President Joe Biden’s electability problems haven’t yet affected polls of marquee congressional races, according to strategists in both parties who say there’s been virtually no movement in most down-ballot races over the last several weeks.
That doesn’t mean Democrats can breathe easy in the battle for control of the House and Senate, particularly after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, which could have previously unforeseen effects on the polls and Biden’s standing in his own party.
In the weeks since Biden’s debate performance and subsequent intraparty argument over whether he should continue as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, candidates from both parties scrambled to adapt to the new political reality.
Democrats have intensified their efforts to establish separate political identities from the president — some even raising doubts about Biden’s ability to continue his own campaign.
“What’s true before the debate is true after: For voters, Senate campaigns are candidate vs. candidate battles,” said David Bergstein, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Republicans have a roster of deeply flawed recruits, and we’ll win because we have the better candidates.”
Meanwhile, Republicans say they’re giddy that Biden’s growing weakness gives new energy to their efforts tying Democratic candidates to the incumbent president.
“This is just not a sustainable problem for them,” a strategist familiar with GOP Senate strategy said. “This issue is not going away.”
Republicans are now also messaging off Trump surviving an attempt to take his life, and baselessly blaming Biden for motivating the shooter.
House and Senate Democrats have each been buoyed by post-debate polls showing their candidates maintaining support even as Biden declines. It’s proof, they say, that voters view the down-ballot races differently than the presidential battle.
Christie Roberts, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in an interview with Bloomberg Government last week that the group’s polling had shown, if anything, a marginal improvement in their candidate’s standing.
That status quo outcome broadly tracks with House races as well, according to a House Democratic strategist, where many of the party’s candidates are maintaining their level of support.
“House Democratic Frontliners are outperforming the top of the ticket in the overwhelming majority of polls we have received since May, including after the debate,” Julie Merz, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement.
So far this cycle, Democratic candidates have run ahead of Biden in most polls. One House Democratic strategist told NOTUS that, before the debate, their candidate overperformed Biden by an average of about 5 percentage points. Other public surveys of marquee Senate races also show candidates like Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania overperforming the top of their party’s ticket.
However, whether that can continue in an era of declining ticket-splitting among voters is unknown. And Republicans have already ramped up attacks linking Biden to Democratic candidates since the debate.
Multiple Republican strategists said election plans that were based on a three-legged attack of border, crime and economy grew a fourth appendage after the debate: Biden’s fitness for office. Now the narrative could be scrambled even further as Americans process witnessing an attempted assassination aired on live television. With the focus this week now on the Republican National Convention, it remains to be seen how this new and horrifying moment will manifest on the campaign trail.
Strategists reached by NOTUS in the days before the shooting detailed how the Biden problem — which may be on the back burner for the moment but still consists of many Democrats publicly saying the president should leave the ticket — was becoming part of the Republican message.
“The issue now is Biden’s incompetency and what they knew about it,” said the operative familiar with GOP Senate strategy. Other Republicans said the same thing.
GOP operatives have scoured archives for any statement made by a Democrat praising Biden or downplaying criticisms of his age and casting the Democrats in a grand cover-up.
They’ve tried to create fresh moments too. Republicans broke out an old-school tracker to confront Sen. Jon Tester TMZ-style over Biden as the Montana Democrat made his way through a D.C. airport. Bernie Moreno, the Republican nominee against Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, traveled to Washington last week and appeared outside Brown’s Capitol Hill office to make political hay from the Biden situation.
“Admit to your complicity in the greatest cover-up in American history,” he reportedly said. “This is Watergate on steroids.” It was a repeat of a line he used a day earlier at an Ohio campaign stop. (The stunt also showed that Republicans still have plenty of headwinds to face. Moreno was mocked by Democrats for vowing to take the tough questions outside Brown’s office but then clamming up when asked about abortion rights.)
Still, the latest polls remain too fuzzy to rely on, and new ones will now be closely watched for the impact of what happened this weekend to Trump. A Republican strategist focused on down-ballot races said the week around the Fourth of July was generally a sleepy one for pollsters, so there were not a lot of numbers to craft messaging around the debate.
Others echoed Democrats who said early post-debate numbers that have come in still show Republican candidates losing even in places where Trump is winning. These operatives say it’s clear from the way Democrats are distancing themselves from the president that there is a worry Biden will drag them down.
It may not be a completely wild bet. Democrats say they see the polling splits in Senate races and targeted House races as an indication that voters want to cast their ballot against a conservative trifecta in Washington. That feeling may have changed somewhat amid a Democratic messaging change in the wake of the shooting. In either case, Republicans note that ticket-splitting is increasingly rare. And they say it’s too early for the big spending in many House and Senate races to begin.
“They are just getting started,” one said of down-ballot spending. In Senate races, expect things to get “super negative in the next month or two,” the operative added.
And if Biden is actually pushed off the ticket, Republicans say the message will simply shift to, “Why aren’t you calling for Biden to resign the presidency entirely?”
“It’s clear they still want Joe Biden in the Oval Office,” National Republican Congressional Committee national press secretary Will Reinert said, previewing the next phase of the Republican attack over Biden. “Not because of his cognitive function, but because they know in his diminished state he is a rubber stamp for their extreme agenda.”
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Alex Roarty and Evan McMorris-Santoro are reporters at NOTUS.