MILWAUKEE — Republicans can’t remember the last time they had it this good. A disciplined and newly introspective presidential candidate. Good polling. A positive news cycle driven by sympathetic headlines after a failed assassination attempt.
Said one former Trump White House official, “I’m still shocked the other shoe hasn’t dropped.”
They checked their phones and pinched themselves with each news alert, marveling at their good fortune every new day of the Republican National Convention. Former President Trump can’t lose, Republicans say publicly, while across the country, Democrats privately say to President Biden that he can’t win. Inevitability or dread, depending on political persuasion – those are the vibes 108 days before the election.
Thursday night, the balloons dropped, and Trump formally accepted a third consecutive presidential nomination in Wisconsin, while across the country, Biden hunkered down in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He has COVID-19.
And a coup. It started in earnest with George Clooney. The Academy Award-winning actor broke the seal when he questioned the mental acuity of the president in a New York Times op-ed, signaling to other Democrats that it was safe to question the top of the ticket.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Biden, according to Politico, that he is about to drag down the Democratic ticket. California Rep. Adam Schiff told the Los Angeles Times it was time for Biden to “pass the torch.” Former President Obama, per the Washington Post, concedes in private that Biden might not have what it takes to hold onto the White House.
But Biden won’t go. The elder statesman insists he is all there, a case made exponentially harder with every senior moment. The most recent embarrassment? When the president forgot the name of Lloyd Austin during an interview with BET, referring to his secretary of defense only as “the black man.”
The nightmare won’t stop for Democrats, and Republicans are afraid they will wake up from a dream. “They’re fractured. They’re not supporting each other. They’re a pit of vipers over there right now,” a senior Trump advisor told RealClearPolitics, pausing only to add the obvious: “which is fantastic.” Sensing an opportunity to keep that chaos going, the Trump campaign rejected the proposed dates for a vice-presidential debate.
No, said Brian Hughes, a senior Trump advisor, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance will not square off with Vice President Kamala Harris because “we don’t know who the Democrat nominee for Vice President is going to be.” To go ahead and debate, Hughes added, “would be unfair” to “whoever Kamala Harris picks as her running mate.” It was stick-in-the-eye disguised as a scheduling memo.
The Democratic National Convention is slated for August 19, meaning the Trump campaign bought themselves another four weeks to feed the flames, implying all the while that Harris, not Biden, will be the presidential nominee. It is also an ironic partisan twist.
Democrats wanted Trump. They blitzed his primary opponents to clear his path, confident that with a few updates, their 2020 playbook could deliver them a 2024 victory. They even sought help from the Almighty: Dick Harpootlian, a longtime friend of the president and husband to the current U.S. ambassador to Slovenia, admitted early in the Biden administration that “we pray” Trump will win the nomination so he could lose the general election.
Now Republicans are desperately hoping Biden will hang on. They were ecstatic when the president seemed to right the ship slightly during a press conference at the NATO Summit. Sources inside Trump World cheered the president’s passable performance last week. Why? Because they are now the ones confident in a 2024 rematch. They may be disappointed.
“If reports prove accurate, Republicans will have made history by spending an entire convention attacking a candidate not in the race,” observed former GOP strategist Stuart Stevens, referencing the possibility that Biden may step aside. “Genius, guys. Just genius.”
The analysis was only half accurate. If Republicans used precious time and money attacking a candidate not long for the limelight, then Democrats expended just as much, or more, of their resources preparing for an aborted Biden run. And Harris, his most obvious successor, took her fair share of hits at the RNC. “I hope and pray that they don’t take that nomination away from him,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reportedly said of Biden during remarks to the Iowa delegation. “We want him to be the Democratic nominee. And I will be rooting for him.”
All the talk about swapping Biden for Harris has given Republicans an opportunity to turn around a talking point. “I have no idea what Democrats will do,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told RCP, “but it seems pretty undemocratic for Obama, Pelosi, and Schumer to force President Biden out of the race after Democrats already voted.” Trump’s own pollster, John McLaughlin, pointed to the 14 million primary votes cast for the president, telling RCP that Biden had “earned the nomination.”
