Democrats and their allies are going silent: After months of warning voters in every battleground state about the dangers of Donald Trump, they’re shutting everything off in the wake of the assassination attempt on the former president.
The plan, according to senior officials at all levels of Democratic campaigning, is for people to see no ads, emails or fundraising texts for the time being. But what happens when the time being is over?
In conversations with around a dozen people who, until Sunday, were part of the nonstop stream of advertisements and organizing efforts focused on defeating Trump, there was a sense that the show must go on. In the first 25 hours after the shooting, however, these Democrats and their allies appeared split over what exactly should happen next and when it should begin. But they remain determined that they can thread the needle of decrying Trump and his potential as president without taking on culpability for the new era of political violence.
As much as they can, Democrats are trying to stay quiet, at least officially. The Biden campaign has suspended advertising, telling reporters it is actively trying to stop ads set to run already. An internal Biden campaign email told staff not to post anything to their own social media. The official arm running Democratic congressional campaigns has stopped its — until now — ceaseless appeals for money via email and text. At least one set of Biden-allied billboards has been put on indefinite hold.
Republicans immediately and without any evidence blamed Democrats’ rhetoric for the shots that killed one person Saturday and wounded others, including Trump. That tragedy is still being investigated, with all the ugly questions surrounding an act of public violence in America yet to be answered. But the political stage is set: One day soon, Democrats will start actively trying to defeat Trump again, and what counts as fair game in that effort will be hotly debated through the end of the cycle.
Per a Biden campaign official, Democrats will begin messaging again around the election following the president’s Monday night interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, “drawing the contrast between our positive vision for the future and Trump and Republicans’ backwards-looking agenda.”
James Carville, a legendary Democratic messaging guru, told NOTUS the party should be undaunted in its messaging, despite what Republicans may howl.
“They’re going to make every idiotic connection they can, and the professional centrists are going to say, ‘This will really prove our points,’” Carville said in a phone interview. “It has nothing to do with that.”
For the next week at least, Carville noted, the Republican National Convention will be the dominant political messaging in the country. As that ends, Democrats will get a chance to show an alternative vision. Carville advised turning talk of the shooting into a focus on gun violence (polls have shown American voters generally favor Democratic positions on new gun safety laws).
“Act like you know the problem is: ‘Too many lonely losers have access to too many guns, and that should be the basis for our policy,’” Carville said. “That’s what caused this, and you have to say it over and over.”
Other veterans of hard-fought and nasty presidential campaigns took a similar tack toward Republican critics of Democratic rhetoric following the shooting.
“We have receipts,” Donna Brazile, former presidential campaign manager and respected party elder, said of Republicans who want to blame Biden’s rhetoric for the shooting. “And if the Republicans want us to show them, we can. We can show them in the form of a gag order that exists today because of what he said.”
One Democratic delegate with an extensive background in political communications said party leaders should plan for messaging to both voters and anxious insiders. Both require strength of will against the expected Republican pushback, they said.
“I don’t think it’s ever too early to be talking about gun control,” the delegate said Sunday. Democrats should remind people that “this is not the first loss of life” in a recent political attack, the delegate said, referring to Jan. 6. As for skittish Democrats, the delegate suggested Biden start making calls to major stakeholders and try to convince them that “whatever bump we’re seeing now won’t be the case forever.”
A senior Democratic operative working on 2024 races said it should still be acceptable for the party to take on Trump and his allies directly. There’s no reason to accept Republican rules around what counts as too pointed, they said.
“There’s plenty of material in places like Project 2025 that can be directly connected to Trump and the people who would staff his administration,” the person said. “We shouldn’t need to resort to vague language that may come off as not credible to voters anyway.”
In a rare prime time address, the president sought to “lower the temperature” of the nation on Sunday night, but he didn’t back away from his central reelection argument that democracy is at risk in this election. “I’ll continue to speak out strongly about democracy, stand up for our constitutional and the rule of law,” he said from the Oval Office. “We debate and disagree. We compare and contrast the candidates and the records, the issues the agendas and the vision for America.”
Biden said he plans to travel the country during the Republican convention to make “the case for our record and the vision, my vision for the country, our vision.”
Some Democratic operatives were despondent Saturday night. Aghast by the shooting, impressed by the now iconic image of a bloodied Trump being herded offstage by the Secret Service with his fist raised high and exhausted by two weeks of Democratic infighting over Biden’s viability, some were ready to throw in the towel. One operative working to defeat Trump in a battleground state captured the feelings of many others when they texted NOTUS simply, “440+ electoral votes for Trump” late in the evening.
But by Sunday, many were again ready to think through the reset campaign, with careful consideration for the tone set by Biden in his public statements throughout the weekend.
“I think Democrats are being appropriately gracious and circumspect for the moment. True to form, President Biden has shown leadership and grace,” said a political strategist well-versed in high-level Democratic conversations. “Eventually, though, this is a campaign, and both sides will duke it out by making their best and strongest arguments for their respective candidates. The stakes of November remain enormously high.”
Another operative familiar with party discussions said they weren’t seeing a frantic or depressed mood among Democrats about Trump’s position post-attack, but instead widespread acknowledgment from inside the DNC and campaign of a “hard pause.”
“This obviously forces a tone change for everyone all around,” the operative said. Democrats now must thread a careful needle.
“I think two things can be true,” the operative said. “Another Trump presidency is a threat to democracy and political violence has no place in America: We can make both points simultaneously.”
Some rhetoric seems off the table, officially. On Sunday, a PAC effort led by prominent never-Trumper George Conway that planned to plaster billboards around the Milwaukee Republican convention site sarcastically “thanking” the delegates for nominating, among other names, “A Psycho,” has been placed on indefinite hold, according to a spokesperson.
The assassination attempt and convention give Trump’s opponents a chance to regroup — and rebuild — after more than a month of riding out multiple gale-force winds.
Late May through mid-July has been a period of unpredictability no operative or political observer alive has seen in their lifetime. Biden campaign aides, especially, have been buffeted over and over. So for some, the only way to think about the future right now is to wait and see what actually comes. A person close to the Biden campaign described staff as “rattled” Sunday.
The person said what happens after the RNC is heavily “dependent upon what we hear from Trump.”
“For now, at least, it takes the [Biden] dropping out stuff off the table,” the source concluded. “I mean, are you really going to come out and say he should drop out when we just had a national tragedy?”
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Evan McMorris-Santoro, Alex Roarty and Jasmine Wright are reporters at NOTUS. Oriana González, a reporter at NOTUS, and Tinashe Chingarande, a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed to this report.