But Trump’s track record since the 2016 election suggests that a nonstop torrent of lies is not necessarily a winning strategy. As president, Trump’s approval rating never hit 50 percent. You might also recall that the Democrats gained 40 House seats in the 2018 off-year elections and that Trump himself was defrocked as president in 2020. For all of Trump’s bleating about the unfairness of his having been tried in Manhattan rather than Alabama for an offense that occurred in New York City, there is scant evidence that this smoke screen of duplicitous rhetoric is working. A CBS News Poll released over the weekend found that 56 percent of independents believe that the Trump jury reached the “right verdict.” Yes, Republicans currying favor with Trump can scream that a Manhattan jury is worse than a North Korean tribunal, but this over-the-top oratory is convincing no one other than the MAGA faithful.
Biden’s reluctance to come out swinging against the Trump verdict is widely interpreted as the 81-year-old president’s hidebound failure to understand that the rules of politics have changed since he was in the Senate. But there is another more plausible interpretation. The Biden campaign has a polling infrastructure that is far more sophisticated than the surveys sponsored by the media and public polling organizations. Horse-race numbers, particularly at this stage, are far less important to the Biden campaign than survey data about how best to politically frame an argument. Biden’s public restraint may be far more shaped by the campaign’s polling numbers than the president’s personal reluctance to go after a convicted felon who has taken over the Republican Party. Two years ago this month, after the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade, pundits brooded that the Democrats were caught flat-footed and did not have an aggressive messaging strategy ready to deploy. But abortion has been a powerful and winning political issue on its own terms without having to largely depend on Democratic partisan talking points.
None of this is to argue that the Democrats should model their campaign around Thumper the Rabbit’s dictum: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” But shouting “convicted felon” every seven seconds is not a magic formula for winning the votes of undecided voters in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The Manhattan verdict is part of Trump’s legacy—along with January 6, threats of “retribution” against his enemies, Covid denial, threatened immigration roundups, and mendacity on a scale rarely seen since 1930s Berlin. Trump will pay a price for all this at the polls in November, as long as the Democrats avoid making everything a partisan issue.