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As Donald Trump falls behind in national polls, his campaign is making an aggressive push ahead of November with an “all hands on deck” strategy.
Vice President Kamala Harris currently holds a 3.4-point lead over Trump, according to an average of national polls taken on Monday. Now, his campaign is ramping up a more aggressive strategy, CNN reports.
“Think Trump on steroids,” an unnamed campaign source told the network. “This is going to be an all hands on deck approach.” The source also told the outlet Trump will visit two states per day, focusing on battleground areas.
This new approach comes after a slow summer for Trump compared to previous election cycles. In 2016, Trump held 22 rallies between July 1 and August 10, according to The Washington Post. This year, Trump held just eight in the same time span.
During a meandering press conference at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, Trump was asked why he wasn’t campaigning more. The former president responded by calling the question “stupid.”
While November 5 is still more than 70 days away, early voting will start in a matter of weeks in some states.
“I think that it’s a good strategy,” Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha told CNN. “I think that we’re getting down to the close to the end, now.
“We keep talking about 72 days, but folks actually start voting here in about 40 days,” he continued. “Early ballots go out in Nevada and Arizona and a lot of these other battleground states.”
Looming large over the race is the September 10 ABC News debate between Trump and Harris. Harris’s campaign is reportedly in a dispute with Trump’s team over whether to keep the candidates’ microphones on throughout the entire debate.
The Harris campaign wants to keep the microphones on the entire time, a deviation from the Biden campaign’s initial request. However, Trump’s team claims the Harris campaign is trying to change the rules with the hope that the former president will bow out.
“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” Brian Fallon, senior adviser for communications for the Harris campaign, told Politico.
Trump also criticized ABC, suggesting he wanted to move the debate to another news organization. The former president said ABC treated Republican Senator Tom Cotton unfairly when he appeared on the network over the weekend.
“When I looked at the hostility of that, I said, ‘Why am I doing it? Let’s do it with another network.’ I want to do it,” Trump said at a Virginia campaign stop on Monday.
“I’d much rather do it on NBC,” he said. “I’d much rather do it on CBS. Frankly, I think CBS is very unfair, but the best of the group, and certainly I do it on Fox, I’d even do it on CNN. I thought CNN treated us very fairly the last time.”
The Independent has contacted the Trump campaign for comment.
