Democrats are beginning to hit the panic button as an implosion in former President Trump’s campaign fails to materialize and a series of polls suggests President Biden is weaker than he was four years ago.
Biden is trailing Trump in polls of several battleground states, underscoring concerns that his message isn’t gaining traction with swing voters.
Many Democrats thought Trump’s legal problems would submarine him, but the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision on Monday ruled in his favor on a 14th Amendment case. Other high-profile trials have been delayed, raising doubts about whether they will reach verdicts before Election Day.
Steve Jarding, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, said Democratic lawmakers “should” be worried about the emerging political picture.
“If you’re Donald Trump and his team, you go, ‘Wow, I’ll take this any day of the week,’” he said, comparing Trump’s relatively strong political position with Biden’s faltering effort to get his message out to voters.
A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll published last week showed Biden trailing Trump in several critical states, including Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada and Wisconsin.
In those states, 48 percent of voters said they would back Trump, while 43 percent said they would back Biden.
Democrats heard another alarm bell over the weekend when a New York Times/Siena College poll showed Trump leading Biden 48 percent to 43 percent among registered voters nationwide.
The survey showed a majority of voters think the economy is in poor shape, and 47 percent of voters strongly disapprove of Biden’s job performance, the highest such disapproval rating of any point in his presidency measured by Times/Siena polling.
Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said the latest poll numbers are concerning, and he decried a separate decision by the Supreme Court to postpone ruling on Trump’s legal immunity claims to the summer as “outrageous.”
“We’re concerned. This is going to be a tough race, but it hasn’t really begun yet, so a lot of the coverage is just about Biden’s age, not about his policies,” he said. “The president is going to get out on the stump and he’s going to have an opportunity to show he’s got the energy as well as the intellect and the acuity to do the job.”
Welch acknowledged that “in retrospect” it was a mistake for Biden to pass up doing an interview with CBS news ahead of the Super Bowl, which would have allowed him to reach a huge national audience.
“In retrospect, it would have been good to do the Super Bowl interview, throw a few deep passes into the end zone,” he said.
On the economy, Welch said the economic indicators are “solid” but people are “feeling some anxiety” about making ends meet when they pay the grocery bills.
But one of the biggest disappointments Welch and other Democrats have concerns the Supreme Court’s decision to not take up Trump’s assertion that he is immune from prosecution on charges related to his efforts to hold on to power after the 2020 election. The delay could put off some of Trump’s legal challenges until after the election.
“That’s outrageous. There’s no excuse for that,” Welch said of the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the immunity claims in late April, after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals resoundingly rejected Trump’s arguments.
Asked if any of the high-profile criminal cases will adjudicated before Election Day, Welch said: “I’m not counting on them one way or another.”
“The decision that I think is the most glaring, egregious and wrong is the Supreme Court delay on the special prosecutor trial” over allegations that Trump tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021, Welch said.
Democrats suffered another blow Monday when the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in a 14th Amendment case brought from Colorado, which in turn affects similar efforts in Maine and Illinois to remove Trump from the ballot.
Trump and his allies in Congress celebrated the decision as a major victory and tried to use it as ammunition against his opponents.
David Axelrod, a former senior political adviser to President Obama, observed on CNN that Trump’s court battles have given him the opportunity to sell his strength as a candidate.
“All these indictments, all of these lawsuits and so on, have given him a chance to look indomitable, look strong, look resilient, and that’s actually in some ways helped,” he said.
While Democrats generally expected the Supreme Court to rule to keep Trump on the ballot, the unanimous decision underscored how weak the legal arguments were against the former president.
The bigger concern for Democrats is that the criminal cases brought against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith in Washington and Miami and by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia are stuck in limbo and may not be resolved by Election Day.
Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.) over the weekend lamented the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the arguments on Trump’s immunity claims as “a disappointment.”
“Their delay in considering this critical issue, this timely issue, is going to delay the resolution of these cases by months at least,” he predicted on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Durbin on Tuesday insisted the presidential race “is far from over” even though “a lot of people in the press are trying to announce it’s over.”
He noted that Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher briefed Senate Democrats about the national political landscape last week.
“I think we have a good candidate and a good story to tell,” he said, though he acknowledged that Democrats need to improve their political messaging to change voters’ view of Biden’s job performance and the economy.
“We have to do a better job, and we certainly have the facts to turn to,” he said. “We have a good story, a record of accomplishment and time to deliver it.”
But when pressed about why Democrats still haven’t gotten their message to resonate with voters after declaring for more than a year they had a great story to tell, Durbin exclaimed: “It’s too early!”
“People who want this done in March: Come on!” he said.
On Tuesday, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), an independent who counts toward the Democratic majority, announced she will not run for reelection.
Polls showed Sinema trailing Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego (Ariz.) and former news anchor Kari Lake (R) in a three-way race, but her departure may give Republicans a better chance of winning the seat.
“With recent polling showing Kyrsten Sinema pulling far more Republican voters than Democratic voters, her decision to retire improves Kari Lake’s opportunity to flip this seat,” National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines (Mont.) said in response to Sinema’s announcement.
Daines and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) scored recruiting coups in recent weeks by persuading popular former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) to run for retiring Sen. Ben Cardin’s (D-Md.) seat and multimillionaire banker Eric Hovde to challenge Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D) in Wisconsin.
The Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), showed Democrats are taking the threat to Baldwin seriously by announcing it would pour $2 million into advertising to paint Hovde as a “third-rate banker from California” and an “out-of-touch carpetbagger.”
Ross K. Baker, a professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University, who has served several Senate fellowships, said the political picture is looking bleak for the Democrats but argued they still have a lot of time to change the political dynamic.
“The president has not presented particularly well. He’s showing his age. The Senate map is very unfavorable to the Democrats,” he said.
He observed that while Democrats have a strong economy to tout, voters continue to view the economy negatively because of higher prices, even though unemployment has stayed near record lows and the rate of inflation is falling.
“Voters seem to focus on the data the least favorable to Democrats and emphasize that and tend to diminish the things that are in the works that will have a pretty substantial benefit on the American economy,” he said.