'According to one veteran political strategist, the polls showing former President Donald Trump consistently leading President Joe Biden aren't showing the full picture. In fact, he argues that it's Republicans who should be the most worried about November.
In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg — who has worked on two presidential campaigns and held senior roles at the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — stressed that Biden is in a much better position than Trump despite his middling performance in polls. He noted that despite being his party's prime standard-bearer for the past eight years, Trump has had difficulty uniting the GOP around his cause.
"Republicans have had to go vote in these primaries, and a large number are not choosing him, right? They’re not choosing MAGA. A big chunk of the Republican coalition became loosened. We’re seeing that play out in the Republican primary," Rosenberg said. "You’re also seeing it within the unprecedented rebellion against Trump happening among Republican leaders. There are two Republican former vice presidents [Dick Cheney and Mike Pence] who are not supporting Trump, a former party nominee [Mitt Romney], a former vice presidential nominee [Paul Ryan]."
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"Republicans have had to go vote in these primaries, and a large number are not choosing him, right? They’re not choosing MAGA. A big chunk of the Republican coalition became loosened. We’re seeing that play out in the Republican primary," Rosenberg said. "You’re also seeing it within the unprecedented rebellion against Trump happening among Republican leaders. There are two Republican former vice presidents [Dick Cheney and Mike Pence] who are not supporting Trump, a former party nominee [Mitt Romney], a former vice presidential nominee [Paul Ryan]."
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New Yorker journalist Isaac Chotiner confronted Rosenberg with context about how Trump is still garnering a higher percentage of his party's voters in the 2024 primary compared to general election candidates in past primaries despite the so-called "zombie vote" for former UN ambassador Nikki Haley. However, Rosenberg simply countered that by saying "none of that matters."
"What matters is in this election. In this election, you have this combination, you have an unprecedented set of circumstances where the Republican coalition has splintered," Rosenberg said. "Now you have Mitt Romney going on TV, consistently telling Republicans not to vote for Trump. We’ve never seen anything like this, and I think it would be dangerous for commentators, who in 2022 got the election so wrong, to dismiss what we’re seeing."
On his "Hopium Chronicles" Substack newsletter, Rosenberg describes himself as "one of the only ones who got 2022 right." During his interview, he referenced how numerous reputable national pollsters predicted a "red wave" in the 2022 midterms that failed to materialize despite an economy rocked by a global pandemic, and incumbent presidents typically seeing their party suffer significant losses in their first midterm election after taking office. While Republicans did end up narrowly winning control of the House of Representatives (partially due to widespread racial gerrymandering), predictions that the GOP would also take back the Senate — with some pollsters estimating as many as 54 seats — turned out to be incorrect. Rosenberg argued 2024's predictions of Trump outperforming Biden in November are similarly inaccurate.
"[I]n a campaign, when the shooting starts, and the ads go on, you would rather be the side that is telling the truth than the side that isn’t. In all the Senate polling, our numbers are holding. In the House polling, the limited House polling that we have, things are looking very encouraging," Rosenberg said. "So, structurally, the generic [ballot] has moved in our direction, and we’re now consistently in positive territory in the generic. The generic, for me, in 2022, was a very important measure that ended up being far more accurate than many of the other measures about what happened in that election."
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The Democratic strategist maintained that "the election is close and neither candidate is ahead or behind." He observed that Democrats have the task of making the case that Biden's first term has been successful and that Americans are mostly better off today than they were four years ago. He added that there were numerous things that are widely known to be true about Trump in 2024 that weren't known in 2020, and that Democrats should hammer those points relentlessly until November.
"They are that he raped E. Jean Carroll in a department-store dressing room... That he oversaw one of the largest financial frauds in American history, and has been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for that, that he stole American secrets, he lied to the FBI," Rosenberg said. "He led an insurrection against the United States, he led an armed attack on the Capitol, and he’s promised to end American democracy for all time if he’s in the White House in 2025; he and his family have corruptly taken more money from foreign governments than any family in American history; and sixth, and this is really important, is that he’s singularly responsible for ending Roe."
Click here to read Rosenberg's interview with the New Yorker in its entirety (subscription required).
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