In a Saturday Night Live skit spoofing the 1988 presidential debates, Dana Carvey portrayed George H.W. Bush emitting a word salad of campaign slogans while trying to fill his allotted time: “On track… stay the course… a thousand points of light… stay the course.”
Jon Lovitz, playing that year’s Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, shot back, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”
Democratic strategists find themselves expressing similar sentiments about this year’s race for the White House and former President Donald Trump, except they are not at all amused. Some are shocked. Many profess to be terrified, regarding Trump as an authoritarian threat to the entire political system. Trump is also now a convicted felon. Democrats are reportedly circulating worst-case scenarios among themselves, though the guilty verdict could change the fundamentals to their benefit.
“How is this even a close race?” a Democrat working on congressional campaigns this year told the Washington Examiner when asked to sum up the prevailing sentiment. “Much less, how can we possibly be losing?”
Yet a considerable amount of their angst is directed at the Democrat sitting in the Oval Office, President Joe Biden. The New York Times’s Ezra Klein, a plugged-in liberal pundit, cranked out a list of seven theories for why the man at the top of the ticket is losing. And he did ultimately place the blame squarely on Biden.
“The electorate hasn’t turned on Democrats; a crucial group of voters has turned on Biden,” Klein wrote. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait said much the same thing. “The point here is that Democrats have a Joe Biden problem, not a partywide problem,” he wrote. “Regular, mainstream Democratic candidates are holding up just fine in the purple states.”
That’s still true of Democratic Senate candidates in places such as Arizona and Nevada. But Biden is tied with Trump in one recent poll of Virginia, a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush in 2004. Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) has conceded that Minnesota, the only state that didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan in 1984 and last went Republican at the presidential level in Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972, is in play.
“It’s going to be close out here,” the Democratic Governors Association chairman told the Washington Post. “We’re not at a given. We take it seriously. We do.”
A Cook Political Report survey conducted by both Democratic and Republican pollsters found Trump leading in six of seven top battleground states and tied with Biden in Wisconsin. The states’ voters prefer Trump to Biden on bringing prices back down by 16 points, with 54% saying that is the best metric by which to judge the economy’s health. The RealClearPolitics polling average has Trump on top in all seven, cumulatively by 3.1 points. Trump is up by 5.4 points in Nevada, a state he lost in his two previous tries.
Biden’s age is a factor. So is the economy, with the cost of living still high, inflation remaining above the Federal Reserve’s preferred rate despite multiple interest rate hikes, which themselves make mortgages more expensive, and many voters weary of Biden’s happy talk about “Bidenomics.” The president’s black and Hispanic support is soft, with Trump attracting a surprisingly diverse crowd for his rally in the Bronx. The Israel-Hamas war drives a wedge in the Democratic coalition, with progressive claims of “genocide” in Gaza possibly being enough to peel off some left-wing voters.
“This has been a constant, constant problem. His desire to claim credit is a huge obstacle to connecting with voters on this issue,” David Axelrod, the lead strategist for former President Barack Obama’s campaigns, told the Wall Street Journal. “We learned this in 2011 and 2012. You can cite data until the cows come home, but what counts is how people are perceiving the economy.”
James Carville, another top Democratic strategist who has publicly criticized the Biden campaign, helped guide Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992 by running against “the worst economy since the Great Depression.” But the recession that formed the basis of that claim had technically been over since March 1991, before Clinton even declared his candidacy.
The fact that strategists of this magnitude are talking about their Biden worries so loudly suggests their concerns are shared at the party’s highest levels. It is especially hard to imagine that Axelrod, who has sounded the alarm about Biden so often the president is said to have called him a “prick,” stray too far from Obamaworld.
“If you go out there and do a focus group, the focus groups all say, ‘He’s 200 years old. You got to be kidding me.’ And the worst part about it is for unaffiliated voters or people that haven’t made up their mind, they look at this and say: ‘You have to be kidding us. These are our choices?’ And they indict us for not taking it seriously,” the Hill quoted an unnamed Democratic senator as saying.
If such Democrats begin to abandon ship to avoid blame, things could begin to spin out of control. “The trajectory remains grim, and one effect of a losing campaign is that various factions start caring less about helping you win and more about exploiting your expected defeat for their own purposes,” Chait warned.
