Donald Trump’s pollsters have been tracking the impact of his indictments throughout his first trial and, moving to get ahead of events, are arguing that regardless of the verdict in the New York hush-money case, they can spin it in his favor.
In the campaign’s internal polling, two-thirds of respondents say politics played a role in his criminal indictments.That is at odds with public polling, which has found that somewhere between a plurality and a majority of Americans believe the case has been handled fairly, with a sharp partisan split. Some 60 percent of voters have said they think the charges are very or somewhat serious. Even 6 percent of Trump voters say they would be less likely to back him if convicted.
But the Trump campaign’s interpretation of its own polling suggests what its strategy might be for dealing with a guilty verdict. Trump’s advisers and allies say the public, which has largely tuned out the trial, may have already factored the possibility of a conviction into how it sees Trump. And as Trump has before, he’ll use the case to bolster the grievance narrative he’s been cultivating for years.
“We’ve got 66 percent telling us that politics have played a role in it. Only 28 say ‘no role,’” said Jim McLaughlin, a Trump pollster whose firm conducted the survey. “The interesting part about that is, even 27 percent of Democrats are saying ‘politics played a role in the indictments.’”
No politician wants to be convicted of a crime, and if he is convicted, it is not out of the question that Trump could face prison time. But if the jury cannot reach a verdict or finds Trump not guilty? “The media loves asking the question, ‘OK, what happens if Donald Trump is found guilty of a felony?’” McLaughlin said. “They don’t ask the question, ‘What happens if he’s found not guilty?’ If he’s found not guilty, I think he gets a bump out of it.”
I suspect he will get a bump if he’s acquitted too. It validates the idea that he’s teflon, an invincible superhero. I could see it convincing some people that he is unbeatable so might as well get onboard.
I wouldn’t take what Trump’s pollsters say about those numbers as gospel though. They have to lie or their patron will be very angry. I doubt any polling can capture how people will react to either verdict to be honest. If I had to guess, if he is convicted the reaction will fall along the predictable party lines with a few people at the margins saying they’ve have enough. And the opposite if he’s acquitted. But who knows?
On Wednesday, I pointed to a posting at The Ink calling for Democrats to tell a better story. Facts without context aren’t as “sticky” as a good story. Facts matter. College graduates, children of the Enlightenment, built their educations and their livelihoods around them. But like your SAT or GRE scores, nobody gives a damn about them later in life. What does your job experience say about you? What story does it tell?
The play’s the thing that will catch the conscience of disaffected voters, writes Michael Podhorzer at Weekend Reading. A key point in Part I of his analysis:
Disaffected voters cast ballots when they believe that if the other party wins, they will lose the freedoms they now take for granted – whether it’s the freedom to own an AR-15 or to have access to reproductive health services.
Podhorzer addresses presidential polling showing “young voters and voters of color” moving away from Biden:
Before we can address the question of whether Biden needs a “low turnout election,” or assess the danger posed by “disengaged voters [driving] the overall polling results,” we need a better way of thinking about votersin the age of MAGA.
Like what I call “mad poll disease,” turnout terror is caused by not recognizing that the factor most certain to determine the election outcome is one we can’t know ahead of time. That factor is: What will the election seem to be “about” to most voters by October? Will it be a referendum on the Biden administration – or will it be a referendum on whether America should be ruled by MAGA? (For stylistic ease, I’ll refer to the alternatives as either the “MAGA election” or the “Biden election” even though, of course, the reality will be something along a continuum, closer to one or the other.)
If we imagine a single undecided voter picking between Biden and Trump in a voting booth, it might seem painfully obvious why this frame would matter. But it is less obvious that what the election is “about” also affects who turns out to vote.
Since 2016, whenever an election has been “about” MAGA, turnout rates have been much higher than normal, and Democrats have won much more often in those contests. If the Trump and MAGA agenda is salient in October, I am confident turnout will again be at historic highs and that Biden will do as well or better than he did in 2020. But if the economy, immigration, or a similar issue is center stage, turnout levels will be lower, as will Biden’s prospects for an Electoral College victory.
This gets back to facts, facts in which Democrats put undue confidence. Podhorzer argues that the broader story Democrats tell will have more of an impact on supporter turnout than trying to persuade voters who believe the economy sucks to believe it doesn’t by hammering away at their disbelief with fact sheets. As in, “Since 2016, whenever an election has been “about” MAGA, turnout rates have been much higher than normal, and Democrats have won much more often in those contests.”
