It’s a messy business, campaigning against a twice-impeached former President who has redefined what it means to be shameless, the loser of two recent civil lawsuits at a cost of half-a-billion dollars in damages and now the defendant in a criminal trial as dark and surreal as Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker. But, as the saying goes, someone needs to do the dirty work no-one else wants to do.
For the next seven months, Joe Biden is that someone.
So while his opponent Donald Trump set up camp at the Manhattan Criminal Court to start this week, Biden hit the road, spending three days campaigning in the swing state of Pennsylvania. It was quite the split screen, with the current White House occupant on the left, speaking to audiences of blue collar workers about traditional Democratic themes of prosperity and economic fairness, and his predecessor on the right, channelling about as much persuasive charm of a cornered raccoon as he rattled on about himself and the trouble he’s in.
Read more from Lawrence Donegan on the campaign trail: Donald Trump trial - Dismissals, denials and the real truth
“Donald Trump looks at the world differently than you and me,” Mr Biden told a crowd in his hometown of Scranton. “He wakes up in the morning at Mar-a-Lago thinking about himself. How can he help his billionaire friends gain power and control, and force their extreme agenda on the rest of us?”
“It's a scam trial. If you read all the legal scholars they will tell you the same thing. It’s a scam, a political witch hunt that just continues, and we are not going to be given a fair trial,’’ Trump told the bank of TV cameras and reporters waiting for him at the end of his first day in court on charges of financial record irregularities surrounding a hush money payment to a former adult film actress, Stephanie Clifford.
Political messaging is an inexact science but, even so, you won’t need a podcast from Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart to understand why in theory voters should respond more positively to the promise of economic betterment for themselves than to the self-obsessed pleading of a criminal defendant staring into the abyss of a guilty verdict.
The issue for Biden is that political theory and reality are at this moment in American political history on divergent paths.
Meanwhile, the problem for Trump is that the aforementioned split screen has at least six more weeks to run, precious time that will find him rooted to the same spot outside the courtroom, delivering his oh-so-familiar ode to legal persecution. Expect the Democratic campaign machine to seize the space this leaves and define the former President as a criminal narcissist, an existential threat to 250 years of American democracy, an electoral loser and a terrible businessman.
To that end, Biden got off a few decent jokes at Trump’s expense this week, referencing the calamitous drop in the share price of the former president’s social media company, Truth Social (down more than 50% in the last three weeks). “If his (Trump’s) stock in the company drops any lower, he might do better under my tax plan than his,” the President said with a smirk - not Dave Chapelle but not bad at all.
Less amusing from the Biden perspective, however, is the current state of the race.
Trump is fond of claiming that he is “leading in all the polls, and by a lot”. He’s exaggerating, of course, but it’s true he is ahead in some of the polls. The New York Times/Sienna survey is the most highly respected in the country and last weekend it had the former President leading by one point, 46%-45% - well within the margin of error and a tightening from last month’s survey, which had Trump ahead by four.
The consensus amongst the other national polls is that support for Biden has picked up since he gave his feisty State of the Union address to Congress in February.
“On average, he’s running about 1.4 points better in the post-State of the Union polls than in earlier surveys by the same pollsters,’’ according to the Times’ resident analyst, Nate Cohn. “But despite these favourable trends, his (Biden’s) approval rating is stuck in the upper 30s, and just 41 percent say they have a favourable view of the president — far lower than four years ago, and lower than voters’ views of Mr. Trump now. Voters still believe the economy is poor, and disapprove of Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy by nearly a two-to-one margin.”
It’s the economy, stupid, (an invention of the 1992 Clinton campaign team) remains unsurpassed in the lexicon of punchy political slogans but in this more tribal era of American discourse, where everyone has picked their “team” and persuadable swing voters are few and far between, it’s also about the quirks of the Electoral College.
Biden won the nationwide popular vote in 2020 by more than seven million votes but such is the method by which the President is selected (with each state assigning their electoral college votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote in its state) the incumbent’s actual margin of victory came down to 45,000 votes in the three swing states of Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.
In short, state polling is where the real story is told.
Here, the numbers are undeniable, unrelenting and disturbing for Biden. A recent survey put in the field by the Wall Street Journal had Trump ahead in six of the most important swing states. Meanwhile, reliably neutral polling aggregators have him leading in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina, with Biden edging it in Pennsylvania. If those polling margins were replicated on November 5th the challenger would be returned to power in a landslide.
The counter to this prognosis is that polling months in advance of a Presidential election isn’t worth the time and money spent doing it. After all, Mike Dukakis was 10 points ahead of George H W Bush in April 1988, Walter Mondale was an early favourite to beat Reagan in 1984, and on this very day (April 16) in 2016 Hillary Clinton was 10.9% in front of Trump in the national polling average.
Read more political writing and analysis from the Herald team
Three days is a lifetime in the context of a Presidency and for the current White House occupant to spend that amount of time in a single state makes clear the Biden campaign has no time for this kind of psephological overview, temporarily comforting though it may be.
Vanity Fair magazine recently carried a profile of the Trump 2024 campaign, describing the operation as “terrifyingly competent” in comparison to his previous campaigns. That is almost certainly true but what VF failed to note is the behemoth it faces.
Eighty-one year old Biden is easily portrayed as old and weak but his 2024 campaign resembles nothing so much as a young, muscled Schwarzenegger, fresh off the plane from Austria and ready to kick sand in the face of whoever stands in his way.
Writing in his substack newsletter, Message Box, former Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer this week gave a detailed breakdown of the weapons the Biden campaign has to hand - the advantages of being in office (historically, incumbents usually win re-election), a vast organizational edge (Biden already has 300 full-time staffers in the swing states, the Trump campaign has, at best, a handful), a discernible campaign plan (in comparison to Trump’s off-script extemporizing on the courthouse steps and occasional rally), vastly superior fund-raising (which helps expand the advantage in campaign infrastructure).
Team Biden is releasing campaign ads hitting his opponent on abortion, economics and democracy on an almost daily basis. Team Trump can’t afford to respond, relying instead on the support of “free media” like Fox News, which continues to preach to the long-converted with sycophancy that would make North Korean TV blush.
“Elections are most often decided by structural factors — the mood of the nation, the unemployment rate, the cost of gas and groceries, etc,’’ Pfeiffer said. “However, campaigns matter on the margins, and this is an election that will likely be won in the margins. If 2024 is as close as the last two elections, Biden's better campaign could be the difference between victory and defeat.”
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