1. Here are a few paragraphs from a piece I wrote back in November:
If voters aren’t sold on the notion that what stands between them and the end of democracy is Joe Biden, they might be more open to a variation on the theme. The variation goes something like this: what stands between you and chaos is Joe Biden.
For all but a few Democrats, at least half of Independents and a significant slice of Republicans, Trump is a one-man anxiety-creation machine. Serious, experienced people who used to work for him —from General James Mattis to former White House chief of staff John Kelly, to former Attorney General William Barr to former National Security Advisor John Bolton to former legal counsel Ty Cobb (and on and on and on)—will willingly attest to the chaos engendered by Mr. Trump and that follows in his wake. They’ve lived with and through it. They know first hand how unsettling it can be.
Trump himself all but promises chaos, with endless late-night screeds on social media, wild threats, and menacing behavior. That will continue. Trump’s campaign team might like it to stop, but they might as well try to stop the Mississippi River from flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. Chaos is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s idea of his re-election campaign. It will continue because he enjoys it; enjoys testing the boundaries of acceptable behavior and seeing what happens when he does.
This is the Biden campaign’s opening. Even people highly critical of Biden, when faced with the choice between stability or chaos, might decide the latter is just too much.
In the stability vs. chaos frame, voters won’t be asked to vote for Biden, they’ll be asked to vote for stability. It’s not exactly an uplifting message, but it’s what they’ve got. If the issue is Biden, defeat is certain.
In a recent episode of ‘Night Owls’, my podcast partner Joe Klein and I had a lengthy conversation with Joe Trippi, a well-known and very shrewd Democratic Party campaign consultant/strategist/operative (pick one). We’ve both known Joe a long time. He’s a pro.
Joe (Trippi) sketched out what he thought might be the best path to Biden’s re-election. It's a smarter version of what I wrote back in November: Make MAGA the issue, not Trump.
Voters who are going to vote against Trump are already accounted for. Voters who are torn between Trump and Biden, or can’t stand either one, or are considering a third party candidate…..those voters will decide who wins in the seven or eight “battleground” states that will decide the outcome in the Electoral College.
Those voters need an extra push away from Trump or towards Biden. For most of them, Trump is already priced in. He’s one reason why they are “undecided” in the first place (Biden is the other). Telling those voters that they’re bad people because they might vote for Trump isn’t going to produce the desired outcome. It’s going to piss them off. Voters don’t like being told what they “should” or “shouldn’t” do.
If, however, Democrats (and their media allies) move Trump to the back burner and make “MAGA” (or, more expansively, MAGA-world) the front burner issue, fence-sitters might/will consider the presidential choice in a larger and (for Democrats) more favorable context.
Trump may have a politically “reasonable” position on abortion, but MAGA (among swing voters) does not. MAGA is Alabama on abortion. Trump may vow to block any attempts to “reform” Social Security and Medicare, but MAGA-world seems hell-bent on taking a wrecking ball to even the most popular government programs. Trump may be supportive of NASA funding, but Marjorie Taylor Greene is concerned about “Jewish space lasers.” Trump may be crazy, but he’s crazy like a fox. MAGA-world is just…crazy.
That’s a “stability” vs. “chaos” frame that works, because it doesn’t demonize Trump (and therefore Trump voters) and it highlights the MAGA-world clown car and its Three Stooges (Matt Goetz, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene). What Mark Halperin calls “the Dominant Media” is all in on the “clown-car” narrative. They keep it (and will keep it) front and center. It’s true enough to cause a lot of undecided voters to think (at least) twice about the consequences of a Trump victory.
2. At the moment, it’s clear that Biden is losing the presidential campaign(s) in the seven or eight states that will determine the outcome. Part of the reason why is that two pillars of the president’s re-election effort are tenuous, at best.
Pillar one is that abortion is the killer app. It isn’t. This from Harry Enton, CNN’s senior political data reporter:
So in our new CNN poll, how does abortion affect your vote for major offices? Candidates must share your views? Only 23% of Americans say that candidates must share your views on abortion. So even if they agree with Joe Biden, it doesn’t necessarily mean they vote for him. And more than that, when we look at the top issues, the nation’s most urgent issues, look where abortion is on this list. It’s all the way down at 5%. The issues that are at the top of this list are immigration and the economy, which of course are Donald Trump’s best issues.” (Source: cnn.com)
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