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Politico: Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden
A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump.
All year, Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election. But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.
“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,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely.
But Biden’s stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said.
“This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.’ It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end.’”
Despite everything, Trump is running ahead of Biden in most battleground states. He raised far more money in April, and the landscape may only become worse for Democrats, with Trump’s hush-money trial concluding and another — this one involving the president’s son — set to begin in Delaware.
The concern has metastasized in recent days as Trump jaunted to some of the country’s most liberal territories, including New Jersey and New York, to woo Hispanic and Black voters as he boasted, improbably, that he would win in those areas.
While he’s long lagged Biden in cash on hand, Trump’s fundraising outpaced the president’s by $25 million last month, and included a record-setting $50.5 million haul from an event in Palm Beach, Florida. One adviser to major Democratic Party donors provided a running list that has been shared with funders of nearly two dozen reasons why Biden could lose, ranging from immigration and high inflation to the president’s age, the unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris and the presence of third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“Donors ask me on an hourly basis about what I think,” the adviser said, calling it “so much easier to show them, so while they read it, I can pour a drink.”
The adviser added, “The list of why we ‘could’ win is so small I don’t even need to keep the list on my phone.
But Democratic critics of the campaign’s approach — while agreeing that abortion should be a winning issue — said they’re challenged when pressed by friends to make the case for why Biden will win.
“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 Pete Giangreco, a longtime Democratic strategist who’s worked on multiple presidential campaigns. “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.”
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.”
Biden’s weaker numbers bear that out. A Siena College poll released Wednesday showed Biden leading Trump in New York by only 9 points — 47 to 38 percent among registered voters. Four years ago, Biden won the state by 23 points. The president is under water with every demographic delineated in the poll — other than Black voters. Fifty-three percent of Latinos and 54 percent of whites reported having an unfavorable opinion of him. To that end, Biden released TV and radio ads in the Empire State on Thursday, ahead of Trump’s campaign rally in the Bronx.
Levine has been something of a Paul Revere in New York, sounding alarms two years ago when a Trump-aligned Republican gubernatorial candidate, Lee Zeldin, appeared to be gaining on Kathy Hochul, the moderate Democratic incumbent. Hochul narrowly held him off.
“I’m worried it’s going to be a 2022 situation, where everyone wakes up in the last seven weeks and has to scramble,” Levine said of his state, which hasn’t swung to the GOP since Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The greatest political challenge confronting the president starts with an “i,” but it’s not Israel, it’s inflation,” Torres said. “The cost of living is a challenge that we have to figure out how to manage.”
He said Biden should focus on issues around affordability and continue to tout his success in capping insulin costs in areas with high rates of diabetes, like his Bronx district.
“The election is more competitive than it should be, given the wretchedness of who Donald Trump is,” he said. “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.”
Trump has railed against blue-state officials, starting with the justice system in New York. In California, he dispatched his daughter-in-law, Lara, and one of his sons, Eric, to hold up the West Coast’s Democratic heavyweight as a cautionary tale.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/28...n-00160047
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Politico: Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden
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