 percent in Iowa. Additionally, when respondents were asked to name candidates they are “actively” considering, the race tightens between Trump and DeSantis; 63 percent of caucus-goers are considering Trump as a first or second choice while 61 percent say the same for DeSantis.

“I think it’s directly related to the fact that he’s really not doing the hard work. And in fact, he’s doing the opposite in attacking the governor of the state,” she said.

Trump may have the highest poll rating now, but Sinclair notes that “he’s the former president and he was a very popular choice here in Iowa.”

“But his approval ratings are declining here, and I don’t think that bodes well for him. I think it points a lot to the fact that he is not engaging with the voters like he should be,” she said.

“He was fairly famous before he ran for president the first time, and so even the first time around in 2016, he campaigned differently than other people. But that doesn’t give him a pass on not coming to Iowa and meeting with people who might be undecided,” she said.

Gloria Mazza, the chairwoman of the Polk County GOP, said more than half of Republican Iowans can still be persuaded.

“Over half the voters, they’re still looking and . . . a lot won’t commit until right before caucus time,” she said. “They’re going to see everybody and hear everybody, and they expect [in small towns] . . . to go to the coffee shops and sit down with them to meet the farmers where they’re at, it all happens that way.”

Iowa voters expect to be able to look candidates in the eye and ask tough questions, she said.

It’s too soon to predict whether Trump’s lack of campaigning will hurt him because he’s such an anomaly as a celebrity-turned-president-turned-former-president running for office, Mazza said. “He already has a record, people know him. It’s not like some of these new names that we’re just getting to know. So there’s a whole different way that I think that he probably needs to campaign.”

New Hampshire state representative James Spillane, who endorsed Trump early only to switch to DeSantis, was also skeptical that Trump could be harmed by staying off the campaign trail.

“It’s really an important way for the people here to get to know who a candidate is,” he said of campaign events in the Granite State. “There’s a saying that people in New Hampshire expect to meet and shake the hands of the candidates twice before they’ve made up their mind to vote. And it’s kind of true.”

But he suggested Trump is “basically immune” from holding intimate grassroots events at this point.

“Nobody expects him to come to a small venue, and if he tried, he would bring too big of a crowd,” he said. “So he’s the exception to the rule. Everyone else you see from Vivek Ramaswamy to DeSantis to Tim Scott, they’re all hitting the small venues.”

More than hurting Trump directly with core supporters, the former president’s failure to work those smaller rooms may instead simply give the rest of the field a much-needed leg up, Spillane said.

“We’re used to being invited to pop into someplace like Murphy’s Diner for breakfast or what have you and meet the candidate there,” he added. “Or to be invited over to a neighbor’s living room where he’s got the candidate speaking with 20, 30 people there. So it’s very important for them to get the close-up. Feeling like it’s a one-on-one discussion where they can ask anything and not like it’s just a theatrical show being put on on a stage.”

Spillane was one of the first New Hampshire lawmakers to endorse Trump this cycle, but ultimately flipped his support to DeSantis after being put off by Trump’s attacks on Kayleigh McEnany.

“I had hoped, I had great hopes that in the intervening years since the last election that Trump had learned to ignore the small slights and things that he felt he was getting and just be bigger about the whole thing. And unfortunately, that wasn’t true.”

He said he was ultimately vindicated when Trump later attacked Iowa governor Kim Reynolds.

Joe Lakin, a senior consultant with Victory Enterprises, which has extensive involvement in Iowa, said history suggests there is a “direct correlation between the amount of work people put into the state, in terms of grassroots and retail politicking,” and the outcome on caucus night.

“I think the Trump campaign has a tough decision to make,” he said. “Again, historically, retail politics has been rewarded, and when you’re the front-runner, it is certainly a situation where you do not want to engage in strategies that create risk and can negatively impact your front-runner status. So, I think it remains to be seen.”

With a former president running in a crowded primary, it’s “uncharted territory for finding a playbook,” he said, but suggested there is a risk in “not engaging in the traditional retail politics that these states have grown to expect from candidates, even for a former president.”

Zach Kessel contributed to reporting.

Around NR

• New reporting from me yesterday reveals that Vivek Ramaswamy paid a Wikipedia editor to remove information about his close relationship with a scientist who helped pioneer mRNA vaccines. The edits came just days before he announced his presidential bid, suggesting Ramaswamy believed the association with technology that was ultimately used to create the Covid-19 vaccines could be a detriment to his campaign. More here.

• Jeffrey Blehar writes about Trump’s “low frequency” campaign and argues that it is in fact a “perfectly intelligent, sound strategy” for Trump to skip the debates:

Trump is playing a “prevent defense” for at least one manifestly obvious reason: because he is, at this point, lapping the field in all polls. He instead campaigns through a series of steadily paced public appearances — rallies, dinner speeches, convention appearances and the like — that give his campaign a leisurely pace compared with the hyperactivity of his rivals. He has this luxury, because his rivals have to both introduce themselves nationally and statewide and then make a case against the ex-president. He merely has to go out there and shore up his brand in a few key states by showing the colors for an hour and a half at a time. Since it would be political malpractice for him to do otherwise, at least until his numbers show some sign of dipping, it can hardly be surprising that he has chosen to run his campaign this way.

• Zach Kessel weighs the pros and cons of a hypothetical presidential run by Glenn Youngkin after recent reporting indicated several big-money GOP donors are looking toward the Virginia governor absent another viable alternative to Trump in the race:

It’s understandable for donors to be scrambling. Trump’s lead has only increased since DeSantis officially jumped into the race, and it doesn’t look like any candidate already in the primary field is going to cut into his numbers. Donors’ personal feelings about Trump aside, the appeal of a Youngkin run is electability: A Virginia Commonwealth University poll has the governor beating President Biden in a head-to-head matchup in his state, which would make the road to 270 much easier to travel for Republicans in 2024. But whether Youngkin is a viable candidate for the anti-Trump faction of the party is unclear, as is whether running now would be the smartest path for his still-young political career.

• Rich Lowry argues that while national polling indicates the presidential race is over, “the game is still afoot in Iowa”:

Both DeSantis and Scott have big chunks of the electorate saying they are their second choice or that they are actively considering them. Both also have high favorable ratings comparable to Trump’s. It’s a major advantage for Trump that two-thirds of his vote is locked in, but about a third is persuadable.

• Trump’s absence at the debate offers the other candidates the chance to shine — but only if they can overcome their unwillingness to attack the front-runner, Bobby Miller writes:

With the upcoming event now also at risk of being upstaged by the Donald’s latest theatrics, the other candidates must quickly drop their reluctance to disparage him. This debate presents the rest of the field with a golden opportunity. With Trump not there, the candidates present on stage can highlight his cowardice in refusing to make an appearance and focus on the issues that affect voters most, proving themselves worthy of the most powerful job in the world. Let’s hope they seize the moment instead of hiding in the shadow of the man they seek to dethrone.

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