In presidential politics, momentum can change quickly.
Just ask Donald Trump.
In less than a week, Trump’s legal troubles have been significantly minimized by the courts, his once-daunting campaign deficit has all but disappeared, and the president has had a disastrous debate performance Joe Biden Not only is Trump widening his lead in some polls, Biden is also clashing with many within his own party who believe the 81-year-old president is unfit to run for re-election.
“Big Mo is clearly on Trump’s side,” said South Carolina GOP Chairman Drew McKissick, using a slang term for “momentum” that he believes the Republican has been gathering over the past week. “From the national polls to the majority of the polls in the swing states, and him setting fundraising records, it’s been a great few weeks.”
The politics surrounding the 2024 race might now be seen as a split screen, with everything before last week’s debate in Atlanta on one side and everything after on the other.
In late May, Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a felony, and he had trailed Biden and Democrats in fundraising for most of the year. And even after the conviction, there was the looming prospect of future legal troubles that would haunt his campaign throughout the 2024 election cycle.
That began to change when he used his beliefs to raise large sums of money and then watched his opponent deliver a disastrous debate performance.
The latest blow to Trump came this week when the U.S. Supreme Court handed Trump a victory by saying that key presidential offices are immune from prosecution, a decision that could hamper the prosecutions he still faces. As a result of that ruling, the judge in his hush-money case in New York on Tuesday stayed sentencing after a jury found him guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments to a porn star ahead of the 2016 election.
His sentencing, originally scheduled for next week, will now not take place until September — a delay that helps Trump avoid cementing the gravity of his crime in voters’ minds by handing out a punishment. And it extends Biden’s cycle of bad news, as Trump heads to the Republican National Convention in less than two weeks.
The Biden campaign and senior surrogates have acknowledged that Biden’s debate performance was not good, but in a series of phone calls they have tried to assuage fears from supporters and donors that it was a one-off poor showing. Biden is not only up to the task of beating Trump, they argue, but he is the only one who can do so in an election cycle that has hinged on Trump as an existential threat to democracy.
“The state and the stakes of this race remain the same,” said James Singer, a Biden campaign spokesman. “America has a choice between Donald Trump: a 34-time felon who wants only to out himself, destroy our democracy, take away our rights, and make himself a dictator with immunity from the Supreme Court. And Joe Biden: a president who fights for our families, defends our democracy, fights for our rights, and delivers real results for the American people.”
Still, on Tuesday, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, became the first Democrat in Congress to call on Biden to withdraw from the 2024 race, and Democratic governors have been meeting to discuss the party’s path forward. Biden is holding a video call with some governors on Wednesday to address the growing concerns.
A series of post-debate opinion polls offers a kind of political Rorschach test.
To support their position that the past week hasn’t changed the fundamentals of the race, Biden supporters point to polls such as a CNN poll that found just 5% of registered voters said the debate changed their views, a separate 538 poll that found “the debate didn’t change many voters’ minds about either candidate,” and a Reuters poll that showed the race tied at 40-40. (NBC News did not independently verify these polls.)
Conversely, nearly all post-debate polls showed Trump doing better than Biden. Other polls found that Biden’s debate gaffes reinforced the perception that he is too old to be commander in chief. Vice President Kamala Harris also found that Biden is now doing better than Trump.
Republicans also hope Trump can now win at least one state that was recently out of the running: New Hampshire.
“I now firmly believe that Donald Trump will win New Hampshire,” said Chris Ager, chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party. “I was optimistic until last week, but I thought it was going to be a very difficult road.”
New Hampshire is a perfect example of how the past five days have turned the momentum in Trump’s favor.
No Republican has won the state since George H. W. Bush in 2000, and Biden won the Granite State by more than 7 points. But polls released after the debate show Biden leading the state by just 2 points, though such polls taken immediately after a major event sometimes fail to fully account for the implications of the event.
“After the debate, Republicans who might not have been here with Trump are now here with Trump and saying, ‘There’s no way it’s Biden,'” Ager said. “It’s solidified his base here.”
Some Biden supporters see the past week as a potential short-term drag on the president’s campaign, but in the long run it will strengthen his political base and draw them to the polls.
“This is why I think it’s been good for Joe Biden,” said John Morgan, a Florida attorney and major Democratic donor. “Now the rug’s been pulled out from under them. He [Trump] maybe never go to jail. Some people are angry about that. You know what they’re going to do? Vote.”
Morgan, who is planning a Biden fundraiser at his Florida home, said the hush-money lawsuit matters little because it was “nonsense” to begin with, but he said things like the U.S. Supreme Court’s immunity ruling on Monday could stoke the intensity.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of anger and frustration. People are going to say, ‘Why does he get to be king? Why is he above the law?'” Morgan said. “That anger is going to manifest itself in a sense of vengeance and tip the scales in Biden’s favor.”
The immunity decision was just the latest political victory for Trump in recent days, but it has raised deep concerns among Democrats and Republicans who don’t support him. It could ultimately give him virtually unchecked power in a second term and fundamentally change what the rule of law has long meant.
“Nobody, no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States,” Biden said Monday night during a White House press briefing discussing the immunity deal.
That ruling, however, provided the former president with more legal victories. Without the immunity ruling in his favor, Trump’s lawyers would not have asked for a stay of sentencing in his New York hush-money case.
The delay in Trump’s sentencing could now serve as a reminder to voters that the trial is much closer to Election Day. But after the judge granted the delay, Trump predictably took a massive victory lap.
“TOTAL EXONERATION!” Trump posted on Truth Social Tuesday afternoon, exaggerating the legal impact of the ruling and the delays in sentencing. “Obviously the Supreme Court’s brilliantly written and historic decision puts an end to all the Crooked Joe Bidens With Hunts against me, including the WHITE HOUSE AND DOJ INSPIRED CIVIL HOAXES in New York.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
