President Trump is set to resume campaign events starting with a rally in Tulsa Oklahoma. Politico. The event is on June 19th and will be followed by events in Florida, Texas, Arizona and then North Carolina. The President's rallies have been put on hold due to Coronavirus and he has not held a major event since March 2nd. It is unclear what safety measures the campaign will take to prevent the spread of the disease. Trump could face criticism for these events due to the virus but the attack will likely ring hollow after Democrats supported the large scale riots and protests that happened after the death of the George Floyd. This strategy will be different than Joe Biden's, who has largely stayed in the basement of his home in Delaware.
My Comment:
This is the right move for President Trump. Trump's rallies have always been popular and will help him in his fight against Joe Biden. It also lets President Trump set the agenda for the country and not be as reactive to events as he has been lately.
Trump has recently been cut off from getting his ideas out there, other than via Twitter. The rallies he used to do helped with that a lot and at least during the pandemic he had his briefings, but since then he hasn't had much of a chance to do so. The media, obsessed with the protests and riots, have not given the President an opportunity to put his point of view out there.
I do have to wonder about the locations President Trump is choosing. I don't really consider any of the states to be serious swing states and Oklahoma is especially baffling, I'd expect California to go red long before Oklahoma would go blue. Arizona, Florida and North Carolina are a bit more up in the air but not as much as the Midwestern states. Still, it's fairly early and I am guessing President Trump will be able to hit those states soon as well.
As for safety, I am not sure what will happen. The virus seems to be in retreat and less dangerous than it once was so I think it's probably safer to allow the rallies now. And I am guessing that there will be things like required facemasks and/or people taking temperatures at the rally.
Regardless, it's very obvious that the Democrats don't have a leg to stand on if they try and criticize this. They have been rioting and protesting for a couple weeks now with little to no regard due to the threat the Coronavirus poses. If they can hold political rallies (now with extra violence and looting!) then the President can hold his totally peaceful events.
However, I'm not sure that the rallies will remain peaceful. Terror groups like Antifa have been emboldened by the lack of response to their violence and they have attacked President Trump's events in the past. Trump has taken action against them and they seem to have expended most of their resources, but I'm not sure that these rallies won't be attacked. Perhaps that is why President Trump chose the states he chose?
I think that these rallies will give President Trump a huge advantage over Joe Biden. It seems like a lifetime ago but it's important to note that Biden was falling apart before the virus hit. His last major story was him getting into an argument with a union member over gun rights. He's easy to anger, stumbles on his words and generally doesn't seem to understand what's going on.
Biden's camp seems to now be adapting the strategy of keeping Biden out of the news at all costs. They want people to vote for a generic Democrat not Biden himself. This is a bad strategy as it allows President Trump to control the national discussion, but with Biden's obvious mental decline, they don't seem to have much of a choice.
Will Trump's rallies help him in the polling? In theory they should for the reasons I listed above, but it's also very clear that we are in the "push poll" phase of the campaign. The polls that have been released in the past few days have been utterly biased against he president in terms of demographics surveyed. For example the CNN poll massively oversampled non-whites and Democrats, which explains why he's been doing badly in polling lately. A more reliable polling firm, Rasmussen, showed a slight drop in approval over the last few days but nothing near what the other polling companies are showing.
I think that the dip isn't even real even in that polling. Given how insane the left has gotten and how shrill and aggressive they have been it would not be surprising the "shy tory" syndrome that happened in 2016. If people are getting fired and canceled for not supporting idiocy like Black Lives Matter, than it's no surprise that people are less likely to admit to pollsters that they support President Trump.
Finally, I think that President Trump starting his rallies again will be a morale booster. It should be for everyone, but with the way the Democrats are acting, it probably won't be for them. Either way, it will be a return to normalcy for Americans to see something as normal as a peaceful political rally...
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