Biden’s Team Doubles Down on ‘Democracy’ on the Ballot

Maybe they are possessed of self-confidence that accompanies millions of dollars’ worth of research and years of experience. Maybe they’re just putting a brave face on some rather uniformly cataclysmic data. Perhaps they’re simply oblivious. Whatever the case, Joe Biden’s reelection team isn’t sweating the polling that shows their candidate staring down the barrel of a legacy-defining humiliation in November.

Following a weekend in which the news was dominated by poll after poll revealing the depth of the hole in which the president finds himself, the New Yorker published a rare and spectacularly well-timed interview with the quiet sage behind the president’s reelection efforts, longtime Biden adviser and his 2020 campaign manager Mike Donilon. Recently dispatched to Wilmington to oversee the campaign’s “organizing” and “electoral mechanics,” Donilon previewed a total shift in the political narrative as the general-election campaign gets under way in earnest.