Democrats are strongly pushing back on the idea that former President Trump’s conviction will in any way help his bid to become president.
The very term “convicted felon,” Democrats say, will deter voters from supporting the former president.
They also noted that Trump could be on probation by the time he accepts the Republican nomination in July, which they said was hardly a good thing for a candidate running for the nation’s highest office.
“There is no world where a presidential candidate convicted of 34 crimes is a political asset,” the Democratic strategist said. Jamal Simmons, who worked in the Biden White House until last year. “Republicans are asking us to believe something that transcends all American political experience, namely that a convicted felon is a good candidate for president.
“You can’t tell me he’s better off with the mother from Sheboygan,” Simmons added, referring to the Wisconsin town where the battlefield raged. “It defies all common sense.”
Simmons and more than a dozen Democrats interviewed by The Hill say the conviction complicates Trump’s efforts to win back the White House, even as they acknowledged the lead Trump now has over Biden in the state polls.
They argued that the conviction is bad news for Trump and because the verdict is so important, it is getting through to voters who aren’t paying attention to the day-to-day action of the presidential race. They also said it would make it harder for Trump to win over the independents or conservative Democrats he needs to win a close battle.
“There are few political moments that break through to a mass audience and define a candidate to a broad group of voters, but the conviction of Donald Trump on 34 felony counts is one,” said Democratic strategist Tim Hogan. “For soft Democrats or center-left independents, this is a strong indicator of Trump’s selfishness and lawlessness. And many of those voters could either be pushed to the polls or more firmly back into Biden’s column as they are reminded of the chaos that follows Trump everywhere.”
“It’s a big rock in Trump’s backpack for the rest of the race,” Hogan added.
Republicans have rallied to Trump’s cause since a jury in New York found the former president guilty on Thursday of 34 counts of falsifying company records to cover up matters that may have influenced the 2016 election.
They have argued that Trump’s prosecution was politically motivated, and they have tried to portray Trump as a victim of that political system.
The former president himself has tried to make the case for the argument. As his trial dragged on, he spent weeks using the available television cameras to claim that the legal system was being used against him.
On Friday, he continued to make that argument at a press event where he took no questions and blamed Biden for the lawsuit, even though the case was brought by New York officials.
“This is all being done by Biden and his people. And perhaps even more important: its people. “I don’t know if Biden knows too much about it, because I don’t know if he knows too much about anything,” Trump said.
Biden and the White House pushed back on such accusations on Friday, calling them dangerous.
“It’s reckless, it’s dangerous, it’s irresponsible for someone to say this is rigged just because they don’t like the verdict,” the president said from the White House.
Trump has sometimes had trouble uniting the entire Republican Party, but the guilty verdict in New York appeared to have the effect of aligning some of the former president’s GOP critics with his supporters.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), two of the top Trump skeptics who had distanced themselves from the trial, both criticized the verdict. And the National Republican Senatorial Committee reported that it had the highest online fundraising day of the cycle on Thursday.
Some Democrats were less sure the verdict would hurt Trump, but they wondered whether it would really make the difference if voters focused on inflation and the economy.
“I’m not going to lie, it’s a big problem, a very big problem,” one Democratic strategist said of Trump’s conviction. “But part of me wonders if anyone will care five months from now if they still can’t pay their bills or buy a house or a car and they’re angry about inflation and Biden for it blame.”
In his speech Friday, Trump tried to turn the spotlight on Biden by blaming the president for policy issues, including immigration.
“If you look at our country, what’s happening is millions and millions of people are pouring in from all parts of the world. Not just South America. From Africa, from Asia, from the Middle East,” the former president said in the 33-minute speech in New York. “We have a president and a group of fascists who don’t want to do anything about it.”
But some Democrats said the conviction gave them a way to frame the election, and Biden should not allow Trump to shape it any other way.
As Democratic strategist Christy Setzer put it, “Will you vote for the very first felon to become president?”
Setzer and other Democrats said it’s up to Biden to make clear to their base and undecided voters over the next five months.
She said the main reason Americans “have committed to memory the worst of the Trump presidency,” including 1 million deaths from COVID-19, family separation at the border and the January 2021 Capitol insurrection, is ” because we stopped talking about it’. .”
“There is a great opportunity to reshape the contours of the campaign [and] to go on the offensive,” Setzer said. “But only if we go hard and vocal.”
Former Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), who chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, pointed to recent polls showing that voters may be more affected by a conviction than an indictment. He said this could be useful for Biden and Democrats in the fall, if only on the margins.
At the same time, Israel added: “It is merely a sad sign of our times that the words convicted felon in the presence of a presidential candidate are not automatically disqualifying.”
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