| | |  | BY CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO | With help from Renuka Rayasam and Myah Ward TIME MAKES YOU BOLDER — President Donald Trump’s fame was an indispensable element of his political ascent. Four years later, his celebrity helps explain why he’s losing in the polls to Joe Biden. When he first campaigned for the job, and during much of his presidency, Trump’s immense persona allowed him to repudiate most of the norms that constrain ordinary politicians. And it led cable producers and Twitter users to amplify his every word. Now, in the closing weeks of the 2020 campaign, Trump is grappling with the uncomfortable reality that he’s behind. “How do you lose to a guy like this?” he asked at an event earlier today. His sole solution seems to be giving his supporters the thing that worked best for him before: Even more Trump. But this time his celebrity, and obsession with TV and social media, is undermining the more conventional tactics that his hired campaign hands are trying to use to put him into contention. On Monday, Trump’s campaign unveiled a slate of TV ads targeting seniors. Trump won seniors by seven points in 2016, but he’s in a tight race for the cohort with Biden in several recent national polls and in battleground states like Florida, which would represent a death knell for the president’s re-election effort. As Trump recovered from his own bout with the virus, his campaign has reached for ways to close that polling gap with Biden. Trump released a video last week professing his devotion to seniors (“my favorite people in the world!”) and promising free treatments for the virus. “For this one thing, you are vulnerable,” he said, before offering an exceedingly rare acknowledgement. “So am I.” Then Trump seemingly blew it all up. He shared a meme on Twitter on Tuesday that featured Biden’s picture superimposed on an elderly man in a wheelchair inside a nursing home. It included the slogan “Biden for President,” with the “P” crossed out. One of the new Trump ads aimed at seniors quoted Anthony Fauci out of context. When Fauci asked for the ads to be taken down, Trump blasted the nation’s top infectious disease expert, when the campaign’s aim had been to make it seem like the two men were working side by side. These are small things in the catalogue of Trump’s Twitter feed or rally rants, but they underscore why some seniors have turned on him, and how the president’s ads can never drown out the president. Well before Covid-19, Americans over 65 were saying they favored political attributes like “respect,” “civility” and “decency,” said Katie Connolly, a Democratic pollster who worked for Pete Buttigieg’s primary campaign. The events of this summer, including the protests for racial equality, have intensified those feelings among Baby Boomers, she said. So it’s a good thing for his campaign that the president can at least rely on the stabilizing force of his new ad campaign. Not exactly. Since July 28, Biden has a massive advantage over Trump on TV ads narrowly tailored to seniors. His campaign spent roughly $45 million over the fall on broadcast and cable. Trump’s TV spending on seniors was far less. And Trump made up no ground at all this week, according to records maintained by the TV ad tracking firm Advertising Analytics. In fact, he fell further behind. Through mid-day today, beginning Monday, Trump spent nearly $2.7 million on four broadcast ads targeting seniors. Biden has been running seven senior-focused ads on broadcast tallying more than $3.5 million. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Check out this roundtable on policing moderated by POLITICO’s Darius Dixon . Not just because he’s my boss. Reach out at ccadelago@politico.com or rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @ccadelago or @renurayasam.
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Election workers check voting machines for accuracy at the Miami-Dade Election Department headquarters in Doral, Fla. | Getty Images | | | CALIFORNIA’S FALL HARVEST — After assailing Democrats’ ballot-collecting efforts for years, California Republicans have pivoted to a new strategy: If you can’t stop ‘em, join ‘em. The state GOP has installed private ballot boxes in sympathetic venues — including gun shops and churches — with the idea of boosting Republican turnout, Jeremy B. White writes. The boxes drew an immediate cease-and-desist order from the California attorney general and secretary of state, while the dispute has gone national as Trump urged California Republicans to “fight hard” while the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has hinted at its own legal avenues to block them. Democrats say the unauthorized boxes are not only against the law but confuse voters and invite fraud because ballot security can’t be assured. Republicans are using the situation to accuse Democrats of voting rights hypocrisy, saying they are only doing what Democrats perfected en route to sweeping gains in the 2018 midterms — providing a free delivery service to voters.
