While the Biden campaign leapt at the chance to pin the “convicted-felon” label on Donald Trump, many congressional Democrats are offering their vulnerable colleagues some unvarnished advice — steer clear of the partisan feeding frenzy, and keep the focus on the twelve jurors.
“We don’t need to talk about that,” former House whip Jim Clyburn told NR in a brief hallway interview on Monday. “I think the public is speaking loud enough.”
Trump’s conviction last week on 34 felony counts has upended the political landscape, injecting more uncertainty into an already bitter and competitive presidential race while sparking new questions about whether Democrats should make the presumptive GOP nominee’s new felon status a central part of their campaign pitch.
Post-verdict polling is sparse but suggests Trump’s convicted-felon status isn’t an electoral slam dunk for either party, at least not yet. As some Democrats pressure Biden to lean into the verdict on the trail, those in the don’t-talk-about-it camp are convinced that last week’s conviction will dissuade on-the-fence or tuned-out voters from voting for Trump, and there’s little to be gained from fanning the flames.
“I feel like there’s no reason for Democrats to comment at all except paying homage to our legal system, and the conviction will speak for itself,” Representative Ritchie Torres (D., N.Y.) said in an interview. “It will likely galvanize his supporters but it’s gonna give pause to the independents and the moderates who will decide the outcome of the election.”
Other Democrats are taking cues from President Joe Biden — the least-popular incumbent since Jimmy Carter — whose campaign began fundraising on the news of Trump’s conviction mere minutes after it was handed down. On Monday, the Biden campaign tweeted out an unflattering photo of Trump with the caption “Convicted felon,” a descriptor Biden himself invoked at a private campaign-fundraising reception later that day.
“For the first time in American history, a former president that is a convicted felon is now seeking the office of the presidency,” Biden said at the Monday evening fundraiser in Connecticut. “But as disturbing as that is, more damaging is the all-out assault Donald Trump is making on the American system of justice.”
Biden, for his part, continues to lag behind Trump in most battleground-state polling averages, as many voters continue to view the 81-year-old as too old to serve another term and disapprove of his handling of the economy and immigration.
As in 2020, Biden’s 2024 reelection strategy has revolved around a democracy-versus-chaos pitch that portrays his opponent as a danger to American institutions. But as we wrote last week, savoring Trump’s new status as convicted felon risks playing into the Trump campaign’s narrative that Biden and other Democrats are reveling in his opponent’s legal troubles and are actively rooting for him to be behind bars.
Months out from Election Day, some Democratic operatives are characterizing the conviction as one small piece of a larger story about Trump’s unfitness for office, and warn that vulnerable incumbents should be wary of making the verdict a central theme on the trail. If campaigns are like movies, then the verdict should serve as one short scene in a broader story about the chaos that follows Trump everywhere he goes — not the main plot.
“No Democrat is crazy enough to think that this is a top-ten issue for voters,” Democratic strategist Matt Bennett tells National Review. “I think it just adds to voters’ concerns about Trump as a kind of unreliable human. So if you ask them to list the things that they’re worrying about, this wouldn’t make the list, but if you ask them to think to articulate why they’re uncomfortable with Trump, this certainly would. And so it’s not an issue question, it’s a character question for Trump.”
Democratic incumbents who represent safe blue districts have little to lose by talking regularly about Trump as a convicted felon. “I don’t think there’s a danger of talking about it,” says Representative Maxwell Frost (D., Fla.), who beat his Republican opponent last cycle by 20 points. “Polls show that this isn’t going to be something that changes the mind of all voters, but it can have a significant impact on a small group of swing voters,” he said, adding that “rule of law is something that polls well.”
“A simple message is we all respect the rule of law,” says Congressional Progressive Caucus Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.). “And we need to respect the rule of law and the jury system and the justice system, and that what Trump is doing when he attacks the jury, when he attacks the judge, is he’s attacking our system of justice, and that is not a good thing.”
The political calculus is obviously far more complicated for vulnerable Democratic incumbents like Sherrod Brown of Ohio or Jon Tester of Montana, both of whom are trying to hold onto Senate seats in states Trump carried by large margins in 2020.
Both Tester and Brown issued cautious statements after the conviction was handed down, praising the judicial system but stopping short of arguing that Trump’s legal troubles were disqualifying.
When candidates in more pro-Trump areas are inevitably met with questions about the conviction, they should “correct the record” and clarify that Biden had nothing to do with the hush-money case, and that the verdict was decided by a twelve-person jury, says Bennett, the Democratic strategist.
One swing-district Democrat seems to be taking that advice to heart. “I haven’t really been talking about it,” says Representative Tom Suozzi (D., N.Y.), the New York Democrat who won a closely watched mid-February special election for the seat of expelled and indicted Republican representative George Santos.
Speaking with NR outside the U.S. Capitol on Monday, Suozzi said he’s “a little sad about the whole thing” because the “division in the country is already so bad already.”
At the same time, he added, “a system that twelve jurors all unanimously received the same verdict after both sides get to make their best case is pretty persuasive, and people need to be held accountable.” Suozzi went on to make a more centrist pitch about the importance of individual accountability in contemporary politics: “It’s not just President Trump. But George Santos needs to be held accountable and Hunter Biden has to be held accountable. And people with the border need to be held accountable, and the shoplifters need to be held accountable.”
Around NR
• Charles C. W. Cooke offers his take on the prevailing wisdom among many pundits that Trump’s conviction is likely to guarantee him the presidency:
I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think that the opposite is true; certainly, Trump still has a shot in November. But I think this will hurt him, as it was designed to.
• Dan McLaughlin, for his part, says no one can know for sure how the former president’s new felon status might impact the campaign, as we’re in uncharted territory. But he games out the possibilities:
On balance, I suspect it is much likelier that the conviction hurts Trump rather than helps him. The biggest reason for that . . . is simply that a lot of not-very-tuned-in voters will simply hear “they convicted him” and assume the charges are legit.
• In North Carolina, Democrats are leaning into public safety as part of their efforts to hang on to the governor’s mansion, Audrey Fahlberg reports. America Works USA is launching a new ad this week boosting North Carolina attorney general Josh Stein, Democrats’ 2024 gubernatorial nominee, who is locked in an incredibly competitive general-election race against the state’s first black Republican lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson. Audrey writes:
North Carolina is a quirky, red-leaning battleground that tends to elect Democrats to the governor’s mansion. Keeping the focus on public safety is a smart move for Stein, who is temperamentally moderate but has said he will campaign alongside President Joe Biden this cycle in a state Donald Trump carried in 2016 and 2020.
• The Republican Party risks marginalizing its own majority-makers if it forces out candidates who are not all-in on MAGA, writes Noah Rothman, who says the GOP will have to decide whether it wants to be a majority party or a Trump party:
For Republican voters who actually want to see their policy preferences advanced by their representatives, the brushback pitches the national GOP is firing off at its own candidate do them no favors. Internecine warfare may make for some lively prime-time cable news segments, but it’s no way to run a national party.
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