President Biden’s Distrust Challenge

The voters likely to decide the Biden-Trump rematch don’t participate in most elections. They are irregular voters who tend to skip primaries and midterm elections but do often turn out for the country’s highest-profile campaign — a presidential election.

Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explained this phenomenon in a recent article. President Biden leads Donald Trump among Americans who are highly engaged with politics, Nate noted. Yet less engaged voters are so dissatisfied with the country’s condition that they prefer Trump by a wide enough margin to give Trump a small overall lead.

These irregular voters have different concerns on average than politically engaged Americans do. Irregular voters are less likely to focus on hot-button issues that motivate committed Democrats and Republicans, like abortion, immigration and democracy. Irregular voters focus more on pocketbook issues like inflation and health care. They are more likely to say the economy is in bad shape.

A Carolina lament

I think this pattern helps explain why some of Biden’s core campaign messages have not resonated with swing voters. Biden talks about the country’s soul and pitches himself as a defender of American values, especially democracy. It is an understandable pitch in many ways: Trump is hostile to democratic traditions in a way that no other modern U.S. politician has been.

But many swing voters are focused elsewhere. They are dissatisfied with the country’s direction and, in some cases, have been for years. Many distrust the political system, the media and other institutions and favor sweeping changes. Biden’s promise of stability — along with his vagueness about a second-term agenda — falls flat with them.

A recent Wall Street Journal article on the Democratic Party’s weakness with rural voters made a related point. The article described Dante Pittman, a 28-year-old Democratic candidate for the North Carolina legislature who has been reaching out to disillusioned voters in his district. He believes that the Democrats’ national message doesn’t match those voters’ concerns, The Journal reported:

Pittman has campaigned full time since last fall, knocking on doors most afternoons and visiting churches on Sundays. He talks about economic opportunities, education and local issues, such as the closing of an area’s sole pharmacy.

Pittman said the national party’s message seems to be: The other side is crazy. We’re not. He wants to persuade state and national party leaders that the pitch should be, “Donald Trump is not only corrupt but an economic disaster,” he said.

Issues over character

I’m also struck that several Democrats running in tough Senate races have adopted a message closer to the one Pittman prefers. These Democrats — in Arizona, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — are focused on pocketbook issues. They portray themselves as populist fighters trying to reduce living costs and take on special interests. And all six of these Democrats are faring better in the polls than Biden. (Here is a recent Morning newsletter with more details.)

Finally, I’m reminded of the arguments of Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago. Zingales grew up in Italy, where a bombastic right-wing populist — Silvio Berlusconi — presaged Trump by becoming prime minister in 1994 and holding the job on and off for years.

Long before Trump became president, Zingales warned that he could. Shortly after Trump’s 2016 victory, Zingales wrote an Opinion essay in The Times outlining the political strategies that tend to fail when opposing a figure like Trump.

Berlusconi’s least-effective opponents focused on his personality and argued that he was beyond the pale of acceptable politics. This criticism made many Italian voters like him even more. They reasoned that if the elites who had done such a poor job running the country hated Berlusconi, maybe he was the solution after all.

Berlusconi’s most effective opponents, by contrast, treated him like an ordinary politician who would not improve their lives. “They focused on the issues, not on his character,” Zingales wrote.

Biden’s imbalance

Biden’s campaign sometimes makes arguments along these lines. It points out that Trump has promised to cut taxes even more for the wealthy than he did in his first term — and that Trump’s proposed tariffs would raise inflation. So far, though, these messages tend to be less prominent than the arguments about democracy and the soul of America.

That imbalance seems to be one reason for Biden’s struggles. It’s true that focusing on Trumpism’s threat to American democracy has helped Democrats win midterms and special elections for the past three years. Doing so has often persuaded a decisive slice of politically engaged Americans to oppose Trump’s Republican Party.

But a presidential electorate is different. It’s larger and more diverse. It’s younger, less affluent and less educated. It cares more about kitchen-table issues — like good-paying jobs, consumer prices and the cost of health care — and less about the issues that transfix cable television.

By sticking mostly to the message that helped Democrats do well in the midterms, Biden is still leading among the narrower group of Americans who follow politics closely and vote regularly. He is trailing among the voters who choose a president.

Related: A new Biden ad tries to split the difference. “This election is between a convicted criminal who is only out for himself and a president who is fighting for your family,” the narrator says.

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