President Biden’s consistently poor polling is triggering panic among Democratic operatives with a little more than five months to go before his likely election rematch against Donald Trump.
The outlook has grown so dire, Politico reported Tuesday, that one adviser to major party donors has been circulating a running tally of nearly two dozen reasons why the incumbent is in trouble — including his age, frustration over immigration and inflation, and the unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Donors ask me on an hourly basis about what I think,” the adviser told the outlet, adding that it’s “so much easier to show them, so while they read it, I can pour a drink.”
“The list of why we ‘could’ win is so small I don’t even need to keep the list on my phone,” the person went on.
“You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” one Democratic operative in close touch with the White House told Politico, explaining why the president’s allies are putting a brave face on the situation while privately expressing dismay about the election’s perceived stakes.
“This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president,'” the operative added. “It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end.’”
In addition to polls showing Trump, 77, leading Biden, 81, in the battleground states that will likely decide the presidency, the 45th president is also catching up in the money race.
In April, the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee outraised the Biden campaign and the Democrats by $25 million – including a record $50.5 million cash grab from an April 6 event in Palm Beach.
The money gap triggered an urgent appeal from Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey when Biden visited Boston for a pair of fundraisers last week.
“To those of you who opened up your wallets, thank you,” Healey told the donors. “We’d like you to open them up a little bit more and to find more patriots — more patriots who believe in this country, who recognize and understand the challenge presented at this time.”
The presumptive Republican nominee has also not been shy about courting traditional Democratic voting blocs, including black and Hispanic voters at a rally in the South Bronx last week.
“New York Democrats need to wake up,” said Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “The number of people in New York, including people of color that I come across who are saying positive things about Trump, is alarming.”
“I’m worried it’s going to be a 2022 situation, where everyone wakes up in the last seven weeks and has to scramble.”
“The election is more competitive than it should be, given the wretchedness of who Donald Trump is,” admitted South Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY). “In a properly functioning democracy, Donald Trump should have no viable path to the presidency. The fact of a competitive race is cause for concern.”
The Biden campaign dismissed the former president’s recent events in New York and New Jersey as “photo-ops and PR stunts.”
“The work we do every day on the ground and on the airwaves in our battleground states — to talk about how President Biden is fighting for the middle class against the corporate greed that’s keeping prices high, and highlight Donald Trump’s anti-American campaign for revenge and retribution and abortion bans — is the work that will again secure us the White House,” spokesman Kevin Munoz told Politico.
“We have to run a campaign, where honestly, we drive home the message that Donald Trump takes us back to the 19th century. Biden takes us further into the 21st century,” agreed Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), who declined to say whether he thought the president’s campaign was doing a good enough job making that point.
“There’s still a path to win this, but they don’t look like a campaign that’s embarking on that path right now,” said longtime Democratic strategist Pete Giangreco in dissent.
“If the frame of this race is, ‘What was better, the 3.5 years under Biden or four years under Trump?’ we lose that every day of the week and twice on Sunday,” he added.
“In 2020, there was enough energy to get Donald Trump out and there were other things on the ballot that brought young people out in subsequent elections,” suggested Michigan state Rep. Laurie Pohutsky, a Democrat.
“That’s not the case this time. I worry that because we’ve had four years with a stable White House, particularly young voters don’t feel that sense of urgency and might not remember how disastrous 2017 was right after the Trump administration took over.”
California RNC Committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon backed Pohutsky’s diagnosis, saying no Democrats are expressing enthusiasm to her for the octogenarian commander in chief.
“The most diplomatic thing I hear from Democrats,” she told Politico, “is, ‘Oh my God, are these the choices we have for president?'”