Dan Eberhart, a pro-Trump donor who recently gave $100,000 to the Trump Victory, the main fundraising committee funding the president’s reelection, was candid about the limits of Trumpism in 2020.
“The usual bag of tricks did not work in the 2018 midterms, and Trump needs to not forget that,” he said.
He said there is “a complete rethink” among Republicans about the campaign strategy that is “absolutely needed and hopefully in the nick of time.”
Trump’s misunderstanding of what got him elected in 2016 is at the heart of the problem, Eberhart argued.
“Trump’s general ability to just feed the base three times over and that will carry you to victory is not really a recipe for success,” he said. “The base is high 30s and that won Trump the primary but he largely won the general election because Hillary was so unpopular. And Biden’s negatives are not as high as Hillary’s so there’s a big problem.”
Not only is Biden an elusive target but there are other problems as well. Eberhart rattled them off: Trump no longer had a financial edge over Biden, voters who want Trump out are more enthusiastic than Trump supporters, and the strategy by some Republicans to assume that the polls were wrong in 2016 and will be wrong this year is “doomed to fail." And that’s all before the obvious impact of the pandemic and the recession.
“His confidence is clearly shaken,” Eberhart said.
He added, “As a Trump donor and Trump supporter, I would hope that he’s paying attention to the soft center and how to get persuadables over to his side rather than just stoking the fires,” he said. “I don’t think this kind of law-and-order culture war, like the Mount Rushmore speech — I don’t think that’s getting him 51 percent at all.”