As polls appear to show President Joe Biden is in trouble in his race against former President Donald Trump, Democrats are starting to get nervous.
Politico reports, “A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump.”
It notes that Democrats have experienced a “joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election,” however, with the election roughly five months away, “Anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.”
One Democrat donor told the outlet, “You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy.”
However, he added that Biden’s streak of bad poll numbers and polls showing him trailing Trump are “creating the freakout.”
“This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.’ It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end,'” the donor insisted.
The former president’s decisions to travel to deep-blue enclaves such as New Jersey and New York City have also apparently been causes for concerns among Democrats as he tries to win over Black and Hispanic voters.
Additionally, in April, Trump raised $25 million more than Biden.
“One adviser to major Democratic Party donors provided a running list that has been shared with funders of nearly two dozen reasons why Biden could lose, ranging from immigration and high inflation to the president’s age, the unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris and the presence of third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” Politico reports. “The adviser added, ‘The list of why we ‘could’ win is so small I don’t even need to keep the list on my phone.’”
The outlet points out many Democrats believe the issue of abortion is a winning one for them but “said they’re challenged when pressed by friends to make the case for why Biden will win.”
““There’s still a path to win this, but they don’t look like a campaign that’s embarking on that path right now,” Democratic strategist Pete Giangreco said. “If the frame of this race is, ‘What was better, the 3.5 years under Biden or four years under Trump,’ we lose that every day of the week and twice on Sunday.”
Despite the concerns of Democrats, Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz told Politico, “Trump’s photo-ops and PR stunts may get under the skin of some very serious D.C. people as compelling campaigning, but they will do nothing to win over the voters that will decide this election.”
“The work we do every day on the ground and on the airwaves in our battleground states — to talk about how President Biden is fighting for the middle class against the corporate greed that’s keeping prices high, and highlight Donald Trump’s anti-American campaign for revenge and retribution and abortion bans — is the work that will again secure us the White House,” he added.
The article comes as polls show Trump and Biden locked in a close race. According to RealClearPolitics’ average of general election polls, Trump leads Biden by 1.1 points.
