Campaign roundup: Biden's troubles come as Trump's fundraising hits highs
VANESSA: Hi. This is Vanessa (ph).
IVY: And Ivy (ph).
VIOLET: And Violet (ph).
VANESSA: And we're listening to the birds near Deep Creek Lake in Maryland.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Nice.
VIOLET: This podcast was recorded at...
TAMARA KEITH, HOST:
12:36 p.m. on Wednesday, July 3.
IVY: Things may have changed by the time you hear this...
VANESSA: ...But we will still be enjoying our summer vacation and trying not to think too much about politics. Enjoy the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA'S "TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)")
KEITH: Ah, I feel like my blood pressure just came down a little bit.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: It's, like, we all need serenity now.
KEITH: (Imitating Frank Costanza) Serenity now - is more like it.
(LAUGHTER)
KEITH: Hey, there. It's the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.
MONTANARO: I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
LIASSON: And I'm Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.
KEITH: Today on the show, the very different weeks that Donald Trump and Joe Biden have had since last week's debate. So let's start with Trump, who has been celebrating a string of wins - before the Supreme Court, in fundraising, his sentencing, which was supposed to be next week, in the New York case where he was convicted of multiple felonies - that sentencing has now moved to September. It has been a pretty good week for the former president.
MONTANARO: Yeah, well, I mean, Trump got this big win with the immunity case at the Supreme Court, first of all, in being able to now essentially have this case just pushed off until after the election, essentially, because the court sent it back to the lower court. And, of course, the last few days have been dominated by all these questions of whether or not Joe Biden, the current president, is fit to run and Democrats' concerns on whether or not he should drop out.
KEITH: In contrast to the current president and in contrast to what is normal most weeks, the former president has been really out of the spotlight this week. And Mara, let's just talk a little bit about the fundraising. For months, President Biden was dominating fundraising. That is no longer the case.
LIASSON: No, it is no longer the case. After he was convicted, Donald Trump saw a big jump in his fundraising, and he now, according to his campaign, has 284.9 - almost $285 million - raised compared to 240 reported by Biden.
KEITH: Yeah, that's cash on hand.
LIASSON: Which is important. But one thing that's important to remember about fundraising is that just if you're ahead doesn't mean that it's a huge advantage. The big, important thing is that you have enough. You don't have to have the exact amount as your opponent, but you have to have enough. But it is a metric of strength, and Donald Trump has been leading in the polls by a little bit in the battleground, and now he's leading in cash on hand by a little bit.
KEITH: And one thing to note there that I thought was interesting - way, way, way below the top headline - is that in June, Biden actually ended up raising more than Trump did in the month of June, a lot of that - 38 million of it - in the days following the presidential debate when sort of the opinion leaders on the Democratic side and editorial writers and everybody else were in a full-on freak-out. Somehow, the money kept flowing to Joe Biden, a lot of it grassroots money.
LIASSON: And Biden has to hope that that fundraising amount somehow reflects his continued support in the polls, which we are waiting to find out.
MONTANARO: I mean, that's what happens with activism when a candidate has their back against the wall. Quite often, the people who've been supporting him continue to do so. We've seen that with former President Trump over the past year or so. Whenever there's been an indictment or a mugshot or whatever, we've seen spikes in fundraising for him, and there have been quite a few of those, so he's seen quite a few spikes in fundraising.
I think the bigger issue is the sort of five-alarm fire that's now going on within the Democratic Party and whether or not Biden can deliver the kinds of messages to fight against Trump after that dismal debate performance. And even though Joe Biden's brand has been overcoming obstacles his entire life, this is one obstacle that's a lot different because Father Time is undefeated. And...
LIASSON: Yeah, and he's not going to get any younger between now and November.
MONTANARO: Right. Or in three years, you know? And the Trump campaign is trying to play off of that. They put out a new advertisement, a new video saying they have to ask this question whether or not he'll even make it four years, and have already taken the Biden off the name of Biden-Harris and said, now, essentially, that you'll have Biden today and Harris tomorrow, and they're trying to run already against Vice President Kamala Harris.
