Analysis: Trump is trying to intimidate his own voters into the polls

For 70 minutes, President Trump spoke from the White House lawn. That was about three times longer than when Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden held the box a week ago. The president promised to cut taxes like never before, to send a woman to the moon and to create ten million new jobs in one year. But there were few election promises that stood out and Donald Trump, who adhered unusually much to the script in the teleprompter, is now going to the polls on largely the same election platform as four years ago, something that made the speech a little sleepy.

In comparison, however, Joe Biden's speech a week ago contained significantly less factual politics than President Trump's speech. The president tried to argue that it was because the Democrats' election manifesto is the most extreme that any major party in the United States has ever presented, and that the Democrats therefore did not want to talk about it.

The tactics are very clear. Republicans want to hammer into the Americans that Joe Biden and the Democrats are left-wing radicals. Biden, who is a center-right candidate in the party and nothing else, was accused of having a "socialist agenda, of being a" Trojan horse for socialism "and his election manifesto was called by Trump the" Biden-Bernie Manifesto ". 

So, why this tactic? It probably does not attract very many new voters. Instead, it is a kind of whip aimed at Republican voters. By portraying political opponents as extreme and threatening that the "radical movement will destroy the United States," as Trump put it, they are intimidating their own constituency voters. 

For the first time, we also saw how the Republican Party will handle Joe Biden's empathy. Last week, the Biden campaign placed great emphasis on telling about Biden's empathic ability, and on saying that the election will be about decency. Trump faced it with sarcasm and accusations that Biden's empathy is hollow.

Many speakers during the week have tried to open up for insecure voters to dare to vote for Donald Trump. But while those speakers did their part to reach new voters - Donald Trump undoubtedly focused mostly on those who already sympathize with his party. Only in a few weeks will we know if there was any push for Biden or Trump in public opinion after each convention.  

But opinion polls are likely to rub off on Trump's election campaign. Even though he is pushing for Biden in some states that are expected to decide the election, Biden still leads big. And then the question is whether it is enough for Trump to target his own electorate, or whether he will soon have to devote more energy to capturing the center electorate.