Aware of the irony, he added, “Let the bosses decide in the backroom in Chicago? That’s not very democratic.”
Republicans already have a line of attack if Harris becomes the nominee. First, they will start with the policies of the current president. “Kamala Harris, even if she becomes the nominee, is saddled with all the failures of the Biden administration. There’s no way for her to distance herself from her boss and the failures of the last three and a half years,” said Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager and an advisor to the Republican National Convention.
“She can try and put lipstick on a pig,” Lewandowski told RCP. “But it’s still a pig.”
Second, if Biden admits he is not up to the job, contrary to the longstanding claims of his staff, Republicans will demand to know what Harris knew and when she knew it. “I don’t think that Biden’s cognitive decline happened the day before the presidential debate,” Lewandowski deadpanned.
“There’s no way, if Kamala Harris was involved in any of the major decisions in the last three and a half years, she didn’t recognize it,” he continued. “And she should have been very clear and candid with the American people. She hasn’t been.”
Whomever Republicans run against, coming out of Milwaukee, they are supremely confident. Charlie Kirk, a political activist and close Trump family friend, told RCP that taking on Harris would be “slightly harder” than running against Biden but wouldn’t amount to “that big of a shift.” Some polling shows Harris with better odds of beating Trump than Biden, although not by much.
For his part, McLaughlin said his numbers from June, the ones Trump is reading, have the former president up over Biden by two points. In a head-to-head with Harris, the Republican leads by five points. As GOP delegates catch their flights out of Milwaukee, the RealClearPolitics Average shows Trump beating Biden by three points.
The polling picture isn’t expected to change dramatically once the convention wraps. “They’ve tried to put him out of business. They’ve tried to put him in jail. I told him the only crime he’s committed is that ‘you’re ahead in the polls,’” McLaughlin said of his conversations with the Republican nominee. “He is already ahead in the polls, so I don’t expect an immediate bounce after the convention, but hopefully we continue to move up. He is ahead in all the battleground states, or at worst, he is tied.”
That analysis mirrors the RCP Average of battleground states. Trump leads in each of them, and on Thursday, he moved ahead of Biden in Virginia – the worst kind of development for Democrats.
Delegates will decamp from here, but Vance will not. The Republican presidential candidate will be dispatched to the upper Midwest to take a sledgehammer to the so-called “blue wall.”
It is familiar territory for him. “J.D. does very well with working class voters because of his own background, and that’s the core of the Trump support,” McLaughlin said, pointing to Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in particular. The pollster added another state, one that hasn’t been red since Richard Nixon’s landslide in 1972: Minnesota.
The optimism follows at a moment when Republicans are as unified as Democrats are divided. Wounds once thought permanent were quickly bound in Milwaukee, most notably as former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley returned to the Trump fold. If those more moderate Republicans, particularly suburban women, follow her lead, said pollster Frank Luntz, the GOP will become a juggernaut. “Add Haley voters to Trump’s total,” he predicted, “and he is unbeatable.”
Jen O’Malley Dillon, chairwoman of the Biden-Harris campaign, poured cold water on that projection, panning Trump’s acceptance speech as “extreme.”
Biden “is running for an America where we defend democracy, not diminish it. Where we restore our rights and protect our freedoms, not take them away. One where we create opportunities for everyone, while making the super wealthy finally pay their fair share,” O’Malley Dillon said in a statement. “That’s what the future President Biden believes in and it’s the future that millions of our fellow Americans believe in too.” Not mentioned, however: the fact that the president is socially distancing.
Democrats will have to wait until Biden tests negative for COVID before he can mount another reset attempt. Van Jones, a former Obama adviser and current CNN contributor, was less than optimistic. “A bullet couldn’t stop Trump,” he said Wednesday. “A virus just stopped Biden.”
“The last time I was in a convention that felt like this,” the liberal commentator said the next day, “was Obama 2008. There is something happening here.”
Such are the dreams of Republicans, and the nightmares of Democrats, at the end of the GOP convention.
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