Donald Trump isn’t the first incumbent president to run for reelection facing a deficit in the late summer polls. At this stage of the election cycle in 1948, as he sank in the polls, no one thought Democrat Harry S. Truman had a prayer of winning.
Newsweek magazine likened the Truman campaign in the month before the election to a “ship beating itself to pieces against a rocky shore.”
Then, as now, Truman faced a revolt inside the Democratic Party as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former vice president, Henry Wallace, bolted and organized the Progressive Party that would surely drain votes from the Democrats. The “Never Trumans” were not much different from the GOP’s Never Trumpers, a group of neocons that Trumpism thrust into irrelevancy. Southern Democrats rallied around Dixiecrat and South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond.
So, how did Truman pull off the “Miracle of ’48”?
In the last three months of the campaign, he adopted an ingenious strategy of running against the “do-nothing Republican Congress.” He fled Washington by train on his “whistle blow” tour through the heartland. He pitted the social and financial concerns of blue-collar workers, farmers, and faith-based voters against the moneyed interests and deep-pocketed lobbyists on the East Coast. Of course, this led to the populist “Give ’em hell, Harry” rallying cry of Middle America.
He warned voters that if they “stayed at home” on Election Day, they would only “keep these reactionaries in power” and that “you will deserve every blow you get.”
That brings us to Trump. He should borrow this strategy from Truman. There is no economic or political gain from swimming in the swamp and negotiating a larded-up “fiscal stimulus” bill with the Democrats focused on special-interest spending.
He should campaign against the $3 trillion Pelosi monstrosity of a “stimulus” bill containing goody bags paid by taxpayers to every imaginable liberal special-interest group. That bill stimulates nothing but Nancy Pelosi’s contributor list, from teachers unions to green lobbyists, trial lawyers, and government workers. The public is disgusted by the opportunism of Democrats that they would dare use a public health crisis to fund union pension funds, the national symphony orchestra, and environmental justice grants, whatever those are.
Trump is the prototypical modern-day Truman against a lifetime politician and his running mate, another lifetime politician, neither of whom have any business or job-creating experience. Putting America First with good-paying jobs is what the public wants. Trump could barnstorm around the country, denouncing Democratic tax hikes and their obsession with climate change issues that would require strangling our energy industry. It would get cheered in China and Europe. Still, it would hobble America’s Midwestern industrial base and put millions of miners, drillers, truckers, construction workers, and other hard hats in unemployment lines.
The Democrats have been apologists, even cheerleaders, for the rioters, gangs, looters, and anarchists who have burned down inner-city neighborhoods, harming the very minorities they say they want to help. Kamala Harris even referred to the marchers and statue terrorists who have trashed our great heroes from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson to Booker T. Washington as “social justice warriors.” Trump could win the election as the candidate of “public safety” alone.
The most populist issue is to open the economy safely and effectively to reduce unemployment and get families a paycheck. Democrats have defined themselves as the lockdown party even in Midwestern and mountain states with few health risks. Biden has even said he might support another nationwide shutdown of schools, churches, stores, small businesses, and factories. Somehow, they say by flattening the economy to rubble, they will help rebuild it.
Truman used to say, “I didn’t give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.” Trump’s particular challenge is that unlike Truman, he isn’t just up against a corrupt East Coast elite core of deep staters, deep-pocketed lobbyists, and wealthy social snobs who view Middle America as flyover country. He also must combat the bleed-blue media.
Given how unpopular the media is today, he can even turn their bias and blinding hatred at places such as CNN from a liability into an asset by again running against the fake news industrial complex. All of this is to say that voters need to be reminded daily that the Left doesn’t just disdain Trump but also the values and pro-America principles of Trump voters, too. Time to rile up the “deplorables” again, circa 1948 and 2016.
