Polls Had Trump Stewing, and Lashing Out at His Own Campaign

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today, Joe Biden is the first candidate in U.S. history to wage a presidential campaign in quarantine. Alex Burns on the strange new reality of the 2020 race. It’s Thursday, April 30.

Alex, the last time that we spoke with you, Joe Biden had just become the de facto Democratic nominee. Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race, and the pandemic was just really beginning to wash over the United States. Now, of course, the coronavirus is very much here, so I wonder if you could describe the state of the Biden campaign.

Well, the state of the Biden campaign is super weird, which is a technical term.

Of course.

You know, since the last time we spoke, Joe Biden has not held one public event in person as a candidate, and his campaign has been really restricted to the telephone and to Zoom and FaceTime, like so much of life for so many Americans. He is campaigning, he likes to say, from his basement, kind of as a joke, but it’s true that he has a video uplink in a refurbished rec room in his enormous house in Delaware. But he is basically unable to do almost any of the traditional activities of a presumptive candidate. There was no unity rally with his defeated primary opponents, and there are certainly no in-person fundraisers.

So what does the virtual element of this campaign actually look like, the part where he’s on Zoom in his basement with all those books behind him?

Right. It’s kind of a work in progress.

So they’ve tried a bunch of different formats.

They have done what they call virtual rope lines, where Biden gets on his video stream and talks to a succession of voters the way he would if he were greeting them at the end of an event.

Except it didn’t quite work that way, because on an actual rope line, you talk to a voter for, you know, maybe 10 or 15 seconds, a minute if it’s a really important conversation.

His first virtual rope line, I spoke to one of the voters who was on it. Voters said that it went for more than an hour, right?

What?

So this is not — yeah, exactly. These became very involved conversations.

Right. The whole point of a rope line, as I’ve observed them, is that the minute you bump into someone you don’t want to talk to, you literally just turn your head and you are done with them.

Right.

And here, it feels like you would be locked into a Zoom conversation with somebody and it would be hard to get out of it.

That’s right.

The campaign has tried other formats. Virtual town halls. He has held virtual endorsement events.

There is definitely a stilted and sometimes artificial quality to these events.

Getting Bernie Sanders’s endorsement, you ended up with these two guys pushing 80 on a livestream talking to each other, and there is something about it that — you know, it doesn’t have the same kind of emotional kick that a unity rally would, for instance.

He has started a podcast —

— where he does these, I think, rather charming interviews with other prominent Democrats —

— where they talk in a fairly unstructured-seeming way about just sort of what’s on their minds, what their lockdown experience has been.

What sort of their big policy agendas are and their ideas are.

Hmm.

Alex, do you have the sense that the virtual components of this campaign that have been cobbled together — the podcast, the town halls, the rope line — do you sense that any of these are really breaking through and that the voting public is actually consuming them?

You know, I think they have done some things that have broken through.

He has begun doing local TV hits in swing states, in markets like Milwaukee and Detroit and Pittsburgh.

Interesting.

And that is an important way to get in front of people, especially at a time when so many people are staying at home and watching television all day.

And in that sense, it feels like fundamentally not quite an even playing field when you think about his opponent, the incumbent president of the United States. Because incumbency has always carried massive advantages for publicity, right, and commanding the spotlight. But here, we have an incumbent in the middle of a national crisis with daily news briefings.

And on the other side is Joe Biden at home in isolation, trying to get on TV or do an online event.

Right. You know, Donald Trump is also stuck at home doing video and television appearances from his residence, but his residence is the White House, and he’s the incumbent president.

Right.

And that commands a different level of public attention. And this is something in the course of our reporting on, you know, Biden’s life in lockdown, is that he has been frustrated with not so much the differential between the attention he gets and the attention Trump gets, but with the criticism he has gotten for being so much less visible than the president. Because I think the view among people close to Biden is, you just can’t put yourself on an equal footing with the president in a national crisis when you’re not allowed to leave your house.

Right. And that frustration, I imagine, reflects a fear that this crisis is just going to make it much harder for Joe Biden to win.

You know, I’m not sure that that’s exactly right.

Hm.

I think the view in the Biden camp, and I think increasingly the view as well among a lot of senior Republicans, is that the huge differential in media exposure in the president’s favor is maybe not working so much in the president’s favor.

He is out there, yes, getting tons of eyeballs on him every single day, but his numbers have steadily fallen, not just overall in terms of where he is in the election, but in how the public feels about his handling of the crisis.

