(CNN) — President Joe Biden is framing the 2024 election in part as a referendum on Donald Trump, but it’s a tougher card to play now that he’s in office and some voters have warm memories of the former president’s chaotic tenure.
The presumptive GOP nominee is showing progress in rallying the GOP around him, as his ongoing criminal trial in New York fuels his claims that he is the victim of political persecution. Even former Attorney General William Barr, who once said Trump should not be anywhere near the Oval Office, told CNN that he would support him. And the former president met this Sunday for several hours with the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, his former rival in the Republican Party primaries. At the same time, Biden continues to struggle with key sectors of his own coalition, including younger voters, a new CNN poll shows.
With just over six months until the election, a volatile political climate is testing two flawed candidates, and it’s difficult to say which issues will be decisive in November. They range from voters’ disenchantment with the economy to abortion rights to criticism of Biden’s leadership on key issues at home and abroad, at a time of stubbornly high inflation and growing campus protests over the war. of Israel in Gaza.
There is also the unprecedented spectacle of the possible next president, who faces multiple criminal charges, including a jury verdict within weeks in his Manhattan hush money case, as he tries to make a historic comeback after his efforts to overturn the 2020 elections to stay in power.
And the impact on the career of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, an independent candidate, remains unclear, although Trump is showing increasing signs of concern about his candidacy.
Memories of Trump’s Oval Office chaos fade
The CNN poll released Sunday suggests Biden faces extreme pressure to do more to remind voters of the turmoil of Trump’s single term, which ended amid his erratic leadership in a once-in-a-century pandemic, but It now appears to some voters to have largely been a time of economic stability.
More than half, 55%, of all Americans say they see Trump’s presidency as a success, while 44% see it as a failure. That contrasts with a poll conducted just before Trump left office and days after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, when 55% of voters considered his presidency a failure. Looking at Biden’s presidency so far, 61% say it is a failure, while 39% consider it a success.
The results underscored the reverse dynamic the president must face as he seeks a second term. Four years ago, he was able to attack Trump’s management from the position of his candidate. Biden promised that the country would “get through this season of darkness” and choose “hope over fear, fact over fiction, justice over privilege.” Now, however, Trump is able to exploit Biden’s travails in office as he attempts to make the election a classic referendum on the incumbent despite his own responsibilities. The former president paints a picture of a nation in decline, adrift in a world spiraling toward disorder, almost every day during breaks in his trial in Manhattan.
“The economy is collapsing now. Now you’re seeing it, very little growth, it’s going to get worse. Oil prices are going up and you have college campuses closed everywhere. Our country is going to hell,” he said Friday. .
Inflation is lower than its peak, but still higher than when Trump was in office. And with voters tired of high prices, it is one of the former president’s most fruitful lines of attack. Biden’s approval rating on the economy is 34% in the CNN poll, and on inflation it is even worse, at 29%. And voters say economic concerns are more important to electing him in this election than in the previous two.
But the president has other weaknesses. He is facing backlash for his handling of Israel’s war in Gaza, with 71% disapproving of his leadership on the matter. A clear sign of danger among a fundamental group of voters for the Democratic coalition is the 81% disapproval of the war among those under 35 years of age.
Figures like these explain why Republicans highlight protests on college campuses. The Republican Party unanimously supports Israel in its war against Hamas. But the issue causes deep divisions in the Democratic coalition and could threaten enthusiasm for Biden among key voting blocs that could be decisive in swing states. As Republicans try to exacerbate the president’s vulnerability on this issue, House Speaker Mike Johnson last week visited Columbia University and called for the deployment of the National Guard to break up the protests. Some Jewish students have said they were threatened by protesters and encountered anti-Semitic rhetoric at some campus rallies over the past week.