As you can see from the chart below, there was very little change in the number of “most likely” voters going into the 2016 and 2020 elections. But going into this election, there are nearly a third more of the “most likely” voters than there were before the last two elections! That 18 million voter gain reflects the conversion of previously “very likely” voters into “most likely” voters across all demographics.
Podhorzer provides more analysis of how these shifts shake out in Biden’s favor. I won’t reproduce those here. But his conclusions about “double haters” may be useful:
In our current political era, knowing and believing what Trump and MAGA plans to do makes people more likely to vote.
The dramatic change in partisan preferences for somewhat likely voters and those who haven’t voted is the crux of the uncertainty about the outcome of the 2024 election. But it would be a mistake to think that the portion of these less likely voters was dependent only on how large the turnout ladle that scoops them up in November will be. Rather, turnout rates will depend on what motivates those less likely voters to vote, given they have been all but sitting out the last three elections. In our current political era, knowing and believing what Trump andMAGA plans to do makes people more likely to vote: for better or worse.
[…]
Recent history suggests that contingent voters can and will become more engaged in the coming months. But it’s far from assured that they will become engaged enough to understand why they personally need to come out and vote. This is not a reason to panic and make predictions of doom; it’s a reason to get to work at keeping those predictions from becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. This isn’t just a job for political campaigns; it’s the job of all of civil society, including the media, who care about American democracy.
Tell better stories. Start with shared values, name the villains, share a vision (say what you’re for).
I’ll have to study this more for what it means for the unaffiliated voters I’m pursuing as critical to wins this fall. But I’ll take the upbeat advice.
Update: What have I been saying?
.@AnandWrites: "American democracy is at risk because of the Democratic Party's risk aversion: not wanting to get messy, to do things that alienate a third of people… but if you're running against fascism in 2024, maybe a little less caution, a little more boldness, try stuff." pic.twitter.com/m8ezgfyZBj
Seeing Trump cultists break down in tears over their authoritarian master facing justice was as disconcerting as it was disheartening. While some may feel the need to mock them for their Trumpish idolatry, I feel sorry for them. Pity may indeed smite them worse than mockery. Mockery feels like oppression, and oppression reinforces faith.
#NOW Trump Supporters BREAK DOWN IN TEARS as they pray for former president Trump outside of NYC Court, as jury deliberations continue inside. pic.twitter.com/chocOaF6oW
— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) May 29, 2024
It is best to remember, as Jenny Cohn and even Tony Perkins pointed out, that the Trump cult attracts the fringiest of the fringe, the sort of people who in another decade might relocate to Jonestown or opt for phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce or pudding. They are loud. They get press. But they are not many. Until America’s Most Corrupted, those MAGA Republicans who’ve latched onto Trump in pursuit of personal power, succeed in burying our democracy to replace it with Gilead, we will still count votes on Election Day.
Remember that. While reminding Black voters in Philadelphia what he’s done for them, President Biden reminded them what Trump would have done to them had Black Americans stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Your vote still counts. Use it.
Biden: What do you think Trump would have done on January 6 if Black Americans had stormed the Capitol? I don't think he would be talking about pardons. This is the same guy who wanted to tear gas you as you peacefully protested George Floyd's murder. pic.twitter.com/cCqa4BcYb0
Newsmax host Todd Starnes wants Trump to make a run for the border:
#NOW Trump Supporters BREAK DOWN IN TEARS as they pray for former president Trump outside of NYC Court, as jury deliberations continue inside. pic.twitter.com/chocOaF6oW
— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) May 29, 2024
Here’s Trump sputtering today:
Trump: "Mother Theresa could not beat these charges. These charges are rigged. The whole thing is rigged. The whole country's a mess." pic.twitter.com/v7PDMhYpy7
Trump: There are a lot of witnesses they could’ve called.. Take a look at the list. You have a lot of big players, very big players that would solved their problem, or actually would have given us the win. We already have the win. pic.twitter.com/NjT1FmNCrd
The jury asked for Pecker testimony to be read back to them today. The consensus among the legal beagles is that the prosecution is likely happy about that since it means they are looking at corroboration of Cohen’s testimony. We don’t know but it’s likely that Trump isn’t going to sleep well tonight.
