Why the Trump campaign is in deeper trouble than you think
Simon Rosenberg explains Trump's predicament and Biden's improving position.
I’m in Italy this week to speak on a panel about twitter at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia and bum around Rome for a few days before then. As I pondered newsletter topics that would hold up well while I’m taking a week off from the grind, I figured that with recent polling showing positive movement for Biden, it’s a good occasion to check in with Simon Rosenberg about the state of the presidential race and why he thinks things will only get worse for Trump from here.
Rosenberg probably needs no introduction for Public Notice readers, especially since we’ve talked to him for a podcast and previous Q&A. But if you’re new here, he’s a veteran Democratic strategist whose reputation for keen insight into US politics was burnished by the 2022 midterms, when he told everyone who’d listen that the red wave widely expected by pundits was a mirage. He’s since launched a widely read (and highly recommended) publication called the Hopium Chronicles where he regularly unpacks all the reasons he thinks Democrats will extend MAGA’s losing streak this November.
When we talked last Thursday, Rosenberg brought up Trump’s money problems and discussed how difficult it will be for him to generate positive headlines when he’s spending so much time in a New York courtroom for his criminal hush money trial.
“What's happening in national media right now is there is a growing sense that the orange emperor has no clothes,” Rosenberg told me. “Where the media narrative started shifting on this race was when it became clear that Trump was having fundraising problems and Republicans are struggling with money. At that point it started dawning on people that maybe he's actually naked.”
“I think the Trump campaign is in much greater trouble than conventional wisdom would indicate right now,” he added.
A full transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Aaron Rupar
You just published a post about new polling showing Biden making noticeable gains on Trump in recent weeks. What do you think explains that movement, and do you foresee that this trend continues and Biden pulls ahead of Trump as we head into the heat of campaign season this summer?
Simon Rosenberg
My general view has been that once the general election began and the Biden campaign turned on, we would see his numbers improve. And that's what's happened.
There's no question now that Biden’s gained a few points in recent months. The Democratic Party has gained in the congressional generic ballot. The Senate polling is good for us all across the country. There's no Senate race right now where our candidate is in trouble or underwater. Even in battleground states, we now have polls where Biden leads in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and we just had two polls showing North Carolina within the margin of error. Quinnipiac, a very reputable independent poll, shows Josh Stein, the Democratic candidate for governor in North Carolina, winning by eight points while Biden is down just two.
If those numbers are real, that means North Carolina is very much in play this cycle. And so I just generally feel that this is a competitive election that's getting more blue. Where it's going to be a month or two months from now, we have no way of knowing. But I'm not really surprised by what we're seeing because I think many of us thought this was what was going to happen as the campaign started engaging our coalition and getting them to pay attention to the race.
Aaron Rupar
In that same post about Biden’s polling gains, you tick through all of Trump’s problems, writing:
His agenda is much further away from the electorate than before. His performance on the stump is significantly degraded, far more impulsive, erratic and disturbing. He wears more make up than a drag queen. He keeps losing and getting humiliated in court. He’s an adjudicated rapist. He committed one of the largest financial frauds in American history.
Do you ever reflect on how crazy it is in the first place that a one man crime spree and failed president has a decent chance of returning to power? Make it make sense!
Simon Rosenberg
The line I've been using recently is that my basic take on the election is that Joe Biden is a good president. The country's better off, the Democratic Party is unified, strong, raising lots of money, and winning elections all across the country — and they have Donald Trump, who's the ugliest political thing we've all ever seen. Their party is a raging, unprecedented dumpster fire. It is hard to understand.
What's happening in national media right now is there’s a growing sense that the orange emperor has no clothes. Where the media narrative started shifting on this race was when it became clear that Trump was having fundraising problems and Republicans are struggling with money. At that point it started dawning on people that maybe he's actually naked.
Trump’s positive polls were a big factor preventing us from having an accurate understanding of the true nature of this race. If those evaporated, then what was going to be left is a really ugly thing underneath. That’s in the process of happening now.
I do think the polls are changing. The media is becoming more open to the idea that Trump really is a historically terrible figure. These were things that couldn't be spoken a few months ago, but they can now.
The other thing that's happened is that the success of Biden's presidency has caused many of the core indictments of him to evaporate. The economy is strong, it's not weak. Inflation is down, it's not up. I know it went up a little bit last month, but it didn't go up a lot. Let’s not exaggerate what just happened here. This inflation uptick could have been within margin of error of the data it was so small.
Crime is not raging. It has actually plummeted across the country. There is no war on energy. We just had our best year of energy production and we're more energy independent than we've been in generations. On the border, because of Trump's idiocy, now we’re party of order and they're the party of chaos. And then finally, the “Biden crime family” story we now know is a Russian disinformation operation that was laundered by congressional Republicans. Special Counsel Hur’s attack on Biden’s acuity turned out to have been a lie, and Biden assuaged a lot of the worries about his age during his strong State of the Union performance.
The election is now slowly moving from being a referendum on Biden to a referendum on Trump. And when it becomes a referendum on Trump they're not going to win because of his historic awfulness. The election is actually changing now, but I also think the media narrative is changing. The media narrative will always trail reality by weeks or months, but you're beginning to see a shift.
In my post today I referenced an article from Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire about Trump no longer being ahead and how the media narrative needs to change. Taegan Goddard is a consolidator of conventional wisdom in Washington. The problem for Trump is that if an understanding emerges that Biden is slightly ahead and they're struggling to raise money and he loses his court case over the next few weeks, Trump's going to go from being strong to being weak, a loser, and just not ready for primetime. We're closer to that happening than I think people really understand.
Aaron Rupar
How worried are you about RFK Jr peeling votes from Biden, and how to you think Democrats should handle him?
Simon Rosenberg
It's important when you talk about third party movements to recognize that the most important of them today is the “never Trump” or “never MAGA” movement, which is aligned with us. We could end up having very prominent Republicans campaigning with Biden, creating an enormous permission structure for Republicans who are not MAGA to either not vote for Trump or vote for Biden. That gets wildly glossed over in all the assessments of the election.
The Republican Party has splintered after Dobbs. A big chunk of the party became loosened and is now available to us. We've seen this in the Haley data from earlier this year. And Trump, by attacking Nikki Haley, by telling Haley voters he doesn't want them to vote for him — it’s among the most idiotic things any of us have ever seen in politics.
Another huge vulnerability for Trump is we know from polling that 20 to 30 percent of Republicans say if he's convicted they won’t vote for him. The splintering that's happened in the Republican Party is far more severe than has been presented in the national discourse.
Moving to RFK Jr., I think we learned lessons from 2000 and from 2016, which is that we're going to have to engage and degrade these candidates and not allow them to become something that prevents us from winning the election. There's already been very significant engagement with Kennedy coming from Biden world. There’s an outside organization being set up to do that as well.
We're going to have to take them on. And what's really important for your readers to recognize is that none of these candidates are good or effective or capable. Robert Kennedy, when you listen to him speak, is a ludicrous political figure. He doesn't scare me. He believes crazy things. I've never seen a politician get called out for lying on national television with video as much as I've seen happen to Kennedy in the last few months. He routinely gets confronted with past things that he said, where the anchor on air essentially points out that he’s lying. That sort of directness is almost unprecedented since I've been in this business because his lies are so epic and there's so much video of him talking.
We have a lot of ammunition to really degrade him. And my hope is that we win this election by enough that none of the potential shenanigans that are going to happen — the third party efforts, anything Trump may try to do with the electoral college or voting — none of these things will matter because it’ll be clear that we've won the election by a large margin. For your readers, the best way as a citizen to manage your anxiety about all this is to keep building up Joe Biden and the Democrats because the bigger that we win by, the less likely any kind of chicanery becomes successful.
We also have to challenge the media not to sanitize RFK Jr.’s candidacy the way they've sanitized Trump. His candidacy is MAGA aligned, it's Russia friendly. It’s a fraud. It's not a presidential campaign, it's an adjunct of the Trump campaign. It may actually be illegal because of its clear openness of coordinating with Trump. We now have video of one of their top staffers explaining how openly aligned they are with Trump. This is not an independent candidacy, it's a MAGA candidacy. And we’re going to have to challenge the media very aggressively to not go along with the game and pretend this guy's actually running for president. He's running to take out Joe Biden.
