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Campaign Feel-Good
Trump 2020 aims to please the president, not win.
From an outsider’s vantage point, it seems as if the president’s sprawling re-election apparatus is more concerned with making him feel good than winning.
Let’s examine a few of the campaign’s questionable decisions. From late May through June, the Trump campaign spent a whopping $400,000 on television advertisements in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Washington and its three electoral votes have never voted for a Republican, and Donald Trump mustered just 4% of the D.C. vote in the 2016 election.
Given that math, the campaign just lit close to a half million dollars on fire. It could be argued that dumping that money into literally any other media market would have been the wiser move. It is the ultimate high risk, low reward calculation.
So why did the Trump campaign so foolishly do this? According to Tim Murtaugh, communication director for the Trump campaign, the ads were intended for Trump allies and not the general public.
But isn’t the whole point of ads to reach the general public?
The Daily Beast, which broke the story, spoke to two campaign officials who claimed that the ads were meant to “put the president at ease.” The ad buy strategically purchased time slots on days where Trump would be…
