Former President Donald Trump shakes hands with Gov. Glenn Youngkin at a rally in Chesapeake, June 28, 2024. Youngkin said he will also attend Trump’s rally in Salem this weekend. (Charlotte Rene Woods/Virginia Mercury)
Former President Donald Trump’s decision to hold a last-minute rally in Salem, Virginia, on Saturday, just days before the Nov. 5 election, has raised eyebrows, as most polls show Vice President Kamala Harris — who has not campaigned in the commonwealth since becoming the Democratic nominee last summer — with a comfortable lead.
The event will mark a nostalgic moment for Rich Anderson, chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, who attended a gathering with President Richard Nixon at the same venue over half a century ago.
“A little tidbit for you,” Anderson shared in a phone interview Thursday, “when I was a little kid, and I remember it like yesterday, I went to the rally in 1969 where President Nixon came to the same Civic Center and campaigned for (former Virginia Gov.) Linwood Holton, who was elected governor that year.”
Nixon’s visit 55 years ago, Anderson said, reverberated through the Roanoke Valley at the time, and he — and other high profile Republicans — hope that Trump’s event will have a similar effect.
Polls vs. perception
According to a Washington Post-Shar survey released Saturday — one of the most recent presidential polls available for Virginia — Harris holds a six-point edge over Trump, similar to her eight-point advantage in a previous poll from September. An earlier poll from Oct. 7 by the Wason Center for Civic Leadership at Christopher Newport University had the Vice President up by 11 points (52-41%) among likely Virginia voters.
But Republicans insist that a victory remains within reach in the commonwealth, where no GOP candidate has won a presidential race since George W. Bush in 2004 and where Trump lost in both 2016 and 2020.
“Virginia, I believe, is in play,” said Anderson. “While the polling generally has Harris up, a lot of it is within the margin of error.”
“What I’ve told people is, don’t get fixated on these polls, regardless (of) where they are. If it shows Trump in a comfortable position, then the danger is that people start relaxing on our side. And if it’s not good news for us, then people get demoralized,” Anderson said. “Just work like we’re 10 points down and that’s the surest path to victory.”
Jeff Ryer, a spokesman for the Trump campaign in Virginia, cited a Republican-leaning poll from Monday, which has Harris at 48% and Trump at 46% and is within the margin of error.
“Whether you’re looking at polling showing a margin-of-error race or Republicans’ strong showing in early voting, it’s clear that Virginia is a battleground,” Ryer said. “President Trump is holding a rally in Virginia because Virginia is in play.”
But Democrats have pushed back against the notion that the presidential race in Virginia has become more competitive in recent weeks.
“Donald Trump has been soundly defeated every time he’s run in Virginia, and while he’s welcome to waste his time campaigning here, Virginians are going to once again reject his extreme plans to roll back our rights and freedoms, wreck our economy, and raise taxes by nearly $4,000 for hardworking families,” said Aaron Fritschner, a spokesman for the Harris campaign.
And Susan Swecker, the chair of the Democratic Party of Virginia, in a text message suggested that Trump’s choice to visit the commonwealth this close before the election might reflect his campaign’s dwindling options for large rallies, especially in competitive states where his standing is uncertain.
The planned Salem rally, Swecker said, was “another tired Trump gimmick to counter that his show has grown stale in the core battlegrounds, as his crowd sizes have plummeted and exhausted people walk out of his rallies.”
Trump is looking for “fresh crowds” in New Mexico and Virginia to “rant and rave about conspiracies like Youngkin’s false conspiracy theories about voting,” Swecker added. “Trump has done the same last-minute stunts in places like New Mexico in 2016 and Minnesota in 2020, only to get crushed.”
Although Trump has never shied away from campaigning in Democratic-leaning areas — as his recent visits to Monterey, California, and New York City have demonstrated — political analysts are also skeptical, noting that Trump lost Virginia in two previous elections and that the state has become more solidly Democratic in recent years.
Some suggest Trump’s visit could be an attempt to create the appearance of momentum in the commonwealth, while others speculate it might serve as a rallying cry for his base in case he contests the results after a potential defeat.
“As recently as last week Trump said on the Joe Rogan Show that he doesn’t trust the polls, but I cannot imagine his campaign thinks that Virginia is in play, especially since the most recent polls I have seen show Harris with a small, but outside-the-margin lead in the commonwealth,” said John Aughenbaugh, an associate political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“I have to wonder if there are other reasons why he would spend valuable campaign time in Salem, when he could be visiting the truly competitive battleground states Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Michigan.”
However, Aughenbaugh said, in 2016 most experts stated that Trump did not have a chance in either Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, yet he ended up winning there in part because his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton stopped campaigning in those states.
Aughenbaugh added that the Trump campaign also may be seizing on the heightened tensions over Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s recent executive order, which led to the removal of thousands of Virginians from the voter rolls and sparked legal challenges and national scrutiny.
The controversy culminated Wednesday, when the U.S. Supreme Court granted a temporary stay in the ongoing legal dispute over the governor’s order — a ruling in the Republicans’ favor.
Political forecaster Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said that with Trump’s rally in Salem — a Republican stronghold — the former president might not have a rational purpose and that he was simply playing to his base by projecting strength through crowd size.
“Trump is in part a creation of TV and ‘The Apprentice,’” Sabato said, referring to NBC’s reality television series which Trump hosted for 14 seasons. “He knows that actual reality can be shaped by the projection of his preferred version of reality. His version right now is, ‘We’re going to win in a landslide and that includes Virginia.’ His MAGA troops will certainly buy it, and it will whip them up even more than they already are.”
And while Salem is a four-hour drive from Washington, D.C., it is close enough to the networks so that coverage will be extensive on the final weekend, Sabato said.
“Rural areas are Trump’s greatest strength, far more than urban-suburban territory. But Virginia is not competitive. If it was, we’d be flooded with TV ads and boasts from the campaigns.”
But Anderson, the RPV chair, said he suspected that the Trump campaign may be trying to win Virginia by replicating Youngkin’s strategy during the 2021 gubernatorial election.
“President Trump has not been to Southwest Virginia, which is obviously a major Republican enclave that must be turned out in order to offset the blue areas of the state, principally the urban crescent that runs from Fairfax all the way down to Richmond and then turns east toward Norfolk,” Anderson said.
In 2021, Youngkin successfully aimed at losing Northern Virginia by fewer voters than some Republicans before him while focusing on increasing GOP turnout in Southwest Virginia, Southside and other Republican areas, Anderson said.
And Youngkin — who during his gubernatorial bid managed to flip the commonwealth red by skillfully balancing his stance on a former president who remained highly unpopular with a significant portion of Virginia voters — has now become one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders, willing to reiterate the campaign’s message that the state is in play.
“Virginia is far more competitive than any of the pundits would believe,” Youngkin told Fox News’s Bret Baier on Wednesday, vowing to attend the Salem rally.
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