The Trump train is still on track

Someone recently joked that seeking election advice from America’s left was like choosing a British dentist to fix your teeth. Five months before the US election, Joe Biden is stubbornly trailing Donald Trump in key swing states. This is in spite of the fact that Trump is nearing a verdict in the first criminal trial of a former US president. Unless Biden can change the narrative, Trump could well be the first felon to reach the White House. Why is stopping him so difficult? 

The shortest answer is disbelief. Democrats find it hard to imagine that the US could sleepwalk into another Trump presidency. At some point voters will surely wake up. Yet there is no consensus on how to make this happen. At the start of the year, liberals had faith that the US legal system would try Trump on his more egregious indictments, notably attempting to overthrow an election. Thanks to the US Supreme Court, that prospect is vanishingly small before the November election. A guilty verdict on the hush money porn star case in New York this week would be poor consolation. 

Even here there is Democratic confusion. On Tuesday, the Biden campaign broke its long-standing decision to ignore Trump’s trials by sending Robert DeNiro and a pair of former police officers to denounce him outside the courthouse. The move was as ill-timed as it was badly thought out. It would have been better to wait for the verdict; better still not to do it at all. Many Americans think the hush money trial is politically motivated. The best stance would be not to feed that impression. 

About the only Democrat who is not suffering from rising panic about November is Biden himself, along with the veterans who run his campaign. Maybe he knows something that others do not. More likely, he suffers from the outsize optimism that afflicts most politicians. It is true that Democrats were written off before the 2022 midterm elections and went on to draw almost even with Republicans. Biden’s prospects were also dismissed in the 2020 Democratic primaries before he ran off with the nomination. Biden has twice now confounded the pundit consensus. He believes a hat trick is his for the taking. 

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But there is little he can do to clear his three toughest hurdles. The first is his age. Polls consistently show that Biden underperforms his party at all levels. This shows that voters, including a majority of Democrats, are more worried about Biden in particular than about his party’s message. It is too late for Biden to step down for a younger candidate. Nor would a Kamala Harris nomination fix the dilemma. Her approval ratings are as low as Biden’s. 

The second is the economy. Democrats are frustrated that Biden gets no credit for the fact that the US has easily the fastest growing economy in the west. This came on the back of the rapid vaccine rollout at the start of Biden’s presidency. Eighteen months ago most economists were predicting a 2024 recession. Wage growth now exceeds inflation. Yet the electorate’s take is unchanged; most Americans think they were better off under Trump. 

Many Democrats believe the problem is poor messaging. If voters would only digest the numbers they would rectify their error. More likely, it is an interest rate problem. While inflation remains well above the 2 per cent target, the US Federal Reserve will be reluctant to start cutting rates. Voters will thus head to the polls feeling poorer than they should. Young people are priced out of the housing market. Biden can do little about that. 

The third is how hard it is to reach voters nowadays. The most partisan Americans on both sides are also the likeliest to read newspapers and watch broadcast news. Biden’s biggest slippage in support comes from Americans under 30 and non-white, blue-collar voters — the demographics that are least likely to consume conventional news. In theory, technology makes it easy to target people. In practice, social media has balkanised access to information and destroyed trust in its vectors. Even if Biden could fix his messaging problem, it is much harder to reach audiences than it was even a decade ago. 

The exception to that is Trump, who has no difficulty in attracting eyeballs. My assumption has been that Trump will be unable to stop this election from turning into a referendum on him; he cannot help himself. But it is conceivable that this will work to his advantage. Notoriety beats obscurity. If swing voters still do not know — or care — about Trump’s plans for US democracy, they will get the government they deserve.

edward.luce@ft.com