Harris Faulkner: Trump campaign unsung hero edition

First, Donald Trump's victory was a team effort, with some people playing high profile roles (think Elon Musk and J.D. Vance) while others plaid important, though more subtle, roles. (Think Lara Trump, Lawrence Jones and Harris Faulkner.) Let's start with the role Harris Faulkner played in Donald Trump's campaign.

While it's true she didn't shill for Trump's campaign like Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough played for the Biden campaign, then for the Harris campaign, Faulkner hosted an all-female townhall in Atlanta that showed a different side of Donald Trump's personality. This NPR article gives some details to the event. It says "Former President Donald Trump attempted to reach out to women voters with a Fox News town hall that aired Wednesday morning. Trump took questions from an all-women audience during the hour-long special."

This wouldn't be an NPR article without some editorial commentary mixed into it. This article didn't disappoint in this respect. Check out this commentary:

Trump heard from a friendly crowd on a range of issues, including child care and transgender kids in sports. He talked about reproductive rights late in the town hall, conceding that some states have passed abortion laws that are “too tough” in the wake of the Dobbs decision. He also defended his comments to Maria Bartiromo over the weekend where he called some Democrats “the enemy from within” and said he’d use the military against them.

The crowd was overwhelmingly supportive of the former president, frequently bursting into loud cheers. Faulkner also was friendly — she was critical of Democratic efforts to “prebut” the town hall with a press call Tuesday and shook her head silently after playing a clip of Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock from that Democratic press call.

Let's get serious a bit. First, the women in the townhall audience askedd informative questions of President Trump. Further, they were allowed to ask Trump follow-up questions, too. This was nothing like the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz-Dana Bash lovefest. In that event, Bash didn't fact-check Harris or Walz nor did she ask follow-up questions. In the Faulkner townhall, Trump patiently listened to the women's questions before fully answering their questions directly. Third, Faulkner didn't react like that to the Democrats' prebuttal:

There's no doubt that it was an audience predisposed to liking President Trump. That doesn't meant they were going to lob him softball question after softball question. They wanted to know what President Trump's policies were. The final question was from a single mom with 2 kids. She said that her child tax credit had decreased by 80%. Then she asked what could be done about the child tax credit so that it was fair. The thing that jumped off the page about these questions were mostly about affordability and inflation. There was a question about biological males participating in girls' sports but that was the exception.

The reason why I call Harris Faulkner an unsung hero isn't because he tipped the scales in Trump's favor in a ham-handed way. It's just that she put him in a position to let Trump's personality shine through. Remember that Trump didn't lose in 2020 because of his policies. He lost because he developed a reputation of frequently posting mean tweets. The minute that Trump sat down and interacted with the audience, Trump's mean tweets persona virtually disappeared. Trump's favorability improved significantly virtually overnight.

It didn't hurt for this to have happened in the battleground state of Georgia. This didn't happen in ruby-red Alabama. It happened in Georgia, where the voters are more skeptical. Let's remember that the first day of early voting, Georgia shattered their single-day early voting record. The previous single-day record was 137,000 in 2020. On the first day of this year's early voting, 306,000 Georgians voted early in-person, more than doubling the previous record.

Finally, it didn't get much attention when this townhall was first announced. Still, it got a ton of last-second attention. while it wasn't a primary driving factor for Trump's victory, it's one of those things that otherwise wouldn't get attention but that helped a lot.

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