Confidence Is High in the Trump Campaign

We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

Election Day is here, and Trump’s campaign is brimming with confidence, fueled by a combination of strong internal polling and encouraging early voting trends.

According to veteran political analyst Mark Halperin, Trump’s team’s confidence has been “extremely high” ever since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee. Halperin notes that the Trump camp’s confidence is more robust today than it was in 2020 or 2016.

So, where’s this confidence coming from?

For starters, Halperin points out that Trump’s internal polling paints a very favorable picture. Trump’s campaign doesn’t believe that Kamala Harris has effectively reassured voters about her capabilities as a commander-in-chief or economic steward. “They don’t believe that Kamala Harris has convinced people that they could trust her to be a good commander in chief or a good steward of a good economy,” he explains. He says of Trump’s team, “They believe they’ve done a better job of defining her on their terms for the undecided voters as failed, weak, and dangerously liberal.” This resonates with undecided voters, many of whom lean conservative on key issues like the economy and immigration.

Halperin notes that the Trump campaign believes that “the makeup of the undecideds is more of the profile of a Trump voter than a Harris voter by 2 to 1, more male than female, more concerned about the economy and immigration, and the issues on which Donald Trump has done well.”

He also said that the Trump campaign is “quite bullish on the prospect of winning five of seven, six of seven, or seven of seven of the battleground states.” While they won’t say Harris has no chance, they’re far more confident than in previous election cycles, reflecting a sense of optimism that surpasses their 2016 and 2020 outlooks.

Trump’s campaign released a memo detailing promising early voting statistics, which we reported about on Monday. The memo showed that Republicans were outperforming Democrats in absentee ballots and early votes across all the battleground states. The data highlighted in the memo showed there’d been a decrease in urban turnout for Democrats, while rural turnout appeared to be rising, potentially benefiting Trump’s campaign.

“I said … when the early, early vote came in, if this continued, there’d be no way to go into election day and think she could win,” Halperin said. Although early voting numbers have seen some improvement for Democrats, they haven’t improved much, leaving Trump’s campaign emboldened by the overall trend.

Halperin, playing devil’s advocate, consulted a “fair-minded Republican strategist,” who thinks the early numbers aren’t going to be very predictive of the outcome, and Republicans shouldn’t read too much into them.

“No sober person has any faith in any of these lunatics who think they can count votes based on the available data,” the strategist said, adding a note of caution: “We’ve been burned before.” This strategist’s hesitation underscores a hard-learned lesson from past elections where data-based assumptions failed to capture late shifts in voter turnout.

Confidence in Donald Trump’s camp “was extremely high when Joe Biden was the nominee and with few breaks since Kamala Harris became the nominee,” says @MarkHalperin. “Their internal polls show him doing very well. They don’t believe that Kamala Harris has convinced people that… pic.twitter.com/R4XuJkkglu

— 2WAY (@2waytvapp) November 5, 2024

Ultimately, the Trump campaign’s optimism rests on solid internal polling, effective messaging, and early voting trends that suggest strong rural turnout. Hopefully their confidence isn’t misplaced.