A lot of people are looking at him very closely. They don’t really seem to like what they see. On the other hand, people are paying far less attention to Joe Biden, but let’s think back on the Joe Biden who we knew during the Democratic primaries, who was not exactly mister crisp, clean, and confident when it came to delivering a public message every single day out on the campaign trail.

Right. There were a lot of gaffes. There were a lot of missteps, a lot of misspoken words and thoughts.

Right. There were arguments with voters.

This is not a candidate with a really flawless performance as a public campaigner, so there is a trade-off here. And right now, I think on balance, it seems to be working for Biden to be this largely unseen figure who people basically have a favorable impression of. So to have him more offstage at a moment when the president is struggling at least creates the possibility that he continues to gain relative political strength mostly by default.

So there is a version of this where Joe Biden meaningfully benefits from being the candidate of isolation.

Yes, and that is the scenario that we are living in right now.

We’ll be right back.

So Alex, you have just described what the Biden candidacy looks like in isolation. I want to turn to the broader campaign. What does that start to look like under these very strange circumstances?

You know, I don’t think anybody knows the answer to that for sure, but I think that what we can say today, with half a year left in this campaign, is that it is going to be a shadow of the kind of presidential campaign that we are used to.

Hm.

We don’t know whether either of these candidates will ever hold a conventional campaign rally again.

Wow.

We still don’t know whether either party will hold any semblance of a national convention, and these are restrictions driven by a public health catastrophe with a very, very uncertain trajectory ahead of us.

It’s really hard to imagine presidential campaigns without conventions. We’ve both attended these conventions, and they are these really important moments in a campaign, right? I mean, in many ways, a candidate is introduced to the country — their biography, their story. There are the slickly produced videos, family members come out. You know, elaborate tributes are made, and without those, kind of, when does the general election really even kick off?

Well, that’s the big question. I think right now, if one of the parties is going to forge ahead with a convention, it will clearly be the Republicans. The president has said to be very determined to hold a convention —

Interesting.

— in Charlotte, but he is a prisoner to circumstance and public health as much as anybody here. Biden has gone much further in suggesting that it may need to be some kind of virtual convention, and it’s hard to imagine a virtual convention getting the same kind of attention as the spectacle that you just described.

Mm-hm.

And if you are deprived of that opportunity, you know, not just to introduce yourself to the country, but to introduce yourself to the country with your running mate, and your ideas, and your general election slogan and message, it is a much, much bigger challenge of political stagecraft to make it really count the way I think both campaigns would really like it to this year.

Well, so I’m curious whether we end up having anything resembling a normal convention or not. How are you seeing the pandemic start to influence the kind of visions that both of these candidates are going to be running on in the next few months?

I don’t think that I can recall another presidential campaign where the two parties’ eventual nominees end up having to move so far away from the message that they set out to deliver at the beginning of the campaign.

What do you mean?

Look, President Trump came into this election season expecting to run on four more years of peace and prosperity, and a booming stock market, and economic growth. That is obviously not a viable message at this point. Joe Biden entered the presidential race with, essentially, a message of returning to normalcy, where, “You all remember what the Obama years were like, and we can do, you know, more of that.” That also seems like a pretty defunct message under current conditions.

Right. Well, what is it starting to mean for those two kind of assumed visions for the campaign? I mean, what are you seeing Joe Biden do to pivot away from the, “I want to return to normal” because there kind of is no normal anymore, and what are you seeing from President Trump, who wanted to campaign on a record stock market and economic expansion?

It is a huge question mark for both of them even at this point, and I think the eventual answers are going to be heavily driven by the external realities of the campaign. If President Trump winds up in a position next fall to make the case that, you know, you are seeing the green shoots of an economic recovery, then that will be his message. If he doesn’t have that, I think it’s really hard to see what kind of positive, forward-looking message he can deliver. What we have seen from his campaign the last few weeks is a combination of attacking congressional Democrats —

— for being very liberal and not being cooperative enough with him, and attacking Joe Biden personally.

And then, you have seen the president at a number of points revive the red meat issue of immigration as sort of a stimulus to his political base.

I don’t know that that adds up to a cohesive message about, “Look at all the things I accomplished. Here are all the things I will accomplish for you with the second term.” I think the closest we heard President Trump get to that kind of message was when he said, somewhat off the cuff, in one of his briefings a few weeks back that we built the greatest economy in the world.

We’ll do it again.

OK. So that’s Trump. What about Biden?