Media Matters looked at the media coverage of the Hillary Clinton “basket of deplorables” comment back in 2016 and Trump’s “vermin” comment this year. It shows that they only learned that they shouldn’t treat Trump as badly as they treated Clinton. Great.
Trump benefits from the fact that he says so many disgusting, reprehensible things that the media no longer sees it as newsworthy. That is perverse.
Lol. That’s nice. He also mentions this down in the piece:
Why is Mr. Biden competitive in the Northern battlegrounds? White voters and older voters.
In Times/Siena polling this year, Mr. Biden is running only about a point behind how he fared among white voters in 2020. For good measure, he’s also faring a bit better than he did among voters over 65. Other polls tell a similar story.
Mr. Biden’s resilience among white voters and older voters hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, but it’s very important. White voters will make up around 70 percent of the electorate in November, and their share will be even higher in the Northern battleground states that Mr. Biden will be counting on. And voters over 65 will outnumber those under 30.
The piece is full of caveats and warnings so don’t expect the mainstream media to change their Biden Is Doomed narrative any time soon. (Cohn is their god.) But it’s interesting in any case, especially since this much longer and comprehensive piece by Ron Brownstein takes a much closer look at what this means:
For decades, Democrats have built their electoral strategies on a common assumption: the higher the turnout, the better their chances of winning. But that familiar equation may no longer apply for President Joe Biden in 2024
A wide array of polls this year shows Biden running best among Americans with the most consistent history of voting, while former President Donald Trump often displays the most strength among people who have been the least likely to vote.
These new patterns are creating challenges for each party. Trump’s potential appeal to more irregular voters, particularly younger Black and Latino men, is compelling Democrats to rethink longstanding strategies that focused on mobilizing as many younger and non-White voters as possible without worrying about their partisan allegiance. For Republicans, the challenge will be to build an organization capable of connecting with irregular voters they have not traditionally focused on reaching, particularly in minority communities.
“What all this means is this election has volatility,” says Daniel Hopkins, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist who has studied the widening partisan divergence between voters with and without a consistent history of turning out. “We used to expect that the marginal non-voter, the next voter who turned out if an election was very engaging, didn’t look different from people who did vote. In this case, the crowd that hasn’t gotten engaged looks very, very different.”
Brownstein looks at a number of polls that back this up focusing on one in particular that looked specifically at this phenomenon:
The results were striking. Among adults who had voted in each of the past three federal elections, Biden led Trump by 11 points, and Biden eked out a narrow advantage among voters who participated in two of the past three races. But, the poll found, Trump led Biden by 12 percentage points among those who voted in just one of the past three elections and by a crushing margin of 18 percentage points among those who came out for none of them.
As important, the pattern held across racial lines. In the poll, Trump ran even with Biden among Latinos who voted in two, one or none of the past three elections, while Biden held a nearly 20-point advantage among those who voted in all three. With Black voters, Biden’s lead was just 10 points among those who did not show up for any of the past three elections, but over 80 points among those who participated in all three.
It’s about people who don’t watch the news and are apathetic about politics:
Hopkins said the gap between habitual and irregular voters in his latest survey was far greater than the difference he found when he conducted a similar poll early in the 2016 race between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Key to this widening chasm, he believes, may be another dynamic: Adults who are less likely to vote are also less likely to follow political news.
“For more infrequent voters, these are often people who pay less attention to politics and whose political barometer is more the question of how is my family doing economically, how does the country seem to be doing,” Hopkins said. “For those voters, Donald Trump…is not especially unusual.” By contrast, Hopkins said, a “sizable sliver” of habitual voters “have a sense that Trump may be qualitatively different than other political candidates with respect to norm violations and January 6.” For less frequent voters, he added, the equation may be as simple as “they don’t love what they see with Joe Biden, and if Donald Trump is the person running against Joe Biden, they want change.”
The NBC polling results buttress that conclusion: It found that among the roughly one-sixth of voters who say they do not follow political news, Trump led Biden by fully 2-to-1.
