Sanders out; Biden vs. Trump set
The 2020 general election has begun — kind of.
With the withdrawal Wednesday of Sen. Bernie Sanders from the Democratic race, Joe Biden and President Donald Trump have no remaining opponents but each other. The two men have already drawn clear battle lines for the campaign, framing the election as a choice between Biden’s sturdily traditional conception of U.S. presidential leadership and
Trump’s proudly divisive approach.
Yet the actual activities of the campaign remain largely on hold, frozen by the coronavirus pandemic that has brought most other aspects of the country’s public life to a standstill. For the foreseeable future, the pandemic has overtaken all other issues in the campaign and may well turn the election into a one-issue debate over Trump’s record in the crisis.
Far from taking a triumphant victory lap that might have greatly amplified his message, Biden
remains largely confined to his home in Wilmington, Del., addressing voters on television and over internet livestreams, and receiving frequent briefings from policy experts on the pervasive disease and its economic toll.
If Biden and Sanders are to share the stage at a rally for party unity at some point, it is entirely unclear when that might even be possible in a long period of statewide lockdowns and social distancing.
Trump, too, has canceled all his campaign events, dispatching political surrogates and members of his family to make the case against Biden online but holding none of the rallies he had hoped to use to thunder against the former vice president all through the spring and summer. He has addressed the country daily from the White House briefing room, a forum often dominated by contentious exchanges with reporters about the halting federal response to the coronavirus.
Reflecting the sobering context for the campaign, the first direct exchange between Trump and Biden this week was not a public clash but a private phone call: The two spoke briefly Monday to discuss the outbreak, afterward sharing details only sparingly. Trump on Monday said it had been “a very nice conversation” in which Biden had shared a number of policy recommendations for dealing with the virus.
“He had suggestions,” the president said, adding, “Doesn’t mean I agree with those suggestions.”
Biden’s account was not much richer, and in a CNN interview Tuesday night he indicated that he and Trump had agreed to keep most details of their conversation confidential.
“I laid out four or five specific points that I thought were necessary,” Biden said.
The moment of mutual graciousness is unlikely to last very long: Trump has routinely attacked Biden in harshly personal terms, and he has sought to defend his own management of the outbreak by criticizing aspects of the Obama administration’s public health record, often in incomplete or misleading terms. He appears likely to try to blame the worst of the pandemic on international forces — like the Chinese government and the World Health Organization — and on the Democratic governors who have accused federal agencies of letting down their hard-hit states.
Even on Wednesday, with the pandemic raging, Trump sought in unsubtle ways to stoke divisions on the Democratic side, suggesting that the party establishment had thwarted Sanders and speculating that some liberals, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, might not support Biden in the general election, though she has repeatedly said she would do so. It was plain from Trump’s comments that he is counting on Democrats to be as divided as they were in 2016, when Sanders battled Hillary Clinton for the nomination.
Yet Biden and Sanders struck a tone of mutual respect and even admiration, with Sanders on Wednesday praising Biden’s character and the former vice president hailing the size and strength of Sanders’ political movement. While Sanders did not endorse Biden immediately, there was no apparent evidence of a bitter personal rift.
Biden has taken a restrained approach to criticizing Trump over the past month, he is under pressure from other Democratic leaders and political donors to step up his antagonism of the president and his flawed management of an extraordinary public health emergency.
Already, outside groups affiliated with Trump and Biden are spending millions to try to shape the political debate over the coronavirus. Two separate Democratic super political action committees are running television commercials and digital ads about the outbreak. One, Priorities USA, is attacking Trump for playing down the severity of the threat for months, while another, Unite the Country, is promoting Biden’s proposals for addressing the crisis.
A pro-Trump group, America First, has announced plans to spend $10 million attacking Biden in three of the most important states on the electoral map — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — all of which are confronting an intensifying challenge from the virus.
The political impact of the pandemic is still unclear, although the modest polling bump that Trump enjoyed last month — a function, experts said, of the public instinct to rally around a leader in a crisis — appears to have receded quickly. Biden has tended to lead Trump in general election polling, but the margins have varied widely.
A poll by CNN published
Wednesday found that a narrow majority of Americans said they now disapprove of Trump’s handling of the virus, almost exactly matching his overall approval ratings. Fifty-five percent of Americans said the federal government overall had done a poor job of battling the outbreak.
There are signs that voters are growing more dissatisfied with the president’s response as he makes little attempt to refrain from his caustic ad hominem attacks when the economy is reeling, the death toll is soaring and voters are looking for reassurance.
“People are hungry for a sense of community and unity,” said David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist. “And his staff writes it into his script every day, but then he ad-libs lines that are completely at odds with that, and then he returns to his phone and starts tweeting the same way.”
Even Trump’s allies concede that this election will be an up-or-down vote on his performance handling the crisis.
“Politically, nothing else matters,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Sunday on ABC. “And, in fact, I have never seen a time when an opponent is more irrelevant.”