Brian Beutler: “They are buffeted by brutal polls, but have little power to legislate in divided government and few ideas about how to change public opinion outside the realm of policymaking. They know that Biden polls dramatically worse than many other high-stature Democrats but have no mechanism to replace him with one of them, and in any case it’s too late for any of them to challenge him. Democrats seem to recognize that abortion is the one issue the public would still entrust to them—and it is an incredibly salient issue—but they seem oddly uninterested in capitalizing on the ghoulish way powerful men are torturing pregnant women in ban states—except maybe for fundraising purposes.”
“And as Jack Smith keeps plugging away, bound by rules and laws that significantly limit what and how he can communicate with the public, Democrats have largely abandoned him to absorb right-wing defamation, incitement, and jury tampering on his own.”
“Trump asserts on a daily basis that Smith and other prosecutors—even state-level ones—are simply the cat’s paw for Joe Biden, and that Biden is orchestrating all of it as a form of political interference in the election. Democratic leaders, including Biden, simply refuse to respond to this casual deception, leaving Trump’s lies uncontested. Most people naturally understand that Trump is lying, of course, while many others either believe him or are sufficiently in his thrall that they don’t care. But elections turn on margins, and more than enough people seem open to Trump’s false claims. Even many Democratic voters now suspect that Trump’s trials are at least partly motivated by politics.”
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