Buoyed by a continuing lead in the polls, Joe Biden’s campaign is gleefully characterizing failed attacks from President Trump in the way children on playgrounds use the “sticks and stones” taunt in response to ineffective name-calling.
Lines from the Trump campaign such as “Sleepy Joe” and “Beijing Biden” were “deployed unsuccessfully for over a year,” Biden’s deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said in a Sunday memo on the “false attacks.”
“This endless rotation of the same debunked smears isn’t the product of some strategic genius, it’s a sign of myopia and desperation as each successive attempt backfires, re-elevating a massive Trump liability while leaving his campaign scrambling to find something new.”
Biden leads the president by 8.7 points in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls and has significant leads in swing states such as Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
It isn’t for lack of trying on the part of the Trump campaign. The campaign spent $24 million in a spring advertising blitz that Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale compared to the Star Wars “death star.” But as Trump slipped in the polls, the message appeared to not break through the coronavirus pandemic upending normal life and the economy or racial tensions bubbling into nationwide protests and riots throughout June.
Another challenge for Trump is that polls find that voters generally like the former vice president.
Trump’s last opponent, Hillary Clinton, was widely disliked and villainized, and he benefited, in part, by voters who either turned out to vote against her or stayed home rather than voting for her.
A wave of books published in 2016 and before tore into her record, such as Dinesh D’Souza’s Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, working to define her as conniving, corrupt, and untrustworthy. There isn’t the same wave of books this year critical of Biden’s record, as Dave Weigel of the Washington Post noted.
Biden’s team is content with the candidate having a low national profile this summer, explicitly saying that they hope to make the election a referendum on Trump and his record.
Trump’s team and allies, meanwhile, are scrambling to define Biden and make the election more of a choice between two less-than-perfect candidates, as in 2016.
But for the most common attacks, the Biden campaign fires back with quips and flaunts more favorable poll numbers.
Trump operatives are gleefully amplifying the former vice president’s many verbal stumbles and misstatements, egging on perceptions that the 77-year-old has “cognitive decline.”
“Trump literally suggested Americans inject disinfectant to cure COVID-19,” Bedingfield said in the Sunday memo, referring to when Trump, in April, brought up using UV light or disinfectant “by injection inside or almost a cleaning.”
In response to continued Trump attacks that Biden is too cozy with China, Bedingfield pointed to national polls that found voters trust Biden more than Trump on dealing with China, including a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released Thursday that showed Biden with a 10-point lead over Trump on the issue.
As Trump’s campaign paints Biden as corrupt — namely by pointing to his son, Hunter Biden, serving on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while Biden was vice president and suggesting that Biden withheld aid to Ukraine because of an investigation into that company — the Biden campaign says that Trump is the one who is “abusing his office to enrich himself, his family, and his political friends at the expense of taxpayers.”
The latest attack from Trump is to tie Biden to the far-left activists calling for revolution or the destruction of non-Confederate monuments such as Mount Rushmore. But a Politico/Morning Consult national poll released last week found that 23% of voters view Biden as moderate, while only 9% think Trump is, showing that Trump has a long way to go in defining Biden as a radical or a puppet for a radical agenda.
The Biden campaign is banking on voters continuing to ignore or not agree with the attacks from Trump.
“The American people know Joe Biden. They know who Biden is, his values, his record, and why he’s running for president,” Bedingfield said.