KEITH: And for his part, the Biden campaign came out very quickly with an ad that essentially admitted, yeah, I am older. I don't move as fast but - making the case that I have heard certainly from many in Biden world - that, do you want the old guy, or do you want the crazy guy?
MONTANARO: Yeah, and, like, I mean, the fact is the Biden campaign had been fairly good before this of trying to frame Biden in the best light, so to speak. And they really messed that up when it came to that debate. You know, if you're going to raise the stakes and say make my day - well, you know, Trump feels like he made his. So, you know, you've got to be able to weigh those things and package it properly. That advertisement that came out that the Biden campaign ran that you alluded to is a good ad, right? But that's because it was packaged in a way that made him look in the best light. But this is the Joe Biden that Democrats feared would show up, and he did.
LIASSON: And look, the question is not this is the Biden they were expecting to see. The question is, did his performance turn people off, or did they feel like they want to vote for him more after this? The early indications of polling that we've seen is that he is going to slip another couple of points, and he already was a couple of points behind Trump in the battleground. And yes, there are bounces after debate performances that often disappear. And we'll know the answer to that question in a couple of weeks.
MONTANARO: And the difficulty on that is that the Biden campaign was already kind of pushing a boulder up the hill, trying to catch up to Trump at the margins, right? I mean, this has been a very close race. It is still a very close race, even in those post-debate polls. But Biden had made up a couple of points after that felony conviction in New York. They thought they were sort of rounding a bit of a corner. But this is something where you had the largest audience of the general election, and people are going to believe their own eyes as opposed to what the campaign wants to spin them on.
And I think that's one area where a lot of Democrats are saying behind the scenes that they're irritated with how the Biden campaign has been talking about this, how they've been talking to them. And, you know, they'd like an acknowledgment of reality and what a clear path forward is going to look like. All that said, as Mara points out, Donald Trump still has very high unfavorable ratings. More than half the country continues to say they don't want him to be president. And, you know, the choice between these two visions and two kinds of administrations are wholly different.
LIASSON: You know, the other thing is that you have to remember about why this race was so tight. The race was tight not because Donald Trump was overperforming what he got in 2020, it's because Joe Biden was underperforming his 2020 numbers. And the problem is that he came into the debate. He asked for this debate to fix that, and it went in the other direction.
KEITH: All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, more about next steps for the Biden campaign.
And we're back. And as part of damage control mode or trying to prove that Joe Biden on the debate stage isn't the Joe Biden who's running for reelection, President Biden on Friday, has an interview scheduled with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News. He's added a rally or an event of some kind - I'm not sure of the details - in Wisconsin on Friday. On Sunday, I'll be traveling with them to Philadelphia, where he's expected to have another campaign event. So the Biden campaign is trying to get him out there.
And next week, they've announced he's going to hold a press conference, trying to show him in some unscripted situations, some situations where he might have more fire in order to quiet what are a growing set of whispers that are becoming loud voices, including one Democratic member of Congress saying he should step aside and make way for a Democrat who has a better chance of beating Donald Trump. But let's just talk about the technicalities of it.
MONTANARO: Well, look, the momentum is certainly against Biden right now because we've heard a change in tone from Democratic officials. Initially, it had been that they were totally in favor of him staying in the race. People like Nancy Pelosi, though, the former house speaker, you know, hearing her say that there are legitimate questions of whether or not this was an episode or whether or not it's a condition, that's a huge statement from somebody who was a staunch ally, right? So that's first and foremost. Second of all, if that were to actually happen and we get to a convention where it's open or contested, the only way to get to that point is for Joe Biden to say he's not running. He is the linchpin in all of this because he's already technically gone through the primary process.
