No. of Recommendations: 2
They're just grasping for anything.
I think they're grasping...but not just for anything.
After all, they've got lots of policy positions and substantive issues they can attack on. Voters feel more positively about the GOP than Democrats on several salient issues, like the economy and immigration. They could put together some brutal attack ads on those points, if they wanted to. And there's certainly voices in the GOP that are pushing them to do that.
But I think Team Trump knows that's not enough. They know that Trump's said and done stuff that even people who voted for him think are bad. They didn't like the dissing of John McCain, they didn't care for the "grab 'em by the ≽^•༚• ྀི≼ " comment, they didn't like the post-Election denial in 2020, and would really prefer not to vote for a convicted criminal. That's why all the Biden Crime Family stuff was so important to the Trump campaign. It created the context where people could make a choice based on policy, because both candidates were lying criminals - since there's no decent person running, they could vote for the indecent Trump.
That's gone now. They need to find an attack line on Harris that doesn't merely show she's wrong on policy or that her election would have bad outcomes. They need to find something that will convince their marginal voters that Harris is a bad person. The double-haters and reluctant Trump voters need that - they need something that will let them convince themselves that Harris and Trump are cut from the same cloth.
Which is why, I think, GOP internal efforts to persuade Trump to run an issues campaign are unlikely to be successful. They know they have to have this, too. That's why they need the "stolen nomination/coup" or the "dishonest about being Black" or the "stolen valor" or the "CHEATING with AI photos" attack lines to get some traction. They need to give their voters a personal disqualifier so that they'll feel okay voting for Trump again....not just policy differences.
