President Joe Biden will once again denounce the political forces former President Donald Trump has unleashed as a threat to democracy on Thursday night.
The question is who the target audience is for this pitch three months out from the midterm elections, with public opinion on Trump settled and surprisingly stable after two presidential elections, two impeachments, a Capitol riot, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and myriad controversies.
Democrats already fear Trump’s return to the White House, though he will not be on the ballot anywhere this fall. And Republicans have remained strikingly loyal to the former president, with the few wavering outliers more than outweighed by conservatives who will reject Biden’s attempt to paint a substantial wing of the GOP as broadly anti-democratic.
BEATING EXPECTATIONS IN NOVEMBER COULD LEAVE DEMOCRATS STUCK WITH BIDEN IN 2024
Here are a few voting blocs the White House may believe will respond to Biden’s “soul of the nation” call.
Democrats The recent upsurge in Biden’s job approval rating is driven by disaffected members of his party who have come home after a flurry of bills have finally reached his desk. When that eventually fades — and there’s unlikely to be any more significant legislation before the election now that the campaign is in full swing — Trump is one way to keep it going.
Trump remains in the spotlight, both by choice and thanks to current events. He is endorsing Republican candidates in the midterm elections and holding rallies, and he is teasing a 2024 presidential bid. He is also under federal investigation for his handling of classified information, with the FBI raiding his Mar-a-Lago home to retrieve sensitive documents he took with him when he left the White House.
There is a constituency for this. The latest Wall Street Journal poll — conducted in part by Tony Fabrizio, who has done polling for Trump — found that 6% said stopping Republicans, Trump, the far Right, and fascism was the most important issue in the election. An NBC News poll that otherwise contained bad news for Biden, with low approval ratings and high dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, found that 21% listed “threats to democracy” as a top issue.
“When we talk about our democracy, when we talk about our freedoms, the way that he sees it is the MAGA Republicans are the most energized part of the Republican Party,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Thursday.
Independents Voters aligned with neither party have turned sharply against Biden. Majorities disapprove of his job performance generally and on most issues. But independents are not fond of Trump either. And a Morning Consult poll in late July showed their attitudes hardening against Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 hearings, a major part of Biden’s threats to democracy talk.
The survey found that 63% of independents held Trump at least somewhat responsible for the events leading to the attack on the Capitol. More now blame Trump for the riot than during his second impeachment.
A Quinnipiac poll found that a majority of independents, 52%, thought Trump should be prosecuted over the documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago. Less than 10% of Republicans say the same.
In the latest Gallup poll, independents helped Biden achieve his highest approval rating in a year. He is up 9 points with these voters in a month. However, Biden is still only at 44% approval in total and 40% among independents.
Suburbanites It was the suburbs that elected Biden president, flipping Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan back into the Democratic column. These voters also turned Georgia blue at the presidential level for the first time since Bill Clinton carried the state in 1992.
White, college-educated suburban women are already unhappy with the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. All three of Trump’s nominees voted with the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to send abortion back to the states. They favor Democrats on the generic ballot by 52% to 40%. Vast swaths of the GOP being branded as “ultra-MAGA” won’t help.
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“Independent voters, especially suburban women, despise [Trump],” a veteran Republican operative told the Washington Examiner. “The party did a great job pulling them back into the fold [in the 2021 Virginia governor’s race]. And now, they’re about to throw that all away.”
The White House has listed abortion as one of the major freedoms the Trump anti-democracy forces wish to take away, even though Dobbs gives democratically elected branches of government the most control of abortion policy they have had in 50 years and allows states to continue to have permissive abortion laws.
