Biden stakes re-election campaign on reviving bad memories of Trump
Democrats hope Donald Trump’s guilty verdict is a reminder of his baggage, but most voters’ views are locked in; ‘They either love him or hate him’.
US President Joe Biden’s re-election strategy rests in large part on reminding voters about the darkest days of Donald Trump’s presidency: the Capitol riot, a botched response to Covid-19 and violence driven by racial strife in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Now, Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts gives Biden and his allies their best chance yet to jolt voters into recalling Trump as an agent of chaos and to argue that his personal behaviour carries risks for the country.
It might not work. Biden’s campaign has struggled to change the minds of the undecided voters he needs most, many of whom are disengaged from politics, worried foremost about prices and hold an increasingly rosy view of Trump’s presidency.
Those factors have made it hard for Democrats to make Trump’s personality and policies the most salient issue in the campaign – as they did successfully in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats made big congressional gains, and in the 2020 race that put Biden in the White House.
“This is going to be the ‘reminder campaign,’” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster who has worked with many presidential candidates. “Instead of talking about the future, they’re going to be talking about the past, because each one wants to define it in his own way.” The challenge for Biden: “Voters’ attitudes toward President Trump are locked in,” Newhouse said. “They either love him or hate him.” Biden’s allies have a different theory of the case. They believe they can, in fact, reframe Trump as a risky and even dangerous choice by presenting voters with information that they have forgotten or never knew about him.
“For those who may have supported Biden in 2020 but have been having second thoughts, this verdict will remind them of why they voted against Trump before -- the danger he poses to the freedoms they count on,” said Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO.
The Biden strategy has been on display in recent days, as the campaign and the president himself have tried to reshape memories of their opponent. They have incessantly reminded voters that Trump-appointed justices helped overturn Roe v. Wade. They have revived a comment from eight years ago, which Trump later retracted, in which he suggested women should face punishment for having abortions. A recent campaign ad, aimed at wavering Black voters, returns to 1989 in citing Trump’s call for the death penalty after Black and Latino men, known as the Central Park Five, were wrongfully arrested for a rape in New York City.
“Remember when he was trying to deal with Covid? He said, ‘Just inject a little bleach in your veins,’” Biden said at a White House event in April, one of several recent times he has raised Trump’s handling of the pandemic. During a press briefing in 2020, Trump had speculated about whether using disinfectant or solar light inside the body could treat Covid, comments he later walked back.
Biden’s team largely steered clear of commenting during the Trump trial. Following the verdict Thursday, Biden made brief comments from the White House on Friday, focusing on respect for the judicial system, rather than the details of the trial. He called it reckless and dangerous to label a trial rigged because someone doesn’t like the outcome. “We should never allow anyone to tear it down. As simple as that,” he said.
Many Democrats hope that the guilty verdict will break through, given the sizzle surrounding the case, which involved a porn actress, hush money and charges of falsified business records, and that the felony conviction of a former president is unprecedented. A Biden campaign pollster said they don’t expect any single event to change things overnight, but said this is a moment that can help push voters – particularly those not paying close attention – to “zoom in” on the unpopular aspects of Trump’s presidency.
The recent past offers little suggestion that Biden’s approach can succeed. Trump is universally known, and many voters believe there is nothing new to learn about him. “Everyone knows he’s a cad. I don’t think it’s new information,” said Republican pollster Greg Strimple, pointing out that many who believe it are voting for Trump anyway.
Biden himself expressed uncertainty about how the conviction would play, telling a reporter who asked if it would help Trump: “I have no idea.” Senior Trump campaign advisers, in a memo dated the day before the verdict was announced, wrote that their polling showed the outcome would have little effect on the race. “The impact of the New York trial, what little there has been, is already ‘baked into the cake’ and voters have by-and-large already formed their opinions on the trial and President Trump’s actions,” they wrote.
As president, Trump survived two House impeachments (with the Senate acquitting him both times), a federal investigation into his 2016 campaign and many other politically jarring events – with barely a dent in how Americans viewed his job performance. His approval ratings generally hovered just above 40 per cent. They never moved beyond a 9-point range in Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling, compared with a 62-point swing in approval ratings for George W. Bush and a 21-point range for Barack Obama, both of whom served two terms.
Even more challenging for Biden’s strategy is that views of Trump’s presidency have grown more favourable since he left office, hovering just below 50 per cent approval in Journal polls for the past year-and-a-half, well above Biden’s ratings and higher than Trump’s job approval as he left office.
And Thursday’s jury verdict could also prove to be the last straw for many Americans who believe that Trump has been targeted for prosecution to stop his presidential campaign and his “Make America Great Again” movement, setting a dangerous precedent of using the criminal-justice system for political ends. That could reanimate the voters that swept him into office in 2016.
“Some voters may think, ‘I didn’t like Trump, I wasn’t sure about him, and now the guy was railroaded.’ So, you may have potentially made him into a more sympathetic figure,” Newhouse said.
John Anzalone, who polled for the Biden campaign in 2020, said the recent past shows that the jury verdict can in fact shift voter opinions, inflicting the kind of damage that hurt Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in 2016, when then-Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey announced days before the election that fall that he was reopening an investigation into her use of a private email server for government business.
“It changed the dynamic of the race. It made her just as big a risk as Trump, and they went with someone new,” he said. In focus groups, voters told the campaign they believed that a Clinton presidency would be tied down with investigations.
“Voters are risk-averse,” Anzalone said. “They’ll think Trump is going to be in a quagmire of problems -- new impeachment, trials -- and all they’re going to care about is that, and that the real work is not going to get done, and so I think this is a tremendous problem for him.” Polling has suggested that some voters would reconsider backing Trump if he were convicted of a felony, but it isn’t clear that they feel the same way now that the jury has given its verdict. The felony conviction of a former president is such an unusual event that many voters might not have know their reaction until the event actually occurred. And the expected millions of dollars in campaign ads yet to come, intended to shape voter views of the conviction, could have an effect.
In one recent survey, an NPR/Marist/PBS poll in late May, some 7 per cent of Trump supporters and 11 per cent of independents said they would be less likely to vote for Trump if he were convicted in the hush-money trial.
Among voters overall, most believed they would shrug off a Trump conviction. More than two-thirds of voters, including 74 per cent of independents, said a guilty verdict in the trial would make no difference to their vote in November.
The Wall Street Journal
