Recent polling holds both warning signs for Democrats and some promising news. President Joe Biden's job approvals, as we know, are still stuck in the low 40s. But on the bright side, Donald Trump remains a bigger drag on Republican candidates, according to a survey conducted by CNN/SSRS through most of January and early February.
Although voters said they preferred a congressional candidate who opposes Biden by a 10-point margin of 42% to 32%, they also said they favored a candidate who opposed Trump by a wider 17-point margin of 44% to 27%. Additionally, 68% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters viewed a candidate's support for Biden favorably, while a bare majority (53%) of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said the same of Trump.
The even brighter side is that Biden could still manage to improve his job rating throughout the year if he hits the right political notes. After all, much of Biden's slippage has come among Democrats—voters who want to like him.
But Trump's ability to improve his standing with voters is dubious at best. The more he's in the spotlight, the more polarizing he is. The past couple weeks have proven that far from fading to the background for the good of the GOP's electoral prospects, Trump plans to be center stage, praising the terrorists who assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6 and dangling pardons for them.
While many Democratic candidates are shying away from making Trump an issue this year, some Democratic operatives are dedicating themselves to making sure Trump shines, as it were.
When the pro-Democratic super PAC Stop Him Now released an ad last month featuring video of the violent insurrection, the PAC’s press release affirmed that Democrats need both "a positive narrative" about their accomplishments and "smart, aggressive, localized campaigns."
"But it won’t be enough," it added.
“Our concern was that lane three — the Trump lane — was being abandoned,” Mandy Grunwald, Democratic strategist and co-founder of the Trump-focused PAC, told The Washington Post's Paul Kane.
Veteran Democratic strategist Geoff Garin shares a similar view.
“More important than Trump himself is what has happened to the Republican Party in the wake of Trump. This is a party that in many ways has become extreme and radicalized,” Garin explained.
Democratic candidates will surely gravitate toward policy on the campaign trail, but these outside strategists appear keenly aware that, strategically speaking, someone has to make the Trump case most of them will be loathe to make.
“The biggest ally we have is Trump himself. He’s not going to allow Chris Christie or Ron DeSantis or anyone else define the future of the Republican Party. He wants the decision of whether to run again be something that he alone decides,” said Saul Shorr, another veteran Democratic media consultant and co-founder of Stop Him Now.
Amen.