Three-and-a-half years after President Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, many Democrats remain haunted by her failure to defeat the most unqualified, dangerous, and reckless person — in their view — ever to sit in the Oval Office.
To win in 2016, this line of thinking goes, Trump must have had some secret sauce, a hidden political genius invisible to most, which allowed him to triumph over an admirable figure such as Clinton, a former first lady, senator from New York, and secretary of state. That includes Trump cracking the vaunted “blue wall,” winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in six straight elections between 1992 and 2012.
Now, with Democrats running to deny Trump a second term, on a ticket to be headed by former Vice President Joe Biden, a great debate rages in the party over the extent of Trump’s political smarts and acumen.
One high priest of Democratic establishment politics, Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director for President Barack Obama’s White House, contends that Trump is effectively a political paper tiger. Democrats are scared of their own political shadow heading into the fall fight between Biden and Trump, Pfeiffer said in a recent episode of Pod Save America, a weekly show he hosts with three other Obama administration speech-writing alums, which has a wide following among uber-partisan Democrats.
“He stumbled ass-backward into the presidency, on a wave of voter suppression and third-party voting,” Pfeiffer said. “In a collection of black swan circumstances involving Jim Comey and the Russians, and all of that. And an Electoral College advantage.”
Other professional Democrats aren’t so sure, warning about Trump’s raw political skills, no matter how much the party’s rank-and-file despises him.
“Donald Trump’s presidency has been a series of missteps and miscalculations. His inept handling of the COVID-19 pandemic is testimony to that. But that shouldn’t lull Joe Biden to sleep,” Democratic consultant Brad Bannon told the Washington Examiner.
Describing Trump as “a shrewd political operator who adeptly measured the pulse of an angry electorate and was masterful in his handling of the media” last go-around, Bannon warned Biden’s advantage in national surveys could disappear by Election Day.
“Donald Trump is much better at marketing than he is at governing,” Bannon said. “The worst mistake Biden could make is not to take Donald Trump seriously during the next six months on the virtual campaign trail.”
Nationally, Biden has an average 6.3 percentage point lead over Trump, according to RealClearPolitics calculations. The same data has him ahead in the battleground states of Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, but he trails in North Carolina.
Bob Mulholland, a California Democratic National Committee member, said Trump continues to pose a threat because of his innate ability “to talk with the everyday voter,” especially in states with higher-than-average white populations.
“The day that Trump kicked off his campaign with ‘Mexicans are rapists’ got him the GOP nomination, and us Democrats let Secretary Clinton down by talking and organizing with ourselves, which allowed ‘Bleachman’ in second place to win the presidency,” Mulholland said, referring to the president’s comments about injecting disinfectant as a possible way to combat COVID-19.
For Northeastern University’s Costas Panagopoulos, how Trump adapts to the political terrain amid the COVID-19 outbreak will determine whether he can reclaim the White House, since some past supporters may now see the benefit of a commander in chief with policy experience.
“Democrats likely learned from 2016 not to take any votes for granted and not to underestimate any opponent, but they likely view 2016 as an outlier election. They will most likely return to seasoned traditions in 2020,” Panagopoulos said.