Biden has increasingly begun to talk about the next presidency not as a return to normalcy kind of event —

— but as really a national emergency presidency.

He has talked about doing much more in terms of investing in economic stimulus, income support, business rescues, infrastructure spending. We just haven’t seen it all come together in some kind of big, “Joe Biden’s National Rescue Plan.” This is what the Joe Biden version of a 21st century New Deal would look like. I can’t tell you that, from my own reporting on the Biden campaign, they are moving in that direction. They are having those conversations, and I think it is generally the view, not just in the Biden camp, but among Democrats more broadly. That the party needs to offer something much bigger than the Joe Biden primary season agenda, an agenda that many Democrats found totally worthy based on the conditions they knew about in February, but that doesn’t match the severity of the moment today.

Alex, I want to turn now to the state of the race, Trump versus Biden. What exactly are polls telling us at this point, with the enormous caveat that it’s six months before election day?

Well, with that enormous caveat, the picture is quite clear at this point that Biden has an early upper hand over the president.

Hm.

In terms of the head-to-head between the two of them, Biden has an advantage of some size in basically everything that we consider this year a swing state.

And when you mention swing states, which ones?

Well, there are the big three from 2016, the historically Democratic Midwestern states that flipped to Trump’s column and delivered him the presidency: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. As of today, Republicans feel very pessimistic about Michigan, somewhat less pessimistic but still pretty pessimistic about Pennsylvania, and they see Wisconsin as a real nail biter, a place where Biden probably has a sliver of an advantage, but you know, not a state that has swung back to the Democrats decisively by any means. The shortest path for any Democrat to 270 electoral college votes is winning those three states, and holding the rest of the states that Hillary Clinton won.

So at this point, Biden has real electoral advantages, but Alex, doesn’t a president in charge in the middle of a national crisis almost by definition benefit politically from the spotlight? From people rallying around the flag, even if he is seen to be screwing up?

The short answer is yes, and we did see that initially with President Trump. Not in a really pronounced way, but at the end of March, the middle of March, he was a couple points higher in the polls than he had been previously.

Mm-hm.

There is a precedent for a president initially getting a political bounce in a national crisis, and then watching it fade rapidly and disastrously for his own re-election as it becomes clearly he has mismanaged the crisis. That’s Jimmy Carter. It all started with the Iranian hostage crisis, when Iran seized the American embassy, took American hostages. There was a rally around the flag effect for Jimmy Carter as he got kind of that aura of, not exactly a wartime president, but a crisis president. And as the crisis dragged on and on, and as the president seemed more and more impotent to resolve it, it really doomed him politically.

Right. And Carter would go on to lose to Ronald Reagan, and he would become a one-term president because of that crisis.

That’s right. And that was an election that was really just about one thing, and that was the country’s perception that the president was weak.

Right.

I think for those of us who are covering this election, we can’t say today that that is how voters will make up their mind in November. Something could come up that changes the entire framing of the race for either candidate. Take the allegation of sexual assault by a former Biden aide, which he denies, but that could get traction. Progressives in the Democratic Party have already pushed him to address the allegation. He has so far been silent on the matter. But we do have to contemplate the possibility that this election is ultimately just about one thing, and that’s the pandemic, and what voters think of the president’s role in marshaling a government response. And if the conditions that exist today exist in the fall, that is a very, very hard campaign for the president to win. And if those conditions change very substantially, then maybe Trump has a chance to run some version of the campaign he was hoping to run in the first place. But all of that is contingent not on the choices the candidates make and not on the tactics and strategy of the campaigns, but on this overwhelming external event that none of them is in a position to control.

In other words, it becomes up to the virus.

[LAUGHS] That’s a very dark way to put it, but I think that’s basically true.

Well, Alex, thank you very much.

Thank you.

The Times reports that President Trump has become increasingly frustrated with polling that shows him trailing behind Joe Biden in crucial swing states, and that last week, he berated his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, over the situation. During a phone call, the president insisted that the polling was incorrect, blamed Parscale for his poor standing, and threatened to sue Parscale. It was unclear if the threat was serious.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. A large-scale clinical trial sponsored by the U.S. government has shown that treatment with an experimental antiviral drug, remdesivir, can speed recovery from the coronavirus.

The trial found that the recovery time for patients using the drug was 11 days, compared with 15 days for those who did not receive the drug.

As a result, President Trump said that the drug is likely to receive emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration and become the first federally-approved treatment for Covid-19.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.