President Joe Biden’s reelection chances may be worse than they look. And they do look great.
The 2024 presidential race is very close. Donald Trump leads Biden by less than 1 percentage point In the national electionsWhen two candidates are virtually tied Michigan And Wisconsin, according to RealClearPolitics’ polling average. But Trump has put Biden ahead of him 2 points Poles in Pennsylvania, and far more than that on the battlefields of the Sun Belt Arizona, NevadaAnd Georgia. Meanwhile, Trump’s endorsement 3.3 points higher than the rating Biden’sAccording to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.
It is not surprising, then, that The Economist’s Election Forecast Trump’s chances of winning in November are about 70 percent.
For anyone who doesn’t want a liberal renegade in the White House, these numbers are alarming enough on their face. But they’re even more troubling when one considers an inappropriate context: Trump hasn’t even launched campaign ads, while Biden continues to blanket the swing-state airwaves.
In other words: This is what the 2024 race looks like when the president enjoys a huge advantage in paid campaigns.
As of late May, the Biden campaign was running $13.6 million worth of advertising, while the Trump campaign had yet to spend a dime on TV spots. Wesleyan Media Project.
That doesn’t mean there is no Pro-Trump ads aired in the United States. Outside groups supporting the GOP candidate bought $8 million in ads. But even when you factor in such spending, pro-Biden ads still outnumber pro-Trump ads by a little more than two-to-one.
Critically, there is little reason to think that Democrats can maintain such dominance over the airwaves come November. While Biden enjoyed a fundraising advantage in the early months of the campaign, Trump and the Republican National Committee have closed the gap in recent weeks, not least because of the GOP candidate’s criminal conviction. An avalanche of contributions In his promotion. The reason Trump hasn’t spent any money on ads so far isn’t because he can’t afford them. Rather, his party seems to be choosing to hold his fire until the elections are near.
Therefore, if current polls are accurate, Biden should increase his support even as the share of swing-state ads declines.
All of this helps explain why the president’s team recently decided to change its messaging strategy: Biden’s ads will no longer go uncontested, but they may be more effective.
To that end, the presidential campaign decided to go all out Portraying Trump as a ruthless criminal.
During Trump’s trial in Manhattan for falsifying business records, Biden refrained from speaking publicly about his opponent’s legal troubles. And the president’s response to Trump’s conviction in late May was understated. is asked by Politico Asked for a reaction to the ruling, White House counsel spokesman Ian Sams replied, “We respect the rule of law, and have no additional comment.” Biden himself dictated the stance, worried that a more aggressive stance might invite the perception that he was politicizing the judiciary.
But focus groups and internal polling changed the president’s mind, according to Politico. It seems likely that Biden’s continued deficit to Trump in the polls — despite his dominance on TV — also influenced the change of heart.
Regardless, the Biden campaign’s $50 million in June includes ad buys a scar That declares, “In court, we see Donald Trump for who he is. He has been convicted of 34 crimes, including sexual assault and financial fraud.” The ad suggests that, while the Republican nominee has been preoccupied with crime, Biden has “cut health care costs and made big corporations pay their fair share.” “This election is between a convicted felon who is only out for himself and a president who is fighting for your family,” the ad said.
This framing is designed to address the fundamental flaw in past Democratic attacks on Trump’s character: Most swing voters are already convinced that Trump is a bad person but still think he can be a good steward of their interests. That’s why Hillary Clinton’s many character attacks on Trump in 2016 failed to convince enough swing-state voters.
In particular, many voters believe that Trump’s indifference to law and ethics can be an asset, enabling him to pursue the interests of the American people with all due ruthlessness. Trump has promoted that idea throughout his tenure in Republican politics, declaring at a GOP primary debate in 2016, “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I grabbed all the money I could get. I am very greedy. But now I want to be greedy for America.”
recent The New York Times Focus groups with undecided voters suggested that sentiment still resonates, with one participant saying that Trump is “a guy who does bad things, who is a bad guy but he does them for the people he represents.”
So, portraying Trump as merely a convicted felon — but a wildly self-centered one — might be a smart play. And the wedding that charges for a bread-and-butter message about Biden’s commitment to taxing the wealthy and lowering drug prices seems wise, too. The debate over Democratic messaging often creates a binary choice between the fight against Trump and populist economic policies. Biden’s new ad shows that these options are not mutually exclusive.
There is reason to suspect that campaign ads may be less powerful this election year than in the past, as major-party candidates are extremely well-known commodities at this point. On the other hand, in recent years Democrats have developed more sophisticated strategies to test advertising and there some evidence that their campaign ads were more effective as a result.
Regardless, Biden must hope that his new message about Trump’s criminality packs a punch — because, for now, the president is losing the re-election battle and his challenger hasn’t quite entered the ring.