Ok. That’s not good news for our country. People should pay attention and should be involved in our civic life. However, this election seems to have produced a particularly apathetic electorate — it’s a re-run and a whole lot of people just aren’t interested — and the potential benefit of that is that these un-engaged citizens tend to favor Donald Trump. That could change in the next few months as people do start to tune in. But I really wonder if that’s going to happen. There is, to borrow a phrase, a malaise in the land, whether it’s due to the post pandemic hangover, Trump’s unrelenting negativity or just the uninspiring nature our polarized politics, and this looks like it may be an election of only the most engaged voters. That may very well benefit Biden who is doing unusually well with seniors and college educated voters who are the most likely to vote.
I don’t think anyone should pin their hopes on apathy. The Dems need to get every possible vote in their column just to stay even. But as Simon Rosenberg says every day, I’d rather be us than them.
This has no relevance to the trial, which has now gone to the jury, but it’s relevant to anyone who has questions about whether it happened:
The celebrity athlete, who spoke to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity, citing fear of harassment or retaliation, said he was close to Trump and Daniels while they socialized at the 2006 American Century Championship celebrity golf tournament on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.
Though Trump sometimes referred to Daniels indirectly as a “porn star,” the athlete said, he emphasized that it was understood among the golfers who heard the boasts that Trump, at the time best known as the host of reality TV show The Apprentice, was saying he had slept with Daniels.
“It was clear to me and everyone who heard him that he was talking about Stormy,” the athlete said, adding that Trump encouraged other celebs to try to have sex with Daniels, behavior the athlete described as “crass,” “gross,” and “stupid.”
“He’d say all these things like, ‘You’ve gotta bang a porn star, it’s incredible,’ and, ‘It added 20 yards to my drive today,’” the athlete told The Daily Beast.
That sure sounds like him…
And this also sounds right:
According to the athlete, shortly before the 2016 election, around the time Daniels’ hush-money payment was being negotiated, he received multiple calls from people who declined to identify themselves, asking what he remembered from the golf event 10 years before.
It was later revealed that in those final critical weeks before the election—amid political fallout from the Access Hollywood video, in which Trump boasted of grabbing women without permission—Trump associates were scrambling to “catch and kill” Daniels’ story, to stop it appearing in the press.
But that was not public information in 2016, and the athlete told The Daily Beast that at the time that he did not fully understand the reason for the calls, and did not answer the questions. In hindsight, he acknowledged, the calls seem “ominous.”
I would have thought this was Michael Cohen, but I think he would have mentioned it. So maybe Keith Schiller? Some GOP operative? Who knows? But Trump bragging about “banging a porn star” and sending some thug to find out what the guys to whom he bragged about it remembered is patented Trump.
The article, which is worth reading for even more details, includes this:
The athlete who spoke to The Daily Beast called Trump a “cheat,” claiming to have witnessed Trump kicking his own ball and clearing obstacles—“like these giant Tahoe pine cones the size of a baby’s head”—from his lie, in violation of the rules. He also said Trump left trails in sandtraps that clearly showed he had moved his ball, and falsely lowered his score.
Tournament officials learned of the cheating allegations, the athlete said, but it was unclear whether anything came of them.
With all the violence and vandalism on January 6th it’s easy to forget that Trump and his henchmen’s real game plan was to send the election to the House and let them decide the winner as the constitution anticipated would happen in case of a tie. This was to be accomplished by submitting competing sets of electors to the VP who would throw up his hands and say that he didn’t know how to count the votes so the congress would have to decide the election. According to Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, they had hoped that in the event Pence didn’t cooperate, having the mob storm the Capitol could have caused a delay which would have allowed Justice Samuel Alito time to stop the certification but they were thwarted when Speaker Nancy Pelosi reconvened Congress that night. (There is no word on whether Justice Alito had been apprised of his role but it’s not a stretch to think he would have been happy to oblige considering his history of flying insurrectionist flags during that period.)
Had they persuaded Pence to twist the constitutional process for a tie vote into a process for resolving (fake) competing slates of electoral votes and had the House taken it up, Trump would have won because votes are counted by state delegation and there are more Republican delegations than Democratic. There was a whole group of Republicans ready and willing to declare Trump the winner under this unprecedented, unconstitutional plot and let the courts and anyone else try and stop them. This was the coup.
Essentially, they were willing to stretch their undemocratic electoral college advantage in controlling rural, lower populated states to an even more undemocratic electoral advantage in the House of Representatives to steal the election. If Pence had cooperated, they might have pulled it off.
