For team Trump, Harris’ promise to ‘not return’ will prove to be a huge mistake

Since replacing President Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris has marked her rallies with a new slogan: “We’re not going back.”

Former President Donald J. Trump’s top advisers believe the slogan is a mistake. Their theory on the matter, with less than 90 days left in the election, is that the American people are nostalgic for the Trump presidency — and specifically, the Trump economy and lower prices.

During a background briefing with a group of reporters at a West Palm Beach hotel on Thursday morning, hours before Mr. Trump held a news conference, a group of senior campaign officials — who, with few exceptions, spoke anonymously to provide a candid assessment of the state of the race — insisted that the structure of the race still favors the former president, even as Ms. Harris has surged in the polls.

“They know, as do we, that the fundamentals of the race haven’t changed,” said Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s top pollster, referring to Harris’ campaign. “Because when you ask voters whether they would rather go back to the Trump economy or stay with the Biden economy, we win by two to one.”

Trump has arguably had his worst three weeks of this election cycle, with Ms. Harris trailing roughly evenly in the polls and the former president undermining his campaign’s policy arguments with brazen racial slurs, falsely claiming that Ms. Harris had only recently embraced her black identity.

His team believes he still has the upper hand in the Electoral College. Their path is simple: If Mr. Trump holds North Carolina and flips only two states that Mr. Biden won in 2020, Pennsylvania and Georgia, he would get to 270 electoral votes and victory. But advisers noted that he could also pair Pennsylvania with Arizona and Nevada, among other paths to the presidency.

The Trump team sees Ms. Harris’s rise as the political equivalent of “cotton candy,” one aide said, and once voters learn more about her liberal record — including her past support for banning fracking, ending private health insurance and providing free health care to undocumented immigrants — her honeymoon will be over.

“She has received the equivalent of the largest in-kind contribution of free media that I have ever seen in all the years that I have been running presidential campaigns – and I have been doing this for a long time – and even with that we still have an advantage in the Electoral College,” Mr. Fabrizio said.

Mr. Trump’s advisers acknowledge that Ms. Harris has boosted Democrats’ motivation to vote. She has made significant gains among black voters, mobilized black women and made some gains among older black men, according to internal Trump campaign polling. She has also shown some potential improvement among white men, Mr. Trump aides said.

But they don’t expect her to win a substantial share of Republican or independent voters, and they don’t think she’s well positioned to win over a group of voters they call “target-persuadable voters.”

This is a group of voters that the Trump team has been intensely targeting. They make up about 11 percent of the electorate, they’re disproportionately male, moderate in ideology, under 50, and nonwhite. They’re more negative about the economy and their own personal finances than the rest of the population, and they’re hard to reach. They don’t watch cable news or read newspapers or digital news. They use streaming services, listen to podcasts, and other nontraditional media — which is why the Trump campaign is spending as much, or in some cases more, time and effort working with these outlets than it does with traditional media.

Trump officials also said they had learned from the mistakes of the previous cycle. One of Trump’s 2024 advisers said the 2020 campaign did a poor job of predicting which voters were actually swayable, only to find that as many as 80 percent of those thought to be swayable were in fact hardened partisans, leading to costly wasted efforts. In some cases, the Trump campaign ended up directing Biden supporters to the polls, officials said.

This year, the Trump team said that most voters’ deep sour feelings about the direction of the country’s economy, the issue of immigration and international unrest all worked in their favor — and they insisted that Ms. Harris would not be able to distance herself from Mr. Biden and his record on those issues once her “honeymoon” period is over.

The exuberance surrounding Ms. Harris, Mr. Fabrizio said, represented “a kind of out-of-body experience where we suspended reality for a few weeks.”