WASHINGTON — With former President Donald Trump a convicted felon, the Democratic Party is grappling with a choice that will help define this year’s presidential race: Should it try to push his crimes to the center of the election?
The path the Democrats take cannot be determined by the president alone Joe Biden‘s fortunes, but also, they say, the future of American democracy. Democrats at all levels of the party widely believe that a vengeful Trump poses a serious threat to the nation. They are simultaneously happy to see him found guilty and fear that he has a supernatural ability to survive even this political danger.
Post-ruling interviews with more than 50 Democrats — including current and former members of Congress, statewide elected officials, veteran strategists, Democratic National Committee members and local officials — showed a party hungry to win over voters. saying that Trump’s conviction makes him unfit and worrying that Biden might not use the pulpit of the presidency to press that argument.
Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times
“I really think it’s every Democrat’s duty to remind every voter that Donald Trump is now a convicted felon and how unprecedented this is,” said former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, a Democrat who ran for the presidential nomination. against Biden in 2020.
Even as Democrats broadly pressure Biden to profit from Trump’s crimes, there is a spectrum of opinion on how much we should focus on them.
Biden himself has deployed a two-pronged strategy, speaking cautiously about Trump’s legal troubles even as his campaign grows more aggressive: On Friday evening, he fired off a statement that referred for the first time to “convicted felon Donald Trump.”
But Biden, seeking to avoid false claims that he is orchestrating Trump’s criminal cases, struck a restrained tone as he addressed the sentencing at the White House on Friday. He said the verdict showed the strength of the US justice system and emphasized that he had nothing to do with the prosecution, as Trump has wrongly argued.
“This jury was chosen the same way every jury in America was chosen,” Biden said. “It was a trial that Donald Trump’s lawyer was part of. The jury heard five weeks of evidence – five weeks – and after careful deliberation, the jury reached a unanimous verdict.”
Fellow Democrats were far less cautious and were happy to say what Biden did not.
“That Trump paid hush money to a porn star and jurors found he falsified company records to cover it up is just one short, tawdry chapter of a much bigger story: Trump is an aspiring tyrant intent on ruling the United States, not to lead. ” said Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga.
The consequences of Trump’s conviction for the 2024 campaign remain unknown. But Democrats hope it will resonate with voters who long ago waited out a dispiriting campaign between two unpopular candidates.
“I think it’s the contrast: the man of lies and chaos versus the man who’s trying to make this country work for everyone,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
Although polling leading up to the verdict was inconsistent and based on a hypothetical outcome, an early May survey from the Democratic firm Navigator suggested the conviction could change views of Trump. In that poll, 47% of registered voters — including 46% of independents and 35% of Democrats — predicted that Trump would not be convicted in New York court. These numbers indicate that many Americans were surprised.
“The magic of Donald Trump is that he has been able to dodge everything,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. and the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “I wondered if they would split the baby and not convict him of everything.”
Internal polling from the Biden campaign shows the belief will resonate more strongly with voters who are not yet paying close attention to the election, especially young people and those without a college degree — two groups Biden needs to reach. But for many voters, the importance of the process pales in comparison to issues like the economy and immigration.
Biden’s comments Friday on the sentencing signaled that he plans to stick to his strategy of leaving the most caustic attacks on Trump’s legal troubles to allies and outside groups while emphasizing the rule of law. Campaign aides say abortion rights, democracy and the economy will remain central to the president’s reelection message. In his remarks, Biden leaned heavily on the idea that the jury had weighed all the evidence and reached an appropriate verdict in the time-honored tradition of American law.
James Carville, a Democratic strategist who worked for Bill Clinton, said Biden should strike a patriotic tone rather than a partisan one.
“The jury, the jury, the jury – for God’s sake, hide under the jury’s clothes,” Carville said. “And you don’t have to say much more.”
Biden seems to feel the same way. On his campaign account Friday, he simply posted: “No one is above the law.”
Other Democrats energetically emphasized Trump’s criminal status and sought to tar his Republican allies by association. House Majority PAC, the super political action committee that backs Democratic House candidates, issued press releases Friday declaring that a large number of Republican incumbents who had defended Trump are “supporting crime.”
“If you can’t see through Trump right now, you’re blind,” said William Shaheen, a Democratic National Committee member from New Hampshire who is a former state judge and married to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat. “If I were the judge, he would be serving a prison sentence.”
The biggest question for Democrats now is what Trump’s conviction means for the 2024 campaign. He has led Biden in polls from battleground states for months, and party officials have described focus groups of voters as deeply sour on the economy and the president. The verdict marked a rare moment of optimism, with Democrats saying in interviews that they were becoming more hopeful about Biden’s chances.
“The most important thing I see is a significant remobilization of an anti-Trump movement in America,” said Faiz Shakir, the manager of Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. “There is no doubt that the energy right now reinjected.”
Democratic National Committee members, many of whom have been concerned about Biden’s dismal poll numbers for months, had plenty of advice for Biden.
William Owen of Tennessee suggested the campaign should start advertising on Christian media in battleground states to reach parishioners where he believes the conviction would conflict with their values. John Verdejo of North Carolina said Biden “shouldn’t take the high road.” Larry Cohen of Maryland, leader of the progressive group Our Revolution, said Biden should “move from conviction to the issue of billionaires like Trump using their economic power to build political power.”
Although Democrats have enjoyed a long string of electoral victories since Trump came to the White House, it’s not hard to find people in the party who still harbor some post-traumatic stress from his 2016 ascension.
Julián Castro, the former housing secretary who emerged last year as a Biden skeptic within the party, said Friday he had more confidence the president would win re-election after Trump’s conviction — but he remained a bit skittish .
“I would be lying if I said that this alone is what makes me think that I am now confident that Donald Trump will lose in November,” Castro said. “Trump is equally or somewhat ahead in these battleground states. That is very worrying for me and for many people.”
Democrats in battleground states said their experience with the kind of disengaged voters who often decide close races suggested the Biden campaign and its allies had a lot of work to do to change people’s minds based on Trump’s beliefs.
“The idea that all politicians are corrupt is quite prevalent among the few voters,” said Danielle Johnson, a Democrat running for a state Assembly seat in western Wisconsin. “It’s not easy to paint a picture that this is a clear ‘good guy-bad guy’ situation.”
After celebrating Thursday, Democrats were confronted with the reality of an agitated Republican Party. Trump’s campaign said Friday evening that he had raised nearly $53 million in the 24 hours after the jury’s verdict.
Soon, the Biden campaign had sent out fundraising appeals from California Governor Gavin Newsom (“I don’t need to tell you about Donald Trump’s conviction yesterday”) and actor Mark Hamill (“You may know me from my role as Luke in ‘ Star Wars'”). The Biden campaign declined to make public fundraising totals in the aftermath of the verdict.
And yet, no matter how bleak Democrats feel about Biden’s standing in the polls or his ability to inspire voters, they will have Trump, a convicted felon, as their opponent in the general election for the next 22 weeks. That’s enough to put the wind in our sails, at least for now.
“I’ve always believed that this is a very tough election that will be very close because Trump is such a convincing carnival barker,” said Jim Roosevelt, a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee from Massachusetts. “Previously I had a confidence level of 47% and now I am at 51%.”
c.2024 The New York Times Company
