As Support Dwindles With Election Day Looming, Donald Trump Acts to Suppress, Not Expand, Vote: Report

AUSTIN, TX — With Donald Trump's lead in Texas over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton now within the margin of error, his campaign has unleashed "Project Alamo" — a tactic centered on voter suppression efforts, according to a published report.

In a Bloomberg Businessweek report on Trump's San Antonio-based operations for Texas, a picture emerges of a campaign team that is at once energized as suffused with anxiety at Trump's continuing slide in the polls, both statewide and nationally.

"Still, Trump's reality is plain: He needs a miracle," the report reads in part. In the 11th hour, the campaign has come to realize that the inattention in making the registration and mobilization of the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees — Trump's most obvious source of new votes, as FiveThirtyEight analyst David Wasserman has noted — has emerged as a major challenge to overcome as Election Day nears.

"To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative," the report reads. "Instead of expanding the electorate, [Trump campaign chairman] Steve Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it."

Bannon is on leave from Breitbart.com to run the Trump campaign.

Said a senior official to Bloomberg Businessweek: "We have three major voters suppression operations under way," explaining the efforts are aimed at three groups Trump needs to win: Idealistic white liberals, young women and African- Americans.

The effort is three-pronged, emblematic of the type of social media-driven tactics employed by San Antonio marketing entrepreneur Brad Parscale, whose young company implausibly won a major, multi-million-dollar contract from the Trump campaign previously from among a field of more seasoned competitors.

In targeting the groups Trump needs to win, his campaign already has coached the candidate to hit hard on certain issues aimed at them in order to suppress their votes, Bloomberg Businessweek reported:

• His invocation of the debate of Clinton's WikiLeaks emails and her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, aimed at turning off idealistic supporters of Bernie Sanders from participating in the voting process.
• The parade of women alleging sexual abuse by former president (and Hillary Clinton's husband) Bill Clinton, meant to undermine Clinton, the candidate's, appeal to young women.
• The recycling of the oft-repeated quote by Hillary Clinton circa 1996 in which she categorized a criminal element — including African-American males — as super predators, designed to dissuade black voters from showing up to the polls at all to cast their votes for Clinton, especially in the critical electoral state of Florida.

Campaigning alongside Clinton for the first time on Thursday, First Lady Michelle Obama made reference to the Trump campaign's efforts not to expand voter participation but to shrink it in the hopes it might benefit him.

“If Hillary doesn’t win this election, that will be on us,” Obama said during a joint rally with the Democratic candidate Thursday in Winston-Salem, North California. “It will be because we did not stand with her. It will be because we did not vote for her. And that is exactly what her opponent is hoping will happen. That’s the strategy."

The Trump campaign's current efforts to "suppress" the vote—not a classic case of suppression through, say, voter intimidation, but a concerted plan to dissuade likely voters—are being launched from the GOP nominee's media campaign hub in San Antonio dubbed, appropriately enough, "Project Alamo"

While Trump has said he doesn't believe the polls, the machinations by Parscale's San Antonio research team illustrate a keen interest in those same polls of which the candidate is publicly dismissive. According to the Bloomberg Businessweek report, the research team in San Antonio is spending $100,000 a week on surveys (apart from polls that are commissioned out of Trump Tower), and has sophisticated models that run daily election simulations.

The findings from those tools yield what is essentially the writing on the wall for the Trump campaign, helping to explain the current efforts to dissuade voters otherwise loyal to Clinton, Bloomberg Businessweek concludes: "The results mirror those of the more reliable public forecasters—in other words, Trump’s staff knows he’s losing. Badly."

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