Everyone from voters to TV pundits have campaign advice for Donald Trump and his presidential campaign. Jon Schweppe, the policy director at American Principles Project, is advising them to move beyond three main campaign issues that are inflation, illegal immigration, and crime.
“They are the issues,” he tells AFN, “that if you ask a voter what they care about the most, that's what they'll volunteer to you.”
So there is a logical reason the Trump campaign is hammering away at those issues, Schweppe says, but he remembers the 2022 midterm elections when the Republican party “lost big” on those same issues.
So what political issues should be discussed on campaign stops and dropped into political ads?
According to Schweppe and American Principles, the Trump campaign should be hammering away at the transgender issue even if polls don’t have it ranked at the top.
“The transgender stuff is never above one or two percent,” he acknowledges, “but we know at APP, through message testing and through our voter outreach, that that issue moves people more than almost any issue."
One possible reason it “moves people” is how far determined Democrats have been willing to push the issue, especially in public schools and even in elementary-age classrooms. But now irate parents are pushing back to demand female-only locker rooms and sports teams, and the removal of obscene books targeting young children.
A second topic that concerns Schweppe, and which he says should concern voters, is the powerful big tech companies that are working with Kamala Harris and her campaign for president. That partnership goes back to her time as California attorney general, he says, when Google, Microsoft, and Apple wrote big campaign checks to her.
“Her whole campaign is bragging about all the money they’ve been raising in what was essentially the donor coup of President Biden,” Schweppe says.
Those powerful corporations will expect to be treated nicely, he warns, if a future President Kamala Harris enters the White House in 2026.
