Indeed, Mr. Trump has spent much of his presidency focused on the parts of the country that already support him. Not counting four states where he regularly stays at his own properties or Maryland, where he travels to Joint Base Andrews or Camp David, he has spent nearly five times as many days in states that voted for him as those that did not, 115 versus 25, according to Bill Frischling of Factba.se, a service that compiles and analyzes data on Mr. Trump’s presidency. His campaign is spending 44 percent of its Facebook advertising budget targeting users 65 and older, far more proportionately than the Democrats, Axios reported.
Other Democrats said it was not clear whether Mr. Trump’s recent spate of divisive language reflected calculation. Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said Mr. Trump might be lashing out more simply because he had fewer advisers around him to restrain him. At the same time, she said Mr. Trump is building a campaign that is far more extensive than the ad hoc organization he had last time.
“I don’t know if it’s any strategy so much as him being liberated,” she said. “He doesn’t seem to me, even though he’s wily and clever, like someone who’s thinking deeply about strategy for 2020. But it may not matter. My view is they’re building a whole apparatus outside the White House that’s gearing up for 2020.”
Other presidents have had to find a balance between being the leader of a nation and a partisan candidate for election, swinging from messages of unity to tough attacks on opponents. But the old theory about reaching out to swing voters to build a governing coalition, much less a re-election coalition, has been fading for years.
Bill Clinton positioned himself as a centrist in 1992 and 1996 to reach beyond the Democratic base and Mr. Bush in 2000 called himself a “compassionate conservative” to appeal to voters in the middle.
After he prevailed following the divisive Florida recount, Mr. Bush sought to reach out by working with Democrats on education and other issues. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he visited a mosque and made a point of stressing that the war that followed was not a war against Muslims. He likewise sought to expand his appeal to Hispanics by supporting an overhaul of immigration laws.
But after 2000, Mr. Dowd conducted a study for Mr. Bush concluding that most independents were really reliable Democratic or Republican voters and that the fraction of the electorate genuinely open to persuasion had shrunk since 1980 from 22 percent to 7 percent.
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