Biden and Democratic lawmakers undermine their party's core message

Clearly, President Biden did not do a good job of making his case against Donald Trump in the first presidential debate last week. That said, one argument was surprisingly absent: that a second Trump presidency would endanger American democracy itself.

The topic came up as soon as CNN moderators brought it up. Given his past comments, Jake Tapper asked if Biden had said that Trump voters would “vote against American democracy”?

“The more they know about what he’s done, the more yes,” Biden responded. He then offered examples, but, in keeping with the challenges that have marred his entire debate performance, they were muddled and unclear, centering largely on the events in Charlottesville in 2017. In his closing remarks, Biden did not mention any threats to democracy, focusing instead on inflation.

Perhaps this was an oversight, or perhaps it was intentional. Perhaps the goal was to boost Biden’s appeal to voters who were unconvinced by his arguments about what a second Trump term might mean. But if the idea is that Trump poses a unique and immediate threat to the country, that certainly wasn’t reflected in Biden’s comments.

It’s clear that this is a big reason why Biden has the support he does. In the CNN poll released Tuesday, voters who say they’ll support Biden in November chose “protecting democracy” as the most important issue in the election by a margin of more than 2 to 1, ahead of the second most-cited issue, the economy. And more than half of those who say they plan to vote for Biden say they plan to do so more because they oppose Trump than because they like the incumbent president.

Then it got worse. On Tuesday, Maine Democratic Rep. Jared Golden wrote an essay rejecting the idea that Trump posed a threat to the country.

“Biden’s poor performance in the debate was not a surprise,” Golden wrote. “Nor did it rattle me like it did others, because the outcome of this election has been clear to me for months: Even though I have no intention of voting for him, Donald Trump is going to win. And I accept that.”

After all, he added later, “to celebrate Trump’s victory is to ignore the strength of our democracy,” as the reaction to the Capitol riot and the millions of Americans who support the idea have shown. The election, he added, “is about the economy, not democracy.”

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) agreed with Golden’s assessment of the likely outcome in a television interview: “The truth, I think, is that Biden is going to lose to Trump.”

They’re not the only ones who believe this. A Siena College poll conducted for The New York Times last month found that nearly a fifth of Biden supporters think Trump will win the election. (About 1 in 8 Trump supporters think Biden will win the election.)

And Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez have a reason to view a Trump victory as likely, if not trivial: Each represents a district that Trump won in 2020. Parting ways with an unpopular president in a moment of crisis or focusing the November choice on their own elections is understandable in that context. There’s a reason Golden’s essay shifted from questions about the presidency to the need for strong lawmakers in Congress, and it’s not because he’s seeking reelection to the White House.

But here again, Golden’s message runs counter to the one his party has been hammering home. If democracy is alive and well after a second Trump victory, even if its survival requires the mobilization of millions of defenders, then all this talk of what’s at stake in November is overblown. Everyone who votes for Biden can perhaps stay home if they want — except for the voters in Maine’s 2nd District, of course, who should come out and vote for Golden.

In truth, we don’t know what will happen if Trump wins the November presidential election. We know that he and his allies intend to reform the government and centralize power in the White House in extraordinary ways, plans reinforced by the Supreme Court’s recent decision on immunity. But no one can say with certainty that democracy will be seriously undermined. In retrospect, these concerns may seem like “hopes for pardon.”

The Democrats’ argument is that even a moderate, avoidable risk is worth avoiding. They—and Biden in particular—have argued effectively that Trump poses such a risk. The fact that Biden has largely ignored it and that members of his party view a Trump victory as imminent risks undermines that effort.

And, by extension, increase the chances of a Trump victory and make that risk less avoidable.