Trump campaign backs off in-person events as coronavirus cases pick up

The decision to halt rallies, even temporarily, poses several political risks to the Trump campaign. 

The first risk is that rallies, and their thousands of adoring fans, have long served as an emotional outlet for Trump, who chafes under the pressures and demands of official Washington. Rallies help to energize the president, who is 74, and for years people close to him have noted that they focus his attention and sharpen his political messaging. 

The rallies also serve a very specific purpose for another side of the Trump campaign: its digital outreach operation. 

Led by Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital operation is widely viewed as the most effective and far-reaching in modern politics. It was critical to his victory in 2016, and it may be even more critical in 2020, now that Trump faces long odds and trails Biden by double digits in most national polls.

But like so much else in 2020, the coronavirus is reshaping this, too. 

A successful rally can add tens of thousands of people’s contact information to the Trump campaign’s database. “Right now, in big cities, we’re walking out with up to 100,000 new phone numbers,” Parscale boasted last fall. “That’s 100,000 people I can send a text message to on Election Day.”

“They use the rallies to collect data,” said Dan Eberhart, a prominent Republican political donor and Trump supporter. “I’ve seen internal numbers indicating that at any given rally, they’ve got 80% Republicans attending, and 20% either Democrats or uncommitted voters. And it’s that 20% slice they target, using Facebook to build datasets of their friends and their social networks.”

“That’s a huge part of how they grow their footprint, and [Brad] Parscale does this really well,” Eberhart said. “On a granular level, the rallies are really a data mining operation.” 

This year, “they were counting on [rallies] being a juggernaut for Trump and a huge advantage over Biden,” said Eberhart, largely because of the data and outreach opportunities that rallies create. “But the coronavirus has created a new digital landscape.”

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/01/trump-campaign-backs-off-in-person-events-as-coronavirus-cases-pick-up.html