The Memo: Democrats face choice: Is it smart to lean into Trump conviction?

Democrats are facing a choice in the wake of the conviction of former President Trump for 34 felonies.

Do they focus hard on the guilty verdict in their political messaging? Or do they let that story tell itself while concentrating on other, more traditional topics like the economy?

A focus on Trump could help sharpen the argument that the 45th president is unfit to hold the nation’s highest office again. He is the first president found guilty of felonies, the first president to be twice impeached — the second time for his conduct around Jan. 6, 2021 — and he has been indicted in three other criminal cases.

The argument against such a focus, however, is that spending time on the criminal conviction does not actually shift many voters, the vast majority of whom have likely made their minds up about Trump’s moral character a long time ago. 

Time and ad money used casting Trump as unacceptable is not spent defending President Biden’s record or pushing the Democratic messaging on favorable topics like reproductive rights. 

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) laid out the case for focusing in on Trump’s conviction during a Sunday appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Schiff said that he understood why Biden might not want to seem to be gleeful about the verdict on the day when it was announced or immediately thereafter.

But Schiff added: “I think the president should be leaning into this going forward. His competitor is a convicted felon. And you can only imagine, if the situation was reversed, they would be going after Joe Biden with a vengeance.”

The California congressman, who is a Senate candidate this year, also contended that Trump’s conviction could be used to make the case that he could not be trusted to run the country.

“You want the country run properly. You don’t want a convicted felon to turn the Oval Office and the federal government [into] some kind of a racketeering operation,” he said. “I think that’s a powerful case to make and certainly one supported by the verdict here.”

So far, Team Biden has delivered a somewhat bifurcated response to Trump’s conviction, which revolved around a $130,000 hush money payment to adult actress Stormy Daniels in the final stretch of the 2016 election.

The president and his White House staff have been circumspect, while Biden’s reelection campaign has been much more forceful.

Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said on the day of the verdict that it was a rebuke to Trump’s purported belief that “he would never face consequences for breaking the law for his own personal gain.”

Later, after Trump had made remarks blasting the verdict, Tyler said “America just witnessed a confused, desperate and defeated Donald Trump ramble about his own personal grievances and lie about the American justice system.”

Still, when viewing the verdict through an electoral lens, the question remains as to whether Trump being found guilty does anything more than amplify the dislike Democratic-leaning voters already feel for him.

The initial evidence on the verdict’s political impact is mixed. 

An ABC News/Ipsos poll found that a plurality of Americans, 50 percent, believe the guilty verdict was correct and 49 percent think Trump should end his 2024 campaign. Yet the same poll showed Trump’s overall favorability rating basically unchanged, albeit at a lowly 31 percent.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Saturday found a clear majority of Americans saying the verdict would make no difference to their willingness or unwillingness to vote for Trump. 

Among independents, though, 25 percent said it would make them less likely to vote for him — while 18 percent said it made them more likely to do so.

Democratic strategist Joel Payne argued that the key objective for Democrats was to connect the conviction with a larger argument that Trump’s legal woes make him ill-placed to take effective action on real issues.

Payne said he did not think Democrats “should shy away” from talking about Trump’s conviction but added that he would not “spend a bunch of ad money” on the topic alone.

“It’s one thing to say, isn’t it terrible that Donald Trump broke these laws and is a convicted felon? But the better message is, Donald Trump is a convicted felon and he is spending all of his time and all of his energy focusing on himself. He is not worried about the issues that matter to the American people.”

Dick Harpootlian, a South Carolina state senator who also serves on the finance committee of Biden’s campaign, argued that there was a moral argument to be made based on Trump’s behavior.

“To have a convicted felon running for president of the United States? A convicted felon who paid off a porn star because he thought it would affect his election? It’s morally reprehensible,” Harpootlian said.

Though Harpootlian freely acknowledged that there were some Trump loyalists who would never be peeled away from their support of the former president, he also contended “there are a bunch of folks out here who can be persuaded this guy is not fit to be the president of the United States, and I think the Biden campaign should remind folks of that.”

Republicans — even those deeply skeptical of Trump — seem far less likely to believe the court verdict can move voters, or that Democrats would be wise to focus much time on it.

“There was nothing any voter learnt coming out of this trial that they didn’t know at the beginning,” said one such GOP strategist, Dan Judy.

“What the Joe Biden campaign needs to worry about is Joe Biden. What he needs to worry about is sub-40 percent approval ratings. 

“The fundamental problem for them is not Donald Trump’s unpopularity, it is Joe Biden’s unpopularity,” Judy added.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.