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Things are not going as well for the Trump campaign as it might have wished. In the past 10 days alone, the president has seen his long-concealed tax returns leaked on the front page of The New York Times, turned in a thuggish debate performance that repelled voters in crucial swing states, and fell victim to his own mishandling of a pandemic disease that has killed more than 210,000 Americans and continues to spread across the highest level of government.
After hearing of Mr. Trump’s diagnosis, Joe Biden, wary of appearing to kick a man while he’s down — or while he’s up, waving from the White House balcony like a consumptive Evita, as the case may be — responded by wishing the first family a speedy recovery and moving to take down his campaign’s negative ads.
The president’s campaign, on the other hand, made clear it wasn’t interested in reciprocating such gestures of fellow feeling. As The Times editorial board wrote in its endorsement of Mr. Biden on Tuesday, his vow to “restore the soul of America” is core to his appeal. But in the final month of the presidential race, could his commitment to the rhetorical high road end up costing him? Here’s what people are saying.
‘A unilateral surrender to a fake civility’
Many political analysts have criticized the Biden campaign for forfeiting a political advantage over an opponent who would never return the favor. “Do a thought experiment: If Biden were sick, what would happen?” tweeted Anne Appelbaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. “Here’s my guess: Trump would be openly gloating, Republicans would be loudly celebrating, their campaigns would put out ads trying to raise money on the back of his illness.”
The hypothetical is scarcely needed. By Monday, the president’s surrogates were trying their best to spin his coronavirus infection as a political liability not for himself but for Mr. Biden. “He has experience as commander in chief, he has experience as a businessman, he has experience — now — fighting the coronavirus as an individual,” Erin Perrine, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said on Fox. “Those firsthand experiences — Joe Biden, he doesn’t have those.”
However the Trump campaign handles his illness, some high-profile Democratic strategists argue that Mr. Biden has an obligation to sustain his criticism of the president. “At this point, Biden must share truth and facts even if they paint Trump negatively,” Amanda Renteria, the political director for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, told McClatchy. “There is simply too much the public needs to know in the most important election in our lifetime. It is critical that Biden also vigorously proceeds.”
Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, is more forgiving of the Biden campaign’s posture, since harsh ads assailing the president right now might risk undermining Mr. Biden’s calls for national comity under crisis. At the same time, though, he warns Democratic candidates in other races, especially Senate ones, against taking their cue from the former vice president.
“Trump’s failure to prepare for and respond to Covid is the most important issue in this election,” Mr. Pfeiffer writes. “As Democrats and as Americans we can simultaneously wish that Donald Trump and the growing number of Republican politicians he has infected recover and hold them accountable for their misdeeds. No one should stop making the political case against Trump and his enablers — the stakes are too damn high.”
‘Stop telling Joe Biden what to do’
As Mr. Pfeiffer himself notes, taking a combative approach to Mr. Trump may not be as effective as common sense suggests: Some political science research has found that voters respond more to positive messages about Mr. Biden than to negative messages about Mr. Trump, about whom most Americans have already made up their minds.
“For Biden to have a shot at the landslide victory he’s aiming for, he needs to win over the people who already dislike Trump, but aren’t yet sold on Biden,” Sarah Longwell writes at The Bulwark. “So a classy move — like pulling your negative ads while your opponent is in the hospital with a life-threatening disease — absolutely could help make people like you more.” Astead Herndon, a national political reporter for The Times, tweeted:
And if attacking Mr. Trump was politically inefficient before, it might be even more so now that the story of his illness is saturating the news. “In a role reversal,” Marc Caputo writes for Politico, “the president who mocked his rival for being weak and hiding ‘in his basement’ is stuck in isolation under doctors’ supervision while Biden jets off to states like Michigan on Friday and Florida on Monday, with the battleground map all to himself.”
The Biden campaign arguably doesn’t need to make any major shifts to sharpen that contrast. According to a poll conducted over the weekend, nearly three in four Americans, including two in five Republicans, believe the president took neither the personal nor the public risk of the virus seriously enough.
And while the Trump campaign was hoping the nation would rally around him, the first polls conducted since the announcement of the president’s diagnosis did not show a sympathy bounce. If anything, his fortunes seem to have sunk in recent days, with one poll showing Mr. Biden doubling his national lead after last week’s debate.
As Dave Wasserman, the House editor at The Cook Political Report, writes in The Times, Mr. Biden will need to flip some combination of the 10 states Mr. Trump carried by less than 10 points in 2016 to win the election, while Mr. Trump would most likely need to win at least eight of those states. “A look at these bellwethers — all either tossups or leaning toward Mr. Biden — makes clear that Mr. Trump is in serious trouble,” Mr. Wasserman says.
All that being said, the Biden campaign can’t stop other political organizations from pillorying the president, and is perhaps even depending on them to do so. After vowing last weekend to “continue to prosecute the campaign against a Trump second term and work to defeat the Republican senators who enable him,” the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump conservatives, cut a new social media ad Monday highlighting the negligence that led to the outbreak in the White House.
“If Donald Trump doesn’t care enough about those closest to him to warn them he has Covid,” the narrator intones, “why should we ever think he cares about us?”
Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.
MORE ON THE FINAL WEEKS OF THE CAMPAIGN
“Trump’s Campaign Saw an Opportunity. He Undermined It.” [The New York Times]
“Trump’s Moment of Reckoning” [The Atlantic]
“One month out, battered Trump campaign faces big challenges” [Associated Press]
“In an October filled with surprises, can President Trump still win?” [The Miami Herald]
“The Upshot on Today’s Polls” [The New York Times]
WHAT YOU’RE SAYING
Here’s what readers had to say about the last debate: Should the presidential debates be canceled?
Rohan from London: “Just a question for America — you do realize that the rest of the world can see these ‘debates’?”
Ellen from California: “Some in the family found the debate useful in that it demonstrated the candidates’ demeanor under pressure. Whose finger would you rather have hovered over the atomic trigger?”
Salina from New Haven: “Presidential debates should be canceled. Even the ‘civil’ ones are not informative. I’d love to hear podcast episodes or watch longer interviews where a skilled host talks to each candidate separately and asks them the same questions. There wouldn’t be any temptation for one candidate to interrupt, one-up, or try to refute the other.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
