'You’re off message': Allies deliver blunt warning to 'distracted' Trump

With the United States' 2024 presidential election less than six weeks away, national and battleground state polls continue to show a close race. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on September 24 showed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris with a national 6 percent lead over GOP rival Donald Trump, yet a CNN poll released the same day showed Harris ahead by only 1 percent.

Harris is still describing herself as the "underdog" in the race. But according to Politico reporters Alex Isenstadt and Meridith McGraw, some of Trump's GOP allies are worried about his campaign from a messaging standpoint.

In an article published on September 25, Isenstadt and McGraw report, "Donald Trump was meeting privately, in mid-September, with one of his oldest friends, Steve Wynn, when the casino mogul and Republican megadonor delivered the former president a blunt warning: You're off message, and it isn’t helping. Trump had been distracted, in Wynn's view."

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Wynn, according to Politico sources, told Trump that instead of promoting a conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, he would be better off zeroing in on issues where Harris is vulnerable.

"The meeting underscored a key point of tension inside the Trump campaign," Isenstadt and McGraw explain. "While polls show the race is incredibly close, some of Trump's allies are concerned that his impulses and coarse approach to campaigning are undermining him against Harris — a rival who has proved far stronger than his previous opponent, Joe Biden. In interviews, more than a dozen Trump allies described the former president as reaching a crossroads — faced with the choice of continuing with the missteps that have overtaken the past several weeks of his campaign or embracing a more calculated approach aimed at appealing to a small subset of undecided voters who are likely to sway the outcome of the election."

A Trump ally, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Politico that he "should be doing better." And GOP strategist David Urban expressed concerns about Trump being "distracted."

Urban told Politico, "Trump is strongest when he is talking about what people care about the most: the economy, immigration, crime, trade, the Trump core messages. When he gets distracted and goes in different directions, it's less helpful. Every day we're not talking about those issues, we're letting Harris go untouched."

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Read Politico's full report at this link.