Lacking Campaign Guidance, Biden Allies Fritter Away Opportunities Against Trump
Lacking Campaign Guidance, Biden Allies Fritter Away Opportunities Against Trump
What we have here is...failure...to communicate.
Here’s a quick Tuesday roundup:
Donald Trump got caught signaling to his most fervent supporters that he intends to consolidate power and torment his political opponents by creating a unified American Reich, supplanting constitutional government.
After insisting for weeks that he would testify in his own defense at his first criminal trial—and having his counsel insist in court not just that he should be acquitted, but that he’s innocent—Trump’s lawyers rested their case. They called just one substantive witnesses whose testimony turned out to be disastrous. Trump did not take the stand.
Several dozen House Democrats signed a letter calling on Samuel Alito to recuse himself from January 6-related cases, but only after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin foreclosed the possibility of holding hearings on the justice’s overt pro-MAGA partisanship.
It turns out Trump’s lawyers found even more stolen classified documents after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago two years ago, including in his bedroom. Some of them had been scanned on to a private laptop by a political aide.
These are just a few splashy news developments that crossed my transom yesterday. See if you can find reference to them here. Spoiler for those on the move: It’s the New York Times front page, and none of those stories made the cut.
Obviously I disagree with whatever editorial judgment deemed all of these items too unimportant to splash across page one. But it’s worth thinking through one reason why.
Most importantly: Only the first development generated meaningful (though limited) response from Democrats. Joe Biden issued a brief campaign video about it. Vice President Kamala Harris denounced Trump at an SEIU convention. But by then Trump had removed the offending Reich video from his official account and blamed the whole thing on a junior aide.
Sending Justice Alito a letter is a response of a kind, but one of resignation—after all, Democrats don’t control House committees, and Senate Democrats have decided to add the latest Alito offense to a growing pile of under-investigated Supreme Court corruption controversies.
Trump and his unscrupulous allies can be overwhelming. Even with their respective institutions operating at peak performance, journalists would have a hard time not becoming desensitized to constant transgression, and Democrats would lack the time and resources to home in on all of their many scandals.
But I have started to suspect there’s a deeper breakdown here: It’s not just that Democrats are too passive and risk-averse to pounce, but that they lack guidance about where and how to direct their efforts. The Biden campaign has placed excessive faith in the power of paid media, and thus underrates the importance of providing its allies and surrogates basic input on which issues to amplify and what to say about them.
AD, NAUSEAM
Amanda Litman, the cofounder of Run for Something, estimates that Democrats have spent at least $70 million on TV ads in the past few months, and that it has bought them basically nothing. Biden got a small boost from his State of the Union address—a free media event—but the ads haven’t moved the needle.
And going forward, there’s reason to suspect paid media will yield even lower returns. Biden has enjoyed a huge money advantage over Trump all year. But now Trump is out-raising Biden—he out-raised Biden in April, at least—so the gap is closing, and the marginal advantage of these ad dollars will shrink.
That’s where tactics and surrogates should come into play.
Earlier this week, I caught a revealing conversation between MSNBC host Jen Psaki (who was recently Biden’s White House press secretary) and James Carville, the longtime Democratic Party strategist. I think it’s fair to assume their implicit purpose was to help Biden help himself. Here’s what Carville said: