If he wants a second term, he needs to convince voters that he’s the best choice to oversee the recovery.
Trump supporters don’t like to hear this, but with just over three months to go before Election Day, their guy is playing catch-up.
Yes, some pollsters were off four years ago, but that merely confirms that polls (and pundits) are fallible, not that they’re always wrong and should be ignored. The president often derides polls that show him trailing, but if he didn’t take them seriously he wouldn’t have replaced his campaign manager earlier this month.
Mr. Trump preferred to run against a Democrat from the progressive wing of the party. But Joe Biden spoiled those plans, and the Covid-19 response stamped out the president’s best argument for re-election: a growing economy with low unemployment and rising wages among broad swaths of workers. What’s left is a White House in search of a consistent campaign message.
Mr. Trump’s biggest problem is that Mr. Biden isn’t Hillary Clinton, and it can’t be overstated how much the president benefited four years ago from anti-Clinton sentiment. Back in 2016, voters who said they didn’t like either candidate went with Mr. Trump over Mrs. Clinton, 47% to 30%, and helped put him over the top in swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. This year, voters with a negative opinion of both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden say they favor the former vice president by 60% to 10%, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released in April.
Four years ago, Mr. Trump bested Mrs. Clinton among suburbanites, seniors and college-educated white men. Current surveys show him trailing in those categories. To get a sense of how deep Mr. Biden has ventured into the GOP’s demographic strongholds, consider that no Democratic candidate for president has run competitive with voters 65 and older since Al Gore 20 years ago.
Even among groups Mr. Trump carried in 2016—evangelicals and white women without a college degree, for example—the lead has shrunk. A Fox News poll last week showed Mr. Biden comfortably ahead in Minnesota, Michigan and Pennsylvania—three battlegrounds that were decided by less than 2 points in the last presidential election. That comes on the heels of a Quinnipiac survey that shows Mr. Biden with a double-digit lead in Florida. Mr. Trump lost the popular vote by about 2 points the first time he ran. A year ago, there was speculation that he could lose the popular vote this year by a slightly larger amount and still be re-elected, but Real Clear Politics now has Mr. Trump behind nationally by 9 points.
If Democrats are ahead at this juncture, there’s no reason to assume that the lead is insurmountable. Mrs. Clinton underestimated Mr. Trump, demeaned his supporters, and took her own for granted. Mr. Biden will try to avoid those mistakes, but we all know that he’s as gaffe-prone as anyone who has run for president. Two hurdles he has yet to clear are choosing a running mate who won’t fracture the Democratic coalition and putting in a strong debate performance against an incumbent who has regularly challenged his mental sharpness. Neither one is a given.
White House officials agree that a new re-election strategy is necessary down the stretch, but moving in a different direction with a notoriously undisciplined candidate and a hostile, pro-Biden media lying in wait is another matter. Reviving the coronavirus briefings with Mr. Trump is an effort to improve his poll numbers, and making them shorter and more congenial is a welcome change. Yet this week the president was back to undermining his own health-care experts in late-night tweets, which probably isn’t part of the reboot.
Similarly, the Trump administration seems intent to push a “law and order” message to voters by cracking down on antipolice mayhem that has become commonplace in several large U.S. cities. Mr. Trump’s frustration at what he sees playing out on television night after night is understandable. But it isn’t clear that sending federal agents where they aren’t wanted is a smart political move, even if the president has the authority to do it. The reality is that the protests are more popular than the president. The unrest has been fueled by a false narrative indulged in the media, but polling shows that the protesters have found sympathy with a majority of Americans, including the white suburbanites Mr. Trump hopes to win over with his crackdowns.
The reason Mr. Trump was headed for re-election before the pandemic was the economy. If he wants a second term, he would do better to focus on responsibly reopening businesses, returning kids to school, and assuring voters that the best person to lead the current recovery is the person who oversaw the last one.
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal