MILWAUKEE — Former President Donald Trump is set to accept the Republican nomination for the third straight presidential race, but for most of the past two weeks — until the attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania — the focus has been on President Joe Biden.
Biden will be a major theme of the Republican National Convention. But it’s the Democrats who have been giving Biden problems ever since his disastrous debate performance. The truth is, however, the man of the hour in Milwaukee is the source of Biden’s problems here, too.
For months, the Biden campaign has tried to make clear to anyone who would listen that the presidential race is close. They claim to have their own polling showing Biden within the margin of error of Trump. Some of the public polls tell the same story: Trump led by just 1 point in the latest Fox News poll, by 2 in NBC News’s. NPR/PBS/Marist actually had Biden ahead by 2 after days of Democratic lawmakers saying he should drop out.
The RealClearPolitics polling average has Trump leading nationally by 2.7 points, down from his post-debate peak of 3.4 points, heading into the GOP convention.
Trump is himself a deeply polarizing figure. His favorability rating remains underwater by 12.6 points, though that is still a bit better than Biden. That is enough to keep the race competitive.
Democrats have never liked hearing that the race is close. They lost just about all patience with that argument after the debate. Why? Again because of Trump.
To Democrats, losing to Trump is unacceptable. Many of them believed he was a spent political force after losing to Biden in 2020 or, if not then, certainly after Jan. 6. Whatever else happens in Milwaukee, that will once again be shown to be untrue.
Democrats often claim, and many of them to varying degrees genuinely believe, that Trump poses a unique threat to democracy. Some of those arguments may be more muted after Trump was wounded by an assassin’s bullet. But the feeling won’t go away.
If democracy is on the ballot, then being within the margin of error of Trump, who outperformed his poll numbers in both 2016 and 2020, isn’t good enough. Democracy can’t be a jump ball.
No answer Biden gave in his post-debate cleanup interview with George Stephanopoulos upset Democrats and Never Trumpers more than when the president said how he would feel if he lost the rematch with his predecessor: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” (Some transcribed Biden as saying “goodest,” but the grammar wasn’t what bothered Democrats.)
Democrats are looking for greater assurances that they will beat Trump than Biden and his top aides have ever given them. They perhaps want more certainty about defeating Trump than any Democratic campaign realistically can give them. But the debate opened the door for someone to try.
An NBC News report detailing Democratic panic in the wake of the assassination attempt against Trump quoted a party strategist saying it was “so bizarre” that “many people on my side are firmly in the camp of [Biden] can’t win.”
What Democrats most want to believe is that the top of their ticket can’t lose, or at least that Trump can’t possibly win. They are not currently seeing data that comforts them on that score.
Even in a poll like NRP/PBS/Marist where Biden appears to be winning, he is probably losing. Biden’s lead is within the poll’s margin of error. More importantly, absent changes in the battleground state polling, he can win the popular vote by 2 points and still lose the Electoral College — and the presidency — to Trump. Hillary Clinton edged Trump in that metric by 2.1 points in 2016.
Biden’s camp keeps trying to persuade Democrats that the race is close, that voters won’t really start focusing on the campaign until after the conventions, that it is still a long way until Election Day, that they should have more confidence in their battleground state get-out-the-vote operations than Trump’s, and that only modest polling errors would erase any Republican lead just like that illusory “red wave” two years ago.
These arguments are plausible. Yet faced with the prospect of a second Trump term, Democrats no longer have the patience to find out if they are correct.
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For Biden, Trump is a double-edged sword. He’s controversial enough to keep Biden in the race. But Trump is also why Biden’s party cannot tolerate the possibility of losing.
Trump looms large not just over the GOP, but both major parties.