The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 29
This week:
- Trump was nearly killed, but Biden’s campaign message is fully dead
- Unique convention opportunity for Trump as Democrats bite their tongues
- Assassination likely also ends Dems’ push to replace Biden
President 2024
Assassination attempt: Obviously, the big story this week of the Republican National Convention is and will remain the historic assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, which killed one attendee at the rally and seriously injured at least two others.
Although we are stil learning about the assassin and his motives, Trump was shot by someone who clearly spent a great deal of time planning the hit and acted with malice aforethought. His survival was a matter of inches.
The shooter could have been simply deranged, like the man who shot RFK. But he shot Trump, so it is likely he has something against him. At a time when it is very common to claim that any sort of political rhetoric is incitement, it is only natural that people will bring up the massive volume of unhinged anti-Trump rhetoric that has become the coin of the realm in mainstream media commentary and popular culture.
Republican convention: It would be a mistake to assume that this act of terrorism will magically give Trump momentum or sufficient sympathy to improve his status with voters. It probably won’t cause much movement in the polls, whenever they are next taken, on its own. What it does, however, is blunt any momentum Democrats had gained in their anti-Trump messaging campaign as the GOP enters its convention. This instantly undermines most of their efforts at counterprogramming.
The assassination means that Trump will have a unique opportunity this week to cut through well as the usual cheap and petty attacks that parties launch at one another during conventions. His campaign has already telegraphed an intention to campaign on a theme of national unity. This could strike just the right tone. If he plays his cards right, Trump might even be able to get skeptical swing voters to give him another chance. We will see after the convention whether he gets a big “bump” from it, as candidates tend to do.
Also, this puts a damper on any plans on the right to generate controversy over the new and in some ways watered-down GOP platform.
Democrats: Democrats, meanwhile, find themselves on ice. Some of them have come to a dark conclusion: “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency,” an anonymous senior Democrat told Axios.
Biden has effectively been forced to pause his campaign for several days. And it suddenly becomes a huge problem for Biden that he has no message except attacking Trump as a threat to democracy itself. It is simply too dangerous to keep parroting the very message that probably motivated the would-be assassin to act.
After all, if you really think that Trump is an existential threat to the republic — that if he were to win there would never be another election, as Biden himself and major Democratic luminaries such as Hillary Clinton have either hinted or stated explicitly — you may well approve of the assassin’s actions.
The Washington Post front-page headline on the day of the assassination attempt was, “Biden trains fire on Trump.” We do not bring this up as a shot at journalists using bellicose language to describe political campaigns, but rather as an illustration that this is Biden’s entire campaign strategy. He has to make the race a referendum on Trump, because he has no record to be proud of or promote, and because his own job approval rating is so low.
In the wake of the assassination attempt, and of his branch of government’s abject failure to protect the Republican nominee adequately, Biden has no choice but to tone down the rhetoric. As one anonymous Democratic strategist put it to NBC News, “That message is dead.”
Biden-fitness: Just as Biden loses valuable days to attack Trump because of the assassination, he and his party continue wasting time and focus thanks to his shockingly bad debate performance more than two weeks ago.
At first, it seemed that Biden was genuinely under threat. Then his administration and campaign rallied allies to his cause. Then his grip on the party seemed to weaken again, to the point that we were only 95 percent certain that the Biden side will outlast the Harris side of this fight (those are the only two sides worth mentioning). We now believe Biden is 99 percent safe for renomination, for reasons explained below. But in truth, the outcome would not change the damage that this entire controversy is doing to the party.
Every day Democrats spend debating Biden’s fitness and scheming to remove him from the ticket or replace him with someone else, is a day they and their media organs are off-message and even at cross-purposes with each other. Their money and time is being wasted. Their fundraising efforts are less fruitful.
Instead of motivating supporters, marshalling resources or persuading undecideds, Democrats are holding a public and mostly destructive internal debate over whether Biden’s senility is sufficient grounds for them to swap out their only viable candidate and give some replacement three months at most to completely reinvent the campaign and come up with a completely new pitch to the voters.
Biden saved? However, we believe the assassination attempt against Trump, given its obvious newsworthiness and historic nature, may have a crossover effect that helps Biden consolidate power and secure the Democratic nomination. This may allow him to pull his people together and move past the unnaturally prolonged news cycle that had up to that point been obsessed with his cognitive impairment.
The assassination gives Biden an opportunity to move the narrative forward to a message more favorable to himself. And it may have already worked, as Democrats who had been trying to pressure Trump to drop out have mostly backed off.
“The only positive thing to come out of last night for Democrats,” one consultant said on Sunday, “is we are no longer talking about Joe Biden’s age today.”
Electoral Map: The national polls remained largely unchanged after the Trump-Biden debate, and no new surveys have been released since the assassination.
The only state polled in the past week is Wisconsin, where Trump holds a small but persistent lead.
There are no new changes to this week’s electoral map, courtesy of 270toWin.com. Even before the assassination attempt and before the debate, Biden was already far behind in Electoral College terms. His only hope of winning now is to carry every single blank state on this map (and Nebraska’s Second Congressional District), plus Pennsylvania or some other state or combination of currently Trump-leaning states worth 19 or more electoral votes.
House 2024
Missouri-1: Maybe left-wing Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) can cure cancer, but she probably can’t save herself from losing the upcoming Aug. 6 primary election. She trails prosecutor Welsey Bell (D), 56 to 33 percent, according to a new poll taken for the CCA Action Fund. The group has worked working against far-left candidates in mostly black and Hispanic districts, including Jamaal Bowman, who lost his primary recently in New York.
Virginia-5: Rep. Bob Good (R) is pressing for a recount in his 374-vote loss to state Sen. John McGuire (R). But given that he trails by more than half a percentage point, it seems unlikely that he will prevail. Good picked the wrong moment to cross Trump, who endorsed McGuire and appeared with him virtually at a last-minute campaign event.
