A Washington Post-George Mason University poll released this week contains good news and bad news for the Biden campaign. First, it shows that Biden has made substantial progress in convincing voters that democracy is indeed on the ballot. The survey of voters in swing states found that 61 percent say “threats to democracy” are extremely important to them.
Unfortunately for Biden, this same poll shows he is failing to persuade people that voting for him is the best way to preserve and/or improve democracy. Forty-four percent of surveyed voters in those states say that they believe Trump is best equipped to deal with threats to democracy, compared with only 33 percent who favor Biden to do so.
The news gets worse for Biden if we focus just on “undecided” voters. Among that group, 38 percent trust Trump as the preserver of democracy. Only 29 percent trust Biden on the democracy issue.
Biden’s democracy problem also arises from the mere fact that the octogenarian incumbent is running again when even most Democrats prefer that he not do so. That he will be on the ballot in November is proof enough for many voters that democracy is not working well.
In addition, the findings of the Washington Post poll offer another example of Trump’s skill in the messaging wars. They suggest that the ex-president has convinced many people, as he put it at a rally in New Hampshire last December, that “Joe Biden is a threat to democracy.”
Biden, he says, has shown that he is a threat to democracy by leading a “politically motivated persecution of a political rival.” As the Post puts it, “Trump has tried to flip the democracy issue, claiming falsely that he and his allies are facing multiple criminal investigations because Biden is weaponizing the judicial system against him.”