After days of rampant civil unrest plaguing cities around the country, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are refining their messages on how to best restore peace. While the president returns to his “law and order” pitch from 2016, despite cities burning under his watch, his challenger is currently playing the role of listener who can help restore race relations.
“I am your president of law and order,” Trump said in a Monday night address as law enforcement officers dispersed protesters outside the White House, threatening to send military forces to cities around the country to end nationwide looting, vandalism, and violence.
The next morning, Biden delivered a softer, somber message in an address from Philadelphia’s City Hall focused largely on the emotional reasons for the uprising: the death of black Minneapolis man George Floyd after a white police officer held a knee on Floyd’s neck.
“It’s time to listen to those words,” Biden said of Floyd’s dying words, “I can’t breathe.” “To try to understand them. To respond to them, respond with action.”
That contrast only happened after the two candidates took days to settle on those messages.
As storefront windows were smashed, Trump was reluctant to come out against the carnage forcefully, only mentioning it in tweets and during a speech at the site of a Saturday NASA space shuttle launch. Much of the indecision surrounding his response comes from conflicting advice offered by senior aides to the president, according to individuals familiar with the matter.
Within his reelection campaign, some advisers, namely Jared Kushner, believe the GOP has a real opportunity in dramatically increasing its share of the black vote. A hard line against the protesters, his thinking goes, could alienate a constituency key to winning a second term in the White House, particularly as Trump sees his poll numbers slip in swing states.
Other advisers saw Trump’s silence as a betrayal of his core supporters and potentially catastrophically damaging to his hopes of winning white suburban voters, who generally favor a strong police response to civic disorder.
Traditionally, the “law and order” narrative favors Republican challengers. Richard Nixon famously attacked Democrats and President Lyndon Johnson for skyrocketing crime rates and political instability in the late 1960s. In 1980, Ronald Reagan railed against abuses in welfare programs and “strapping young bucks” buying steaks with taxpayer-funded food stamps.
But in this November election, the incumbent is a Republican who centered his first and only election on beating back the “American carnage” that engulfed the country’s urban core.
“For too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “And the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
Throughout President Barack Obama’s tenure, Trump routinely mocked his predecessor’s supposed fecklessness in stopping the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, while claiming that countries such as China were delighted by our dysfunction.
Trump’s delay in forming a cohesive message presented an opportunity for Biden to pitch himself as the candidate who can help restore peace.
“He has a leadership opportunity right now,” Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and founder of the New Democrat Network, said of Biden. “Joe Biden should be imagining himself not just as a presidential candidate, but the leader of an opposition.”
Biden’s appeals differ from those previously offered by Nixon or Reagan. Although he has shown gentle disapproval of the riots and property damage, he directs moral indignation at “systemic racism” and accuses Trump of fanning “the flames of hate.”
“The truth is what’s needed now is deescalation,” Rosenberg said, referring to Biden’s difficult balancing act for reassuring voters he can stop the rioting without reverting to harsh crackdowns. “The police caused this problem. The police are responsible for having created the unrest.”
A written statement from Biden released just after midnight on Sunday lightly condemned violence in the demonstrations, leaving critics little room to claim Biden was ignoring the destruction.
“Protesting such brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response. But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not,” he said.
On Monday, Biden made clear that his message was about listening and growing. In his first in-person campaign event since coronavirus lockdowns started in mid-March, Biden held a roundtable with community leaders in a predominantly black AME church in Wilmington, Delaware. Later in the day, he gathered four mayors, including running mate contender Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, to talk about the civil unrest and police relationships.
“It is my commitment to all of you to lead on these issues — to listen,” Biden said Tuesday.
The question for Biden is whether a challenger’s message of sympathy and listening rather than law and order will appeal to voters. A Morning Consult poll released Tuesday shows voters giving mixed signals, making the answer unclear: While 57% strongly or somewhat support the ongoing protests, 58% of voters support calling in the military to supplement police forces.
