Donald Trump’s re-election campaign has reportedly taken a major step back from advertising following a leadership shake-up and polls that show former Vice President Joe Biden surging.
As NBC News reported, the campaign “virtually disappeared” from airwaves this week, pulling advertising and undergoing a significant re-evaluation of its strategy. That pause comes after campaign manager Brad Parscale was removed from the position, a move that followed a rally in Tulsa that failed to meet attendance expectations and an overall dip in polling for the president.
The report noted that Trump’s re-election effort spent almost nothing on advertising for Wednesday and Thursday, and has nothing booked through the entire month of August, either. The Democratic candidate has been active during that time, spending $3.9 million on ads in the last two days with another $6 million committed through August.
A source told NBC News that the move is somewhat standard given the change in leadership.
“With the leadership change in the campaign, there’s understandably a review and fine-tuning of the campaign’s strategy. We’ll be back on the air shortly, even more forcefully exposing Joe Biden as a puppet of the radical left-wing,” the source said.
The report noted that Trump’s team had been pushing hard on a strategy connecting Biden to efforts to defund police departments, though the former vice president has said he is opposed to such efforts and has not aligned with some of the more vocal members of his party supporting these calls. Trump’s campaign has also been criticized for claims that his Democratic opponent is seeking to “destroy” the suburbs, which critics see as veiled racism.
At the same time, Trump has fallen behind in both national and statewide polls, down 10 points or more in a number of national polls. The campaign has pushed back, saying that this polling does not accurately reflect the race. As The Inquisitr reported earlier this week, one official even dismissed the polling as “junk.”
Hogan Gidley, press secretary for the re-election effort, said in an interview with Fox Business Network that pollsters are deliberately undercounting Republican voters, pushing back when host Dagen McDowell called the excuse a “cop-out.”
“It’s not a cop-out where the numbers bear out the fact that 10 percent more Democrats are surveyed in these polls than there were in 2016,” Gidley said, via The Hill .
“That’s just sheer mathematics. I can’t change that. So they are skewed to the left for sure.”
It was not exactly clear how long Trump’s campaign will stay off the airwaves, and whether it will introduce a new approach or line of attack against his Democratic opponent.