As Biden attempts to temper a collision between his political interests (and what he perceives as U.S. national interests) and his support for Israel, he spoke by phone Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, underscoring his opposition to an incursion Israeli planned in Rafah, Gaza. Critics fear that the operation to wipe out Hamas fighters could cause huge civilian casualties. Such a scenario would only intensify Biden’s political exposure at home due to the crisis.
Trump and DeSantis meet
Polls can only show a snapshot of opinion at any given time.
Support levels for Trump (49%) and Biden (43%) among registered voters in a face-to-face meeting are not significantly different from what they were in January in CNN polls. And most polls show a statistical tie. CBS News polls released Sunday show Biden and Trump tied in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, several of the key swing states that will decide the election. Biden won all three in 2020 after Trump won them in 2016 in his victory over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Some Republicans now believe that the dynamics of the election favor Trump, despite his confinement to a Manhattan courtroom four days a week while his hush money trial takes place. “Your survey tells me everything I need to know about these Trump legal problems. People are paying attention to their problems, not Trump’s legal problems,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of the leading supporters of the former president, to CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
The CNN poll suggests that most Republicans are supporting Trump, even though thousands of GOP primary voters are still voting for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the race in March. And the former president appears to have more control over his party than Biden does over his. In the survey, 92% of Republicans consider Trump’s time in the presidency a success, while only 73% of Democrats say that Biden’s has been a success. And while 85% of Democrats surveyed say they support Biden, 91% of Republicans say they support Trump.
A hallmark of Trump’s political success has been his ability to crush GOP opposition and force Republicans who want a political future — or who simply want a home in the party — to bend to his will. In a new example of this phenomenon, DeSantis, who had attacked Trump before ending his primary campaign, had breakfast with the former president this Sunday, as reported by CNN’s Kristen Holmes and Kit Maher.
In an extraordinary interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins last week, the former president’s former attorney general said he would vote for Trump. Barr, who rejected Trump’s claims of voter fraud in 2020 as the former president was trying to steal the election, insisted that Biden and progressives posed a bigger threat to democracy than Trump, in part because they wanted to tell “people what kind of stoves they can use and what kind of vehicles they have to drive… Yes, those are the threats to democracy.”
And New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Haley supporter who has previously described Trump as an extremist and a loser, said before his candidate had even dropped out that he would vote for Trump if he were the nominee, even if he were a convicted felon.
Why Biden does not resonate with some voters
Biden has made the former president’s threat to democracy a cornerstone of his campaign. But it appears unlikely that Trump will be held accountable for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election result before the 2024 election, with two — one federal and one in Georgia — tied up in pretrial litigation. The president once again warns that political freedoms that Americans previously took for granted are at stake. “Each of us has a role to play, an important role to play, in ensuring that democracy endures. American democracy,” Biden said at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night.
Biden has been a successful president by many traditional measures. He has presided over a long period of historically low unemployment following the economic crisis caused by the pandemic. He has unified the West to support Ukraine, a democracy, under ruthless and illegal assault by Russia. And earlier this month, he presided over a stunningly successful US operation to protect Israel from a barrage of Iranian drones and ballistic and cruise missiles. He has passed as much or more major legislation than any of his recent predecessors, including a bipartisan infrastructure bill that Trump failed to sign into law. However, whether because of high inflation or the prolonged sense of economic insecurity that still haunts Americans, he is not getting much credit from voters.
Biden’s problems are more notable considering that he is running against the first impeached former president, who incited a revolt that nearly broke American democracy and who left office in disgrace after a single tumultuous term. “Saturday Night Live” comedian Colin Jost referred to Biden this way at Saturday’s correspondents’ dinner. “The Republican presidential candidate owes $500 million in fines for bank fraud and is currently spending his days… (in) a porn star bribery trial, and the race is tied? Nothing makes sense anymore” Jost said.
The joke went down well in the cavernous ballroom of the Washington Hilton. But outside the cities where political elites and the media congregate, Trump enjoys deep support from tens of millions of Americans waiting for an opportunity to try to return him to the White House.