He has a majority of the delegates who are bound to vote for him on the first ballot at the convention for him to be able to accept the nomination. So if he wants to accept the nomination, the nomination is his. So all of the chips are on Joe Biden's side of the table, and he has to decide whether he wants to hold them or fold them. And by the way, there are a lot of Democratic strategists who I've been talking to who've been saying they think that's exactly what the party needs and would be actually a good thing, despite what the committee thinks is too much chaos.
LIASSON: Yeah, and there's two views on that. One is it's an Aaron Sorkin Hollywood fantasy, where you have this mini primary of young, dynamic Democrats, one debate a week for the next five weeks. The other is, whoa, it's going to be chaotic, and it'll be a mess. But I do think it all depends on, obviously, as Domenico said, if Joe Biden voluntarily relinquishes his delegates, says he's not going to run. And then it matters when he does that. Does he do it really soon in the next couple of days that leaves five weeks for a debate a week mini primary, or does he do it at the very last minute before Chicago, which pretty much would leave only Kamala Harris in the position to inherit his campaign?
MONTANARO: And there's another option. Biden could accept the nomination and then say he's not running. And then there would be an actual structure that's created within the Democratic Convention, where there's already a process that is in the rules to be able to then have Biden have more control over who that person would be so that they could avoid the chaos of a convention. But that's exactly what the grassroots of the party has been complaining about with the Democratic party for so long.
KEITH: Can I just say why didn't this conversation happen two or three years ago?
LIASSON: Because he convinced them he was OK, and he convinced himself he was OK.
MONTANARO: Yeah, I mean, it's obvious here. We saw a debate that was not a good debate - most clearly played into his biggest vulnerability. We've been saying with the caveat that Joe Biden was going to be the nominee unless there was, like, a McConnell moment - right? - where Mitch McConnell had a couple of those freezing episodes. It showed his age. It was a little - made people cautious about him and his age and who - whether or not he could lead still. If something like that happened for Joe Biden, then you'd see the four-alarm fire going off. And that's exactly what happened Thursday night. It wasn't a freeze moment, but it was a moment where you saw Joe Biden seem like he was not able to handle the moment.
KEITH: All right, well, we are watching this very closely. Governors - Democratic governors are meeting at the White House tonight with the president. He's making calls to Democratic members of Congress and leaders. This is a moving target, and we will be watching it. And we would be remiss not to mention a bad week of press for Robert Kennedy Jr., the independent candidate. An expose in Vanity Fair detailed accusations of sexual misconduct against him and showed him posing for a photo with a barbecued dog. Do these kinds of things move the needle anymore?
MONTANARO: It's really weird, right? And it's not just weird. It's when he then replies to the story and said, quote, "I've said this from the beginning. I'm not a church boy. I'm not running like that. I said I had a very rambunctious youth. I said in an announcement speech so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world." That is not a good response to this kind of thing to say, yeah, maybe it happened, you know, because I had a rambunctious youth. But this is the thing is that, like, you have somebody with a name like Kennedy, and when people are frustrated with the two major party candidates in Biden and Trump, and they're looking for somebody else, and you have most people who are not as dug into the details of every day, then, you know, these kinds of third-party candidates sometimes are tremendous wildcards, as Robert F. Kennedy clearly is. And, you know, this kind of attention is something clearly, obviously, like, the Biden campaign, even some on the Trump side would hope then people would dissipate their support for RFK Jr. and go back to who they would have voted for previously.
LIASSON: What's so interesting - or they'll stay home. Don't forget one of...
MONTANARO: Right, right.
LIASSON: ...Biden's opponents is the couch.
MONTANARO: Absolutely.
LIASSON: But the thing that's interesting about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is that the debate theoretically would have helped him. People would have watched that, said, ugh, Biden too old. Ugh, you know, Trump too dangerous. I think I'll vote for a third party. But now, you know, you have this information about Robert F. Kennedy. I don't know which is the more important dynamic that this hurts him or the debate helped him.
KEITH: All right, well, we will leave it there for today. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.
LIASSON: I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
LIASSON: And I'm Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.
KEITH: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA'S "TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)")
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