As Election Day approaches, we are already seeing ballots being cast in some states. This raises questions about the early voting period and whether it should be shortened to avoid distractions from the core issues that matter most.
As a political consultant, one of the key pieces of advice I give to candidates is that elections are won based on what voters decide to focus on. In the 2024 presidential election, this has never been more true. The contrast in issues between the two sides couldn’t be more stark.
On one hand, Team Harris is focusing on two key points: abortion and Donald Trump. On the other hand, Team Trump is trying to make voters think about immigration, inflation, and crime. This divide in focus creates an interesting dynamic as voters head to the polls.
Looking at the polling data, Trump appears to have the advantage. The majority of voters rank the economy, immigration, and crime as their top concerns, and on those issues, Trump leads by significant margins. In a typical election year—though we can all agree that 2024 is far from typical—those numbers would suggest a clear path to victory for Trump and Republican candidates down the ballot.
However, abortion has consistently ranked lower on voters’ priority lists, often not even cracking the top ten issues. This leaves Trump’s personality and behavior as the Democrats’ most effective tool for mobilizing voters. Unfortunately for Trump, Democrats—with significant support from much of the media—are making his controversial personality their winning issue.
To make matters worse for Trump, his own team has contributed to the distractions. Rather than focusing on the issues that most concern voters, they’ve allowed the media and their opponents to steer the conversation to much less relevant topics.
In the past few days, two bizarre issues have captured headlines: childless cat owners and migrants allegedly eating cats and dogs. These are the kinds of arbitrary issues that sometimes arise in elections but hold little significance beyond the campaign season. I saw this firsthand in the 1960 election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, where debates over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu or the so-called “missile gap” disappeared after the election.
Regardless of who wins in 2024, the topics of childless individuals and culinary habits won’t stick around. They’re fleeting distractions from the core issues of the economy, immigration, and crime—distractions that Team Trump has unfortunately allowed to dominate the conversation.
The attack on people without children, especially Governor Sarah Huckabee’s criticism of Harris for not having biological children, is one such unforced error. Not only is this approach tactically unsound, but it’s also factually flawed. Harris, through her marriage, has stepchildren, and raising stepchildren or adopted children is no less legitimate than raising biological children. Speaking from personal experience, having raised children who were not biologically mine, the bond and responsibility are just as real.
The migrant story, which alleges that Haitians are eating cats and dogs, is another narrative that makes it hard to focus on the very real and serious concerns about the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policies. This sensationalism distracts from meaningful discussions on how immigration is impacting small towns and major cities across the country.
All of these distractions serve to bolster the negative image of Trump that Democrats are relying on. Team Trump seems determined to test just how many unforced errors they can make before it costs them the election. The longer these irrelevant stories dominate the headlines, the more difficult it will be for Trump to pivot back to the key issues that should have been his campaign’s focus all along.
If Trump and the Republicans don’t refocus on the economy, immigration, crime, and foreign policy—issues that resonate most with voters—they risk losing an election that seemed to be theirs to win for several months.
