Dietrich, like even the most circumspect observers of the 2020 campaign, does not predict that Biden will fall apart. But Democrats carry checklists in their minds of the universe of things that could alter the course of the campaign.
Biden could say something wrong in a debate, or have an awkward moment in an interview or at a press conference. Trump’s massive ad campaign could begin to resonate, hurting Biden’s favorable ratings. Biden’s campaign could make poor decisions about spending allocations in battlefield states, or his campaign coverage may sour if he loses even a percentage point or two in the polls. Presidential candidates with big leads have suffered less.
And then there are the factors beyond Biden’s control. Trump may announce a coronavirus vaccine before November, either real or imagined. And the economy may improve, a prospect Republicans are pinning on their hopes.
So much has changed in such a short period of time, so far, largely to Biden’s advantage, that it’s impossible to rule out any kind of black swan political event.
Later this week, Les Francis, a Democratic strategist and former White House deputy chief of staff in the Carter administration, e-mailed a circle of friends, including a former congressman and former administration officials, with the subject, “123 days until the election, and a sobering perspective”.
Right now, he said, “Trump is more than vulnerable.” But then he went on to outline a scenario in which Republicans maintain participation and sufficiently tighten Trump’s base.
“Do you think it can’t work?” Francis concluded. “Think again.”
Biden’s electoral leadership over Trump is significant, but not unprecedented. The RealClearPolitics poll average has Biden running ahead of Trump at just under 9 percentage points.
Richard Nixon maintained a double-digit lead over Hubert Humphrey during the summer of 1968, then was forced to fight in the fall when Humphrey rose. Twenty years later, After that year’s Democratic National Convention, a Gallup poll put Michael Dukakis’s lead over George HW Bush at 17 percentage points. As they do today, voters that summer seemed eager for change, before leaving Dukakis and voting for Bush.
“Sometimes things can seem very, very comfortable and they change, they can change very, very quickly,” said Ken Khachigian, a former Nixon aide and chief speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. “The psyche of the American voter can be dramatically affected by the events between Labor Day and Election Day.”
If he were running the Biden campaign, he said, “I would feel pretty good now, but I still wouldn’t buy property in Northwest Washington.”
Perhaps nothing is more indicative of Biden’s growing advantage than the shifting frames of reference necessary to doubt it. Throughout the Democratic primary, Biden was expected to implode so much that several other centrist candidates based their entire campaigns on expectation. Then came comparisons to 2016, and polls that put Hillary Clinton ahead at a similar point in the campaign. After it became clear that Biden was in a stronger position than Clinton, the unpersuaded looked for examples of catastrophes.
Often they settle for Dukakis and his career against Bush.
In a sense, that choice is unique to Biden. It was during the 1987 primaries, his first run for president, that a plagiarism scandal engulfed Biden’s campaign, with the discovery that he had drawn the lines of a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.
“If there’s one thing we learned from ’88, Biden is capable of ruining it in a big way,” said John J. Pitney Jr., who aided the Bush campaign in 1988 and wrote a book about those elections last year.
Pitney, who became acting director of research at the Republican National Committee, said that in the current race between Biden and Trump, “you would have to qualify [Biden] as a decisive favorite right now. “
However, he said, “What we found in 2016 is that even a few spots in some states can make a difference, so Biden shouldn’t count on a nap until September and October.”
So far, Biden seems not to be. He has raised more money than Trump for two months in a row, and his campaign recently came up with his first major general election offensive. Biden is taking more steps outside his home in Delaware, where he has remained for much of the coronavirus pandemic. He said this week that he “can hardly wait” to debate Trump.
Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who ran for president in 2008 and was initially skeptical of Biden’s decision to remain cloistered in his country, said “There is no historical context for what is happening, at least in my life”.
“I thought it was a mistake to run a discreet race,” he said. “But given Trump’s erratic behavior and mistakes … for now, Biden is running a perfect race, which means Trump is Trump, self-destructing.”
Trump has privately acknowledged that he is losing, and is desperate to correct course. Republicans see the debates as an opportunity to gain ground, as Bush did after Dukakis’ emotionless response to a question about the death penalty in the event that his wife, Kitty, “was raped and killed.”
And the Trump campaign is just beginning to saturate the airwaves with negative announcements about the alleged Democratic candidate. In a campaign not unlike Lee Atwater’s orchestrated assault on Dukakis’ fitness to serve, Trump is airing ads that show Biden as old and confused, with mental abilities that are “clearly diminished.”
Phil Angelides, the former California state treasurer who was a major fundraiser for Dukakis and who has pooled money for every Democratic nominee since, said that after Trump’s 2016 victory, “I don’t think we can give anything for seated”.
But Dukakis, he said, was not as well known to voters as Biden. And the economic conditions of that year were much better than they are now.
“It was a pretty good environment for the owner [party], unlike today, “said Angelides.
If anything, the underlying environment may be historically bad for Trump, so bad that not only was it crushed in November, but could become the immediate cause of widespread change in the American electorate.
Older, suburban voters, two pillars of the long-standing Republican coalition, are abandoning Joe Biden. Once-red states suddenly seem competitive, and the sons of Democrats Reagan march through the streets.
“The tectonic plates are changing,” said Chris Lehane, a former Clinton White House staff member who helped manage the turmoil surrounding that president’s impeachment proceedings. “On June 1, if I had told you that by July 1 the flag would fall in Mississippi, Woodrow Wilson would be off the wall in Princeton, Juneteenth would be a national holiday for businesses, Black Lives Matter would reflect the great, not such a silent majority, you would question my sanity. All that happened in 30 days. “
In the midterm elections, suburban voters rebelled against the president. And then came the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed some 130,000 people in the United States. Trump’s favorability index plummeted, and his problems were compounded by the civil unrest that followed the death of George Floyd. As Trump responded with a stream of “law and order” rhetoric, the streets were filled with protests amid a national trial on race.
“The pandemic is bad enough for Trump because he managed to overcome it,” said Paul Maslin, one of the top Democratic pollsters who worked on the Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean presidential campaigns. “What George Floyd did was serve to activate this other America to say, ‘Wait a minute, who are we?'”
Elections may be close, he said. But “I wouldn’t be surprised if she finishes between 8 and 10” points, a landslide for Biden.
Dietrich, at the National Committee for Democratic Empowerment, said on Friday: “Can we have the elections this afternoon? We would clean the table with him right now. But the polls and the momentum are a snapshot … We have absolutely no idea of where will we be in November. “
Still, he said, “I’d rather be us than they are.”