There are even signs that Biden’s campaign recognizes his problems. It has stepped up its efforts with black and Hispanic voters as well as their race-based attacks on Republicans. Biden has agreed to debate Trump after flirting with conditioning such encounters on the Republican’s behavior. Biden could also use the felony conviction to justify avoiding the debates. A barrage is planned against the more conventionally pro-business parts of Trump’s record.
After largely staying away from Trump’s legal predicaments, the Biden campaign dispatched 80-year-old actor Robert De Niro to inveigh against the former president outside his Manhattan hush money trial (another move Axelrod panned) as it neared its conclusion. The move was described by Biden allies as a “guerilla-style pivot.”
That trial itself could solve Biden’s problems. Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts. Democrats will now be able to append “convicted felon” to his name in every ad, speech, and campaign appearance.
Trump’s leads are small by historical standards and could easily be erased by the New York verdict. In the aforementioned 1988 contest, Dukakis built and blew a 17-point lead between the conventions and Election Day. Trump’s national lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average is only 0.9 points weeks before the conventions, though if it held that would make him just the second Republican nominee to win the popular vote since the elder Bush beat Dukakis.
There is no shortage of Republicans who harbored similar fears about Trump even before he was convicted in the hush money trial — that any other nominee would deliver them a landslide rather than a nail-biter. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) both tried to make that case.
This is the crux of the Democratic dilemma. Biden is nearly tied with Trump. The realistic alternatives aren’t polling unambiguously better, a consequence of the weak bench post-Obama that left Democrats with an 81-year-old standard-bearer in the first place.
These polls have all been taken while this improbable scenario is still a hypothetical: forcing out an incumbent president who swept all the primaries by landslide margins, even if only against token opposition, and also Vice President Kamala Harris, the first black, Asian, and woman to hold the office. Given how the Democrats exceeded expectations in the midterm elections and have recently had better election results than poll numbers, perhaps Biden is in even better shape than he appears, or will be once disenchanted progressives come home to stop Trump. Democrats have reason to be confident in their fundraising, overall operation, and swing-state ground game.
But if you believe what many Democrats say they do about Trump, the election being a jump ball isn’t good enough. “This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president,’” a worried Democratic operative told Politico. “It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end.’”
Leaving aside the fact that Biden told a largely black audience that Romney was going to “put y’all back in chains” when the former Massachusetts governor and outgoing Utah senator was the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Trump is a remarkably resilient political figure.
Polls taken before Trump’s conviction still show a competitive race in that scenario. A CNN poll found four out of five Trump voters who said they might desert him if convicted would not consider voting for Biden. An NBC News poll earlier this year yielded similar results.
“Republican pollster Bill McInturff, the GOP half of the bipartisan group of pollsters who conduct the NBC News survey, cautions that the sliver of voters who shift on these two ballots — 55 in total out of 1,000 interviews — hold overwhelmingly negative opinions about Biden, and they also prefer a Republican-controlled Congress by more than 60 points,” the network’s Mark Murray wrote.
An NPR/Marist poll released the day Trump was found guilty found that 67% of people said a hush money conviction would have no impact on their vote, 17% said it would make it less likely they would vote for the former president, and 15% said it would make them more likely to vote for him.
Obviously, it is hard to know the real impact until more post-conviction polling is done. But from Access Hollywood to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Trump has survived blows that would have ended anyone else’s political career. The multiple indictments helped him in the Republican primaries.
Many of the conditions that helped Trump win in 2016 are present this year: two broadly unpopular major party nominees, the Trump base more enthused for their choice than the Democrats’ left flank, multiple third-party candidates possibly splitting the anti-Trump vote, respectable leads in the Sun Belt and smaller ones in the Rust Belt.
It was Trump who outperformed his poll numbers in both 2016 and 2020. Trump likely would have been reelected four years ago if the pandemic hadn’t happened, probably would have been reelected against a too-left Democratic nominee like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and might have even prevailed against Biden last time in a pandemic-addled economy with fewer COVID-19 voting protocols in place.
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Trump is rightly associated with a number of Republican electoral setbacks, and his significant political liabilities have just gotten worse. But counting the GOP primaries, Trump has beaten multiple established candidates head-to-head. Biden in 2020 is the exception, not the rule. Candidates who expected outside forces to neutralize Trump have typically lost to him. And at least Hillary Clinton’s complacency could be justified by the polls.
There is little Democrats can do about their panic except stay the course and hope Biden is on track. They will be worried unless and until they stop losing to this guy who has been convicted on all felony counts.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
