WASHINGTON -- Buoyed by his impeachment acquittal and the Iowa caucus problems in the Democratic primary race, President Donald Trump and his campaign are turning to an effort to win back suburban voters.
His campaign is aiming to regain these voters in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, after losing many of them to Democrats in the 2018 midterms. Advisers hope to expand the electoral map for November by winning moderate-leaning states like Minnesota and New Hampshire. And the White House is gearing up to help with policy issues directed at swing states, such as the new trade deal with Mexico and Canada and paid family leave for federal workers.
Trump campaign officials also are stockpiling cash to help with these efforts, with $200 million in the bank now and fundraising continuing. They have put up television ads relatively early in the race, allocating $6 million for the final three months of 2019 to highlight a booming economy and the low unemployment numbers.
Among the goals is trying to appeal to black voters and suburban and upper-income white voters with ads such as a spot focusing on criminal-justice reform that first aired during the Super Bowl and is continuing on cable channels with large female audiences, like Bravo and Lifetime.
The ad showed Alice Marie Johnson, a 64-year-old black woman from Mississippi who was freed after Trump commuted her prison sentence for a nonviolent drug offense. She is seen in the ad hugging her family and friends, thanking Trump and declaring, "Hallelujah!"
Republicans are eager to echo Trump as they try to chip into Democratic strongholds throughout the South and Midwest. Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, a Trump ally who is running for reelection this year, said Trump's emphasis on criminal justice and stoking economic opportunity for minority communities "sure does" help his own Senate campaign in a state where black and Hispanic voters are pivotal.
"We've got [historically black colleges and universities], we've got criminal-justice reform, we've got the economy going," Perdue said, arguing that Trump has been the best president for the black community since Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s.
Besides appealing to moderates, the campaign is engaging the president's supporters with Facebook ads decrying "the impeachment hoax," while also promoting curtailing immigration.
Trump cannot win a second term without attracting more suburban voters and independents in a handful of states he carried in 2016, his advisers believe, arguing that the suburban voters who eschewed Republicans in the 2018 midterms will vote differently when the president's name is on the ballot.
"Suburban women is where he has a challenge," said Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D.
"I think the biggest problem that he has with suburban women is the part that so many in his base like about him," Cramer said. "His rhetoric, his punching down at his opponents. It's so different than anything they've seen."
Republican National Committee officials are tracking the suburban problem. In 2016, about 100,000 Michigan residents who voted in state legislative races left the box for president empty. Many of those voters were men in the suburbs, Republican officials said, and were people who didn't believe Trump was truly a conservative, but who have come back after seeing him deliver on conservative judicial appointments and a tax-cut bill.
But suburban women remain difficult to sway, Trump advisers acknowledge, but when Trump talks about Democrats wanting to provide government health care benefits to people illegally in the country, for instance, Republican officials have seen an uptick of support in their own surveys of the suburbs of Pennsylvania.
"We don't have a Democratic opponent yet," said Cramer. "It's always harder to run against the unnamed opponent. Once you have the opponent, you get to draw the distinctions."
And Trump faces an unknown in Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire former New York City mayor running a general election strategy, who is spending so much money that Trump's advisers acknowledged that he cannot be ignored even if Bloomberg loses the Democratic nomination.
Interviews with more than a dozen Republican strategists, lawmakers and state chairmen reveal a consensus that Sen. Bernie Sanders would be the easiest Democrat for them to beat because they believe his avowed socialism would help them reclaim suburbanites and better frame the election as a choice.
"It's easy to call him a socialist because he admits it," said Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor.
Sanders' aides, of course, see it very differently and believe that they would tear up Trump's 2016 electoral map by reclaiming working-class white voters in states like Michigan and Wisconsin, something some Trump advisers agree with. And Trump advisers have been caught by surprise by the success of Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind.
Trump advisers are focused not just on the three states that elected Trump in 2016 -- Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania -- but also the forever battleground of Florida, and battleground states with competitive Senate races that could help the Democratic nominee in Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina.
The campaign also sees opportunities for pickups in New Hampshire and especially in Minnesota, states that have voted for Democrats in recent presidential races but where the margins were close in 2016.
But while the campaign manager Brad Parscale has insisted New Mexico is within reach, other Trump advisers say there's been little movement.
In an interview, Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said Republicans have the resources to appeal to various groups of voters. "That gives us an advantage to focus on the rural vote that we need to turn out, but then also go after places where we've lost voters to bring them back in," she said. And Tim Murtaugh, a campaign spokesman, said they had always planned to woo various demographics, "regardless of what Democrats in Congress were trying to do to him."
The administration is pulling out the policy stops. Vice President Mike Pence has recently made stops and bus tours in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, highlighting Trump administration efforts like the "school choice" initiative to help low-income students enter private schools.
On Thursday, Trump tweeted that he was looking to move away from a proposal pushed by his former energy secretary, Rick Perry: storing nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain, an effort his two top political advisers, Bill Stepien and Justin Clark, opposed for years. And officials are expected to hold events in the Midwest highlighting provisions aimed at helping domestic automakers that were included in the U.S., Mexico, Canada trade deal.
"We've been chopping wood for a while, and it feels like everyone else is seeing what we've been seeing for a long time," said Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law who is overseeing his campaign. "Everyone else has been distracted, but it's not like we invented these policies for the State of the Union."
Trump's approval ratings have inched up and he's now around where the last three incumbent presidents were at the start of their own, successful, reelections. And the economy shows no signs of slowing.
Scott Reed, the top political adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, nodded to the nature of Trump-era politics as he assessed the electoral landscape for the president.
"The White House and the campaign should focus 100% on the economic growth and opportunity society Trump is creating for America," he said.
"Politics in Trumpville are great right now, but these days, a week feels like three months and we have a long way to go."
Information for this article was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Annie Karni and Jonathan Martin of The New York Times; and by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker of The Washington Post.
A Section on 02/09/2020