One of the most shocking things to me in the last few weeks has been how RFK Jr. has expressed open fondness for Putin and Russia in ways that alarmingly echo Russian propaganda. He's used formulations about Ukraine and about domestic American politics that are formulations Putin himself uses this. Greg Sargent calls this imaginary world that Trump lives in “Foxlandia.” RFK Jr. is living in Putinlandia. So I do think there’s real urgency and a hunger to engage and degrade him.
Aaron Rupar
I get questions all the time from people asking if this or that poll is credible or about polling methodologies. What are some good rules of thumb laypeople can use to assess whether a poll is worth paying attention to? Polling averages obviously come with their own set of problems, but are people better off just looking at those?
Simon Rosenberg
I would say two things. One is give preference to larger sample polls by independent pollsters that aren’t affiliated with either party or with any kind of ideological movement.
There's been a huge increase in Republican-aligned polling in recent years, which is becoming problematic because there's an asymmetry. There's just much more Republican polling showing up than Democratic polling and it's pushing the polling averages to the right. That’s part of what happened with the red wave that didn’t materialize in 2022.
The second thing I would say is that I'm not a big believer in the averages anymore. They can get distorted by a flood of outlier or Republican-aligned polls. For example, in November 2022, RealClearPolitics ended up based on the averages getting to 54 Republican seats in the Senate, and they only got to 49. So we saw how the averages actually could be misleading.
You have to look at trendlines over time. Not any one poll, but where all the polls are going and whether they're all moving in a certain direction. Right now, a majority of the polls are showing meaningful improvement for Joe Biden. That's why I think the most important data we have right now is that the election's gotten a little bit bluer in the last few months, and we now have a close competitive election that’s moving in our direction. But we got a long way to go in this race and lots will change.
In 2022, there was a coordinated Republican effort to push the polling averages to the right. The notion that we have to be very suspicious of Republican-affiliated polling is not conspiracy theory stuff. We're starting to see, again, Republican polls coming back as many as four points more Republican than the independent polls, which is also what happened in 2020.
Perhaps the most egregious example of this was the recent Wall Street Journal battleground state poll. I mean, those polls were paid for by Rupert Murdoch. They were conducted by Trump's pollster himself. How in the world can the national media or Democrats take seriously polls that were paid for by Rupert Murdoch and conducted by Trump's pollster?
For your readers, the key is one is to favor independent high sample polls, and secondly to watch for trends and movement over time. Right now there is clear movement, but will that hold in a month? Polls have no predictive capacity. They have no ability to tell you anything about tomorrow. All they can do is tell you about today.
In 2016, the polls weren't wrong. The election changed at the end, and elections can change. They can even change 10 days before the election, right? James Comey changed the election and handed it to Donald Trump in 2016. The polls weren't wrong In 2016, the election changed, and things are going to change a lot in this election.
Between the Florida and Arizona abortion rulings — stripping the rights of women in those states — my own view is that the escalating extremism of Republicans is going to hurt Trump. I don't know if it's going to show up in the polls today or tomorrow, but this has been a really, really bad week for him. And then next week, the trial starts.
If you were worried about MAGA before, and you voted against MAGA in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2023, MAGA is clearly a far greater threat to you and to the country than it was before. And that's now been confirmed by what's happened in Arizona, in Florida, and by Trump's overt endorsement of all of these extreme abortion restrictions across the country. This has been a very, very bad stretch for him. And the question is, what capacity does he have to change the narrative, to change the trajectory of the election? How does he generate positive news coverage for himself? It's very hard to do when you're spending three to four days a week in court. I think the Trump campaign is in much greater trouble than conventional wisdom would indicate right now.
That’s it for today
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Mission accomplished Aaron. A good article achieved when on light duties. I notice the improvement in the polls but I would feel a lot better if Biden was clearly leading in the swing states. That said I've always hoped that Trump would prove a terrible campaigner this time round. He's noticeably poorer than he was in 2020 and 2016 and I don't think he's capable of changing this unattractive narrative of vengeance and a sense of his own personal victimhood (in the face of the evidence) and unlike 2016 people now KNOW that he won't prove more sensible and moderate if elected...But I'm still worried. No room for complacency everyone!
Putting asside the rather disturbing visual of a naked Donald Trump, I think that the cliché "Follow the Money" will be a strong key in this election.
With the Trump camp hijacking the RNC, and some mega-donor cash mis-diverted to Trump's legal bills, less money will be available to his campaign and those down-ballot, which should give us a boost in November.