| | PEACOCK STEAMING — NBC has been rocked by an internal feud over its decision to host a town hall with Trump at 8 p.m. ET tonight, the same time as ABC’s town hall with Biden, a scheduling move that critics contend is a gift to the president after he refused to participate in the debate originally scheduled for tonight, Marc Caputo writes. The internal conflict extends to the highest levels of NBCUniversal, where MSNBC head Phil Griffin strongly disagreed with NBC News President Noah Oppenheim’s decision to unilaterally move forward with the town hall during that time slot, according to three high-ranking sources at the TV media giant. Griffin and Oppenheim have been increasingly at loggerheads over the way the two networks present their news, with MSNBC moving more leftward in its commentary while NBC News tries to maintain a more traditional down-the-middle approach, the sources said. “Each side thinks the other is ruining the other’s brand, and this just ripped it open,” said one of the sources. HARRIS SIDELINED — Sen. Kamala Harris has canceled all campaign travel through this weekend “out of an abundance of caution” after a flight crew member and her communications director tested positive for coronavirus, the Biden campaign announced this morning. Harris, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, has tested negative for coronavirus three times over the past week — including today — the campaign added. “Senator Harris was not in close contact, as defined by the CDC, with either of these individuals during the two days prior to their positive tests; as such, there is no requirement for quarantine,” Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement. Neither of the individuals who tested positive had contact with Harris or former Vice President Joe Biden “or any other staffers since testing positive or in the 48 hours prior to their positive test results,” O’Malley Dillon said. DEMOCRATS RULE THE WAVES — You may have heard, once or a dozen times, that Democratic candidates are raising a heck of a lot of money. Team blue’s online payment processor, ActBlue, processed an astounding $1.5 billion in donations in the last quarter. But what do you do with all of that money once you have it? Morning Score author Zach Montellaro emails us: The entire POLITICO Campaigns team will be up all night picking through FEC reports, with a deadline of midnight tonight for congressional campaigns to file. But some eager candidates were happy to file earlier in the day, giving us an early look of how they’re spending their money. And, if you’re a high-raising Democratic Senate hopeful, the answer to that question is pretty simple: Ads, and a whole lot of them. South Carolina Democrat Jaime Harrison raised a stunning $57.9 million in the quarter — but spent even more than that, dropping $60.1 million on his race against Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. The vast majority of that was spent on advertising, $50.9 million on everything from TV ads to a print ad in a magazine focused on HBCUs. North Carolina Democrat Cal Cunningham, who raised $28.3 million for his race against Sen. Thom Tillis, spent $30.7 million, with $26.3 million of that going toward advertising. Spending a lot of money on digital and TV advertising isn’t a massive surprise for a Senate candidate, but I was taken aback by the proportion of it. With in-person campaigning still largely sporadic (at best) for a lot of candidates, what do you do with the money that would have gone toward, for example, renting event space? Buy more ads, it turns out.
| | Nightly asks you: What’s the one question you would ask President Trump and the one question you would ask Joe Biden? You only get one each. Send us your answers via our form, and we’ll include select responses in Friday’s edition.
| | ZOOMING HEADS — Eugene Daniels, Ryan Lizza, Laura Barrón-López and Elena Schneider are back with a new episode of Four Square, discussing the hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the home stretch of the presidential election and the continuing fight against Covid-19.
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| | | THE OTHER ROSE GARDEN — The new season of The Bachelorette is here — and coronavirus safety is front and center, with contestants tested several times in an isolated bubble. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, health care reporter Dan Diamond breaks down the show’s health protocols and how they stack up against the White House.
| | | | EUROPE’S SECOND WAVE — As Covid cases in the U.S. creep back up, Europe’s numbers continue to go in the wrong direction, too. The latest from our colleagues at POLITICO Europe: — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen walked out of a summit of EU leaders today after finding out that a member of her staff tested positive for Covid-19. As the leaders were discussing Brexit, von der Leyen tweeted, “I have just been informed that a member of my front office has tested positive to Covid-19 this morning.” — London will be placed into the U.K. government’s high alert category for Covid-19 restrictions, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said today. “Tier two” measures include a ban on households mixing indoors, while journeys on public transport will be discouraged. This is one step down from the top tier of restrictions, which forces bars and pubs not serving food to close. — German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the premiers of the country’s 16 federal states agreed on limiting private gatherings to 15 attendees and a curfew for bars and restaurants from 11 p.m. in areas with a weekly rate of more than 35 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
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898,000 The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits, a historically high number and evidence that layoffs remain a hindrance to the economy’s recovery from the pandemic recession that erupted seven months ago. |
| | | WHITEHOUSE V. WHITE HOUSE — Sheldon Whitehouse issued a warning to his Republican colleagues today, as he watched the Senate Judiciary Committee ready Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination for the Senate floor, congressional reporters Burgess Everett and Marianne LeVine write. There will not be two sets of rules for Democratic and Republican Senate majorities, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island vowed; the GOP decision to block President Barack Obama’s nominee in 2016 and approve Trump’s just days before the 2020 election will have consequences, he said. “Don’t think when you have established the rule of ‘because we can,’ that should the shoe be on the other foot, you will have any credibility to come to us and say: ‘Yeah, I know you can do that, but you shouldn’t,’” Whitehouse said. “Your credibility to make that argument at any time in the future will die in this room and on that Senate floor if you continue.” In an interview afterward, Whitehouse called his statement “more or less a preview of coming attractions and work to be done, than it was a threat.”
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