Less than five months before voters will decide his fate, President Donald Trump is confronting a vastly different political reality than he once envisioned.
For starters, if the election were held today, he’d likely lose.
The president, West Wing advisers and campaign aides have grown increasingly concerned about his reelection chances as they’ve watched Trump’s standing take a pummeling first on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and now during a nationwide wave of protests against racial injustice.
His allies worry that the president has achieved something that his November foe had so far been unable to do: igniting enthusiasm in a Democratic Party base that has been lukewarm to former Vice President Joe Biden.
Trump was facing tougher political prospects even before the death of George Floyd, the black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee for almost nine minutes into Floyd’s neck last week.
COVID-19’s mounting human and economic tolls — and the president’s defiant response — cost him support among constituencies his campaign believes are key to victory in November. His signature rallies had been frozen for months, and his cash advantage over Biden, while vast, wasn’t growing as quickly as hoped because the pandemic put a halt to high-dollar fundraisers.
Internal campaign surveys and public polling showed a steady erosion in support for Trump among seniors and in battleground states once believed to be leaning decisively in the president’s direction, according to six current and former campaign officials not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.
The campaign recently launched a television ad blitz in Ohio, a state the president carried by 8 percentage points four years ago, and it sees trouble in Arizona and warning signs in once-deep-red Georgia.