A sense of doom is percolating among Democrats who fear that Joe Biden may lose to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, RadarOnline.com has learned.
Officeholders and strategists who were once optimistic about a second Biden victory are reportedly in a full-blown "freakout" as Trump gains momentum in key battleground states and outpaces the president in fundraising.
Politico spoke with more than a dozen Democratic Party leaders and operatives and reported on Tuesday that a "pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party," adding that "the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects."
A Democratic operative in frequent contact with the White House told the outlet anonymously, “You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes."
"Nobody wants to be that guy,” the source continued, adding that Biden's lagging poll numbers and the potential consequences of a loss to Trump “are creating the freakout.
“This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.’ It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end,’” the operative said.
In April, the Trump campaign said it brought in a record $50.5 million at a fundraising event in Florida, which was almost double the amount generated by the Biden campaign that month, according to the Associated Press.
This financial gap has reportedly prompted Democratic leaders to urge increased support from donors. An adviser to "major Democratic Party donors" gave Politico a "running list that has been shared with funders of nearly two dozen reasons why Biden could lose," the outlet reported.
“The list of why we ‘could’ win is so small I don’t even need to keep the list on my phone," the adviser said.
These issues included immigration, high inflation, Biden's age, the purported unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris, and the presence of third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
A campaign adviser to the president who also spoke anonymously with Politico said that Biden's team was not focused on how Trump's criminal hush money trial would impact the election outcome. Instead, the adviser predicted that Trump's greatest challenges would be defending his stance on abortion, attacks on democracy, and alignment with corporations.
Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz told the outlet, “Trump’s photo-ops and PR stunts may get under the skin of some very serious D.C. people as compelling campaigning, but they will do nothing to win over the voters that will decide this election.”
“The work we do every day on the ground and on the airwaves in our battleground states — to talk about how President Biden is fighting for the middle class against the corporate greed that’s keeping prices high, and highlight Donald Trump’s anti-American campaign for revenge and retribution and abortion bans — is the work that will again secure us the White House,” Munoz continued.
Meanwhile, the former president has been expanding his campaign into areas where voters have been historically Democratic, aiming to attract Hispanic and Black voters.
The latest polls showed Trump with a slight lead over Biden nationally as well as in most battleground states, and Vox noted on Tuesday that the president "has lost an extraordinary amount of standing with young and nonwhite voters."
Biden and Trump became the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees in March, but candidates will be officially nominated at the Republican National Convention in July, followed by the Democratic National Convention in August.
