The GOP nominee has to have a HUGE lead to counteract this. Otherwise, BOHICA.
The Left has two big advantages over the Right: they have no moral standards (so you cannot shame them) while being able to hold the Right to standards that are impossible to live up to.
They only have to yell “Racist!”, “Sexist!”, “Homophobe!”, and people retreat, or tangle themselves up in knots in a futile attempt to explain why the label doesn’t REALLY fit.
The solution is to just not care. A Leftist friend of my wife’s, talking about a friend of mine, called him a Klan member. I replied, deadpan, “I doubt he’s a Klan member. Neither of us has ever seen him show up for any of the meetings.”
And that was that.