It’s obvious that the framers made a huge error with this silly process of having the House delegations decide the election in case of a tie. It should be the popular vote winner. (It should be the popular vote winner in all cases but for some reason we seem to be stuck with this antediluvian artifact of a compromise that should have been fixed over a century ago.)
There has long been a belief among a certain set of American white elites that democracy is good in theory and a very nice idea, but really we can’t let the riff raff have the last word. Our history of denying the voting franchise to vast numbers of citizens goes all the way back to the beginning and we’re still fighting over it. That’s also why we’re stuck with the US Senate which gives two senators to states which have more cows than people and two senators to states which have many more people than cows. They did finally manage to allow direct election of those senators which was a step in the right direction but really, the senate is an undemocratic institution.
And after the debacles of 2000 and 2016 in which Republicans won the presidency with victories in the electoral college while losing the popular vote, it’s not necessary to make any argument that our presidential elections have a very serious, potentially fatal flaw for a modern democracy. It’s really no wonder that the Republican Party, faced with the fact that it is a minority party, has decided to push the envelope even farther.
Vote suppression and disenfranchisement are no longer enough. They have discovered that they can change the system itself in their favor now. The latest example comes from Texas which held its GOP convention last week. Aside from the odious culture war issues they installed in their platform such as labeling gender-affirming care as child abuse, requiring the Bible to be taught in public schools and calling for “equal protection for the preborn” which means abortion can be punishable as a homicide, they are proposing to create an electoral college system in their state:
“The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add the additional criteria for election to a statewide office to include the majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county.”
In other words, they want to create a system in which every county has exactly the same vote, whether the county has 20 people in it or 5 million. As Paul Waldman wrote in his newsletter The Cross Section, this would be the equivalent of California and Wyoming each having one electoral vote for president. Waldman ran some numbers and the outcome is astonishing:
In the 2020 election, 11,315,056 votes were cast for president in Texas. Fifty percent plus one of the votes cast in the smallest 178 counties (almost all of which Trump won) produces a total of 481,548 votes. Which means that under the GOP proposal, a candidate could win a statewide race with just 4 percent of the vote.
That’s right: You could get blown out 96%-4% and become governor, attorney general, or any of the other statewide offices. The candidates who did this would inevitably be Republicans, because they’d be the ones winning all those small rural counties. Which of course is the point.
Texas isn’t the only red state to attempt such an end run around democracy and majority rule. In Missouri where their ballot system was allowing some progressive policies to be passed by a majority of citizens, they tried to change the law to require that not only do they need a majority of voters to pass, but they must have a majority in five of their eight congressional districts which gives rural GOP districts the upper hand. Arizona has proposed a similar initiative. So far they haven’t had any luck enacting any of these changes, and the Texas proposals are just part of the GOP platform for now, but does anyone think that MAGAfied parties in red states won’t do it if they get the chance?
The old saw that “states are the laboratories of democracy” has long been one of the rationales for states’ rights adherents to excuse their anti-democratic behavior. Donald Trump’s Big Lie and coup attempt has given permission to these same political actors to experiment with ways to permanently advantage their shrinking constituency by corrupting the election systems in the states. And because of the electoral college, that will likely permanently advantage them in presidential elections as well.
Donald Trump will not win the popular vote next November but he might be able to eke out another win in the electoral college. The opposition which is fighting so energetically to save democracy is already fighting with one hand tied behind its back and it’s only going to get worse.
Update: Paul Waldman corrected some numbers in his post. The above quote should read:
In the 2020 election, 11,315,056 votes were cast for president in Texas. Fifty percent plus one of the votes cast in the smallest 128 counties (almost all of which Trump won) produces a total of 191,978 votes. Which means that under the GOP proposal, a candidate could win a statewide race with less than 2 percent of the vote.
That’s right: You could get blown out 98%-2% and become governor, attorney general, or any of the other statewide offices. The candidates who did this would inevitably be Republicans, because they’d be the ones winning all those small rural counties. Which of course is the point.
“Whatever happens happens,” Trump told one person recently. “I have no control.”
But there is one clear hope MAGAville clings to: a hung jury that results in a mistrial.
If that happens, Trump allies suspect that it will be chiefly due to the one juror who has made friendly eye contact with Trump from time to time as the jury enters the room and walks right past the defense table.
