“The more they learn about what he’s done, the more they agree,” Biden replied. He then offered examples, but like the challenges that plagued his entire debate performance, they were messy and unclear, and focused heavily on the events in Charlottesville in 2017. In his closing comments, Biden made no mention of threats to democracy, instead focusing on inflation.
This may have been an oversight, or it may have been intentional — perhaps the focus was on broadening Biden’s appeal to voters who weren’t convinced by his claims about what a second term for Trump would mean — but if the idea was that Trump was a particular and immediate threat to the country, that certainly didn’t come across in Biden’s remarks.
This is clearly a key reason why Biden is so popular: A CNN poll released Tuesday found that voters who say they will support Biden in November chose “protecting democracy” as the most important issue in the election, more than twice as many as the second most popular issue, the economy. And more than half of those who plan to vote for Biden say they will do so because they oppose Trump, rather than because they like the incumbent president.
Then it got even worse: On Tuesday, Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) wrote an essay that effectively dismissed the idea that President Trump poses a threat to the nation.
“Biden’s poor performance in the debate didn’t surprise me,” Golden wrote, “and it didn’t upset me as much as it did others, because the outcome of this election has been clear to me for months. I’m not going to vote for Biden, but Donald Trump is going to win, and I’m OK with that.”
After all, he later added, “[p]”The fixation on a Trump victory ignores the strength of our democracy,” Golden said, as evidenced by the reaction to the storming of the Capitol and the millions of Americans who support the idea. The election is “about the economy, not about democracy,” Golden said.
Rep. Marie Grusenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) echoed Golden’s prediction in a television interview: “I think the truth is that Biden is going to lose to Trump.”
They’re not alone in that belief: A Siena College poll conducted for The New York Times last month found that about one-fifth of Biden supporters think Trump will win the election. (About one-in-eight Trump supporters think Biden will win.)
And Golden and Grusenkamp-Perez have incentives to treat a Trump victory as likely or even a big deal: They each represent districts that Trump won in 2020. Distancing themselves from an unpopular president in a moment of crisis, or focusing the November election on their own, makes sense in that context. There’s a reason Golden’s essay pivoted from questions about the presidency to the need for strong members in Congress, and it’s not because he’s seeking reelection to the White House.
But Golden’s message is notably at odds with what his party has repeatedly asserted: If democracy survives after a second Trump victory, even if it takes millions of defenders to survive, then all talk of November’s election results has been exaggerated. People who came to vote for Biden could just stay home if they wanted to — except, of course, voters in Maine’s 2nd congressional district, who should vote for Golden.
The truth is, we don’t know what will happen if Trump wins in November. We know that Trump and his allies have plans to reform the government and concentrate power in the White House, an exceptional case that has been bolstered by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on immunity. But no one can say for sure that democracy will be significantly undermined. In retrospect, such concerns may seem like “pearl-clutching.”
But the Democrats’ argument has been that even moderate, avoidable risks are worth avoiding. They, and Biden in particular, have effectively made the argument that Trump poses such a risk. Biden has largely ignored it, while members of his own party have treated a Trump victory as an imminent risk, undermining the effort.
This, in turn, will increase the likelihood of Trump’s victory, making that risk more difficult to avoid.
