What does President Biden have to do to catch up to Donald Trump?
According to Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO, exposing and clarifying Trump’s 2025 agenda will be crucial to Biden’s success or failure:
Donald Trump will lose the election to the extent that voters accurately understand what his plans for a second term would be. Not only are most voters now not paying attention to Trump’s legal troubles, they know next to nothing about what he’s said on the campaign trail about what he will do if elected again, let alone the very specific and chilling agenda Trump allies have assembled in the event Trump wins a second term.
Podhorzer argued in an email that
It is necessary, but far from sufficient, for voters to hear that from Biden and congressional Democrats. Unless the media and other trusted nonpartisan civil society institutions are forthright in affirming that the 2024 election is not a contest between two politicians, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but a virtual constitutional referendum, Trump could win.
In support of his argument, Podhorzer wrote:
Since 2016, MAGA has lost nearly every important election in which voters understood this, including 23 of the 27 statewide elections in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while picking up a dozen House seats in California and New York in the midterms when voters did not.
The most recent NBC News poll, conducted at the end of January, has Trump favored over Biden by a substantial 47-42 percent.
The responses to detailed questions were brutal.
Voters said Trump would do a better job than Biden on immigration and border security (57-22); on the economy (55-33); on crime and violence (50-29); on competence and efficacy (48-38); and on possessing the required mental and physical stamina for the presidency, (46-23). Note the 23-point gap on that last one.
A glimmer of hope for Biden emerged toward the end of the survey: “If Donald Trump is found guilty and convicted this year of a felony — with Donald Trump as the Republican candidate and Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate — for whom would you vote?”
In this hypothetical circumstance, Biden pulls ahead of Trump, 45-43.
The damage a conviction might inflict on the Trump campaign was highlighted in a Bloomberg-Morning Consult survey of 4,956 registered voters, conducted on Jan. 16-22 in seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Six of these states — all but North Carolina — voted for Biden in 2020. Trump now leads Biden in all seven of them.
But when asked, “How willing would you be to vote for Donald Trump if he is convicted of a crime?” 53 percent of registered voters surveyed said they would be “unwilling” to do so; 46 percent said “very unwilling”; and 7 percent said “somewhat unwilling.”
Bloomberg-Morning Consult asked respondents whether they would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he were “sentenced to prison”: 55 percent said unwilling, 48 percent very unwilling and 7 percent said somewhat unwilling.