“There are eight people on that jury who definitely hate Trump. If there’s one person who doesn’t, it’s [this] juror,” said one court attendee who, like others for this story, relayed their observations on condition of anonymity to The Bulwark, which is also protecting the privacy and safety of the juror in question by not disclosing identifying details.
[…]
“There’s one juror that people are worried about and I share the worry,” Harry Litmam, a Democrat and former deputy attorney general, wrote Tuesday on X, adding he “can’t identify her or him per judge’s orders but seems less engaged and slightly irritable.”
But in the meantime, body-language augury has only grown in MAGAville.
“Whenever our allies or elected officials are in the courtroom, [the juror] sort of gets animated,” said one, noting how the person makes eye contact or gives “a smile or a nod” in the defense’s direction at times.
“When [Sen. J.D. Vance] came to court, that[juror’s] face lit up. It wasn’t the only time.”
That source said the juror also reacted favorably to Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, Lauren Boebert, Byron Donalds, and Matt Gaetz.
It would not surprise me if there is one holdout, especially if this is a white guy. It might even be a good career move if he wants to be a MAGA hero. That was always a risk with this jury.
On the other hand, I can’t help but remember that Georgia Grand Jury foreperson who gave media interviews. She was clearly entranced by all the celebrities involved but didn’t vote in Trump’s favor. Some people just get starstruck. So we’ll see.
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” ― Richard Powers, The Overstory
Actor Robert De Niro appeared Tuesday with retired Capitol Police officers Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone, Jan. 6 combat veterans, outside the Manhattan courthouse where closing arguments were underway in Donald Trump’s falsified business records trial.
When we spoke with writer and policy wonk Heather McGhee earlier this month, she pointed out that Democrats have a serious “meaning making” problem. Which is to say, Trump understands what Democratic leaders tend not to: that in today’s media environment and attention economy, an effective candidate needs not only to seek votes but also, crucially, to be an active, vigorous participant in the cultural process through which voters construct meaning.
Voting is downstream; meaning making is upstream. Authoritarian leaders tend to be deft at working at both points of the river. And pro-democracy leaders are often at risk of earnestly seeking votes downstream and ignoring the sense-making part.
A trial, for example, doesn’t explain itself, as obvious a situation as it may appear to be. A trial is a thousand fragments of reality. It needs to be arrayed into a story in people’s minds to gain meaning. That meaning could be “Donald Trump is relentlessly persecuted by the powerful elite because he fights for people like me,” or it could be “Donald Trump is a lifelong charlatan who does crimes the way you do breakfast.”
Friends in the Writers Guild lament regularly that Democrats don’t avail themselves of the professional storytelling skills they are more than willing to share. Democrats rely instead on the Beltway Boys Club, the campaign industrial complex of former Hill staffers who, once they leave government employ, hang out shingles as chummy campaign consultants.
“I don’t get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys — keep hiring them.” — Nationally prominent Republican official
From “Crashing the Gate,” by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (2006)
What was different yesterday is that De Niro is an excellent storyteller. He “made meaning out of the narrative fragments of the Trump trial, telling a story that people might tell themselves, the kind of story about Trump the penny-ante grifter that New Yorkers certainly know in their bones.”
As McGhee explained it to us recently:
Biden is nowhere in our daily and cultural lives, which is, actually, I think, even worse than him being this caricature of a doddering old man. He is not an avatar for anything we either are or want to be. He is not a brand. He is not a style. He is not a storyteller. He’s not a cultural icon or a logic, and he doesn’t knit together different things that we experience on a daily basis into a story.
Perhaps a shift is in the works. Can Biden engage in more of this meaning-making himself? That remains to be seen, but yesterday offered evidence that the Democrats are trying to speak to people where they live.
Another storyteller, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, made the same point in his commencement address at Brandeis University. He quoted novelist Richard Powers: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
Biden is not a natural. He needs help he may not know he needs. Perhaps someone got to him. Good. It’s not enough to be the most qualified for the office. (Ask Hillary Clinton.) You first have to be the best candidate. Different skill sets. Plus, what’s worked for Biden his whole decades-long career needs to adapt to current realities. His “MAGA Republicans” speech at Independence Hall in 2022 showed he can bring it. But he needs to bring it, and bring it, and bring it if he expects to be part of “our daily and cultural lives.”
De Niro recently narrated a Biden-Harris ad, suggesting maybe our Democrats is learning (intentional Bushism).
