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msn.com

WASHINGTON—President Biden’s re-election strategy rests in large part on reminding voters about the darkest days of Donald Trump’s presidency: the Capitol riot, a botched response to Covid-19 and violence driven by racial strife in Charlottesville, Va.

Now, Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts gives Biden and his allies their best chance yet to jolt voters into recalling Trump as an agent of chaos and to argue that his personal behavior carries risks for the country.

It might not work. Biden’s campaign has struggled to change the minds of the undecided voters he needs most, many of whom are disengaged from politics, worried foremost about prices and hold an increasingly rosy view of Trump’s presidency.

Those factors have made it hard for Democrats to make Trump’s personality and policies the most salient issue in the campaign—as they did successfully in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats made big congressional gains, and in the 2020 race that put Biden in the White House.

“This is going to be the ‘reminder campaign,’” said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster who has worked with many presidential candidates. “Instead of talking about the future, they’re going to be talking about the past, because each one wants to define it in his own way.”

The challenge for Biden: “Voters’ attitudes toward President Trump are locked in,” Newhouse said. “They either love him or hate him.”

Biden’s allies have a different theory of the case. They believe they can, in fact, reframe Trump as a risky and even dangerous choice by presenting voters with information that they have forgotten or never knew about him.

“For those who may have supported Biden in 2020 but have been having second thoughts, this verdict will remind them of why they voted against Trump before—the danger he poses to the freedoms they count on,” said Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO.

The Biden strategy has been on display in recent days, as the campaign and the president himself have tried to reshape memories of their opponent. They have incessantly reminded voters that Trump-appointed justices helped overturn Roe v. Wade. They have revived a comment from eight years ago, which Trump later retracted, in which he suggested women should face punishment for having abortions. A recent campaign ad, aimed at wavering Black voters, returns to 1989 in citing Trump’s call for the death penalty after Black and Latino men, known as the Central Park Five, were wrongfully arrested for a rape in New York City.

“Remember when he was trying to deal with Covid? He said, ‘Just inject a little bleach in your veins,’” Biden said at a White House event in April, one of several recent times he has raised Trump’s handling of the pandemic. During a press briefing in 2020, Trump had speculated about whether using disinfectant or solar light inside the body could treat Covid, comments he later walked back.

Biden’s team largely steered clear of commenting during the Trump trial. Following the verdict Thursday, Biden made brief comments from the White House on Friday, focusing on respect for the judicial system, rather than the details of the trial. He called it reckless and dangerous to label a trial rigged because someone doesn’t like the outcome. “We should never allow anyone to tear it down. As simple as that,” he said.

Many Democrats hope that the guilty verdict will break through, given the sizzle surrounding the case, which involved a porn actress, hush money and charges of falsified business records, and that the felony conviction of a former president is unprecedented. A Biden campaign pollster said they don’t expect any single event to change things overnight, but said this is a moment that can help push voters—particularly those not paying close attention—to “zoom in” on the unpopular aspects of Trump’s presidency.