Has the Trump train stalled?

The “Trumpmentum” of the last few weeks couldn’t last forever. Now, with less than four days to go until Election Day, concern is spreading in Republican circles that the Trump train has “stalled” as the Democrats make late and potentially decisive gains in key areas. 

Across the battleground states, and especially in Pennsylvania, early voting numbers suggest that women are turning out in far bigger numbers than men. This is good news for the Democrats because 2024 is widely thought to be “the gender election”: a majority of men favor Trump; a majority of women support Harris. The Trump campaign is also lagging behind Harris in early voting among senior citizens in Pennsylvania. Americans over the age of sixty-five are traditionally a key demographic group for Republican success, yet Trump campaign sources remain confident that Republican-voting seniors will address that imbalance by voting the more old-fashioned way on Election Day. “Republicans and older Republicans in particular, generally, like to vote on Election Day because that’s what they’re accustomed to,” says Charlie Gerow, a Republican strategist in Pennsylvania. 

Is this all late jitters?

For now, however, it’s a worry for the Trump-Vance campaign. Another concern is that Trump’s popularity among African-American voters may have been as overhyped as it was in 2020. Early voting patterns show that older black women – a core Harris voter group — are turning out in higher numbers than expected. Democratic insiders are now suggesting that Harris could match Joe Biden’s success in winning 90 percent of black voters. Some Republicans are also concerned that North Carolina, so far this year the most “leans Trump” of all the seven key battleground states, is slipping towards the Democrats. 

Is this all late jitters? Or evidence that the formidable and better funded Democratic ground game is starting to turn the tide in Harris’s favor? The pro-Democratic media and Harris campaign spokespeople are naturally inclined to believe the latter. They point towards Harris’s latest, celebrity-studded rallies, which have been particularly large and energetic in recent days.  

David Plouffe, the Harris campaign manager, has been telling reporters that the Trump mega-rally at Madison Square Garden — the one in which speakers made jokes about Puerto Rico and Harris’s racial heritage — backfired and has moved undecided voters towards the Harris-Walz ticket. He’s also insisting that Trump’s “threat” to Liz Cheney on stage in Arizona on Thursday — selectively quoted all over the Democratic media yesterday to make his words sound more menacing than they were — will further damage Trump’s already limited appeal among women. 

Then again, as Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita so delicately put it last night: “What the hell is he going to say? He’s losing. Fact of the matter is David can’t do anything but bullshit until Tuesday because we are kicking his ass. The only thing the Harris campaign has functional at this point is a bullshit machine that is dutifully repeated by the legacy media as if fact.”

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.