The Oppo Problem Democrats Don’t Know They Have
With Donald Trump now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Democrats are gearing up for one of the bloodiest general election campaigns anyone is likely to see, but the decks are stacked against them more than they think. Delve CEO Jeff Berkowitz outlined exactly why Democrats’ attacks on Donald Trump will prove ineffective for USA Today’s Fredreka Schouten:
Despite his bombastic rhetoric about women’s appearances, Latino immigrants and Muslims, Trump barreled through the Republican primary, in part, because his GOP rivals failed to mount a serious opposition-research effort against him, said veteran Republican strategist Jeff Berkowitz. He oversaw research for the Republican National Committee and for Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign and now runs his own firm in Washington, Delve.
Trump’s GOP opponents treated his candidacy as a “summer fling that would pass,” Berkowitz said. That doesn’t mean Democrats have an easy task ahead, he said.
As Berkowitz has been previously detailed, former GOP primary challengers refused to take Trump seriously and ended up unable to research to define the billionaire to the American voter.
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Simultaneously, the likely Democratic standard-bearer Hillary Clinton has already proven woefully ineffective in her attempts to define Bernie Sanders. Unlike the junior Senator from Vermont’s rapid rise to national prominence over the past year, however, Trump has had 14 seasons of primetime television to define himself to American voters.
“You have someone who spent a decade on reality TV being presented as a successful businessperson who was in a position to judge other people on whether they should be in leadership positions as well,” Berkowitz said of Trump’s 14-season run as host of NBC’s The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice shows.“Trying to convince voters now that he is not successful and that he shouldn’t be in a position of leadership and judgment is going to be very, very difficult,” he said.
The impossible problem facing Democrats is that they are armed with a politician who has already displayed difficult in effectively employing opposition research to define her opponent facing down one of the best defined political candidates in history, who also happens to have a knack for defining his opponents.
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