A shocking assassination attempt, the dismissal of a major federal probe and intensifying divisions among Democrats have unexpectedly culminated to deliver a boost to former President Trump ahead of November.
The former president’s lead in battleground state polls has solidified in the wake of the June 27 debate with President Biden, and Trump and his team appear poised to ride that momentum into the summer as favorites to win another term in the White House.
The shooting at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, where Trump was grazed by a bullet, may have unintentionally added more wind to his sails, as footage of the former president — shown with blood on his face and fist raised in the air defiantly — has been seared into Americans’ minds over the past few days.
The incident has unified skeptical Republicans behind Trump and also complicated the Biden campaign’s efforts to paint the former president as an existential threat to democracy. And Trump is poised to capitalize with a weeklong show of strength at the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin.
“The environment up here is bad, the environment deep down is bad for Joe Biden,” Reince Priebus, chair of the convention host committee, told reporters Monday.
“I think the state of play is very much in Donald Trump’s favor, but also factoring in a very unknown situation given Biden’s age issues and the extraordinary events of the other day,” he added.
Polls show, however, that the election is still either Trump’s or Biden’s to win.
A Decision Desk HQ/The Hill average of national polls shows Trump leading Biden by 1 percentage point. Polling averages also show Trump leading in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia North Carolina and Nevada, with a close race in Michigan and Wisconsin — states that are crucial to secure for either candidate’s victory.
A New York Times poll published Monday and conducted before the shooting found Trump leading Biden in Pennsylvania by 3 percentage points, 48-45. Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020 by just more than a percentage point, and losing the state in November would practically close his path to 270 electoral votes.
In another sign of Trump’s growing strength, the Times poll showed the former president trailing Biden by just 3 percentage points in Virginia. Biden carried the commonwealth in 2020 by 10 percentage points.
Biden campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said Monday after Trump named Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate that the incumbent and his team “will spend every single day making the case between the two starkly contrasting visions Americans will choose between at the ballot box this November.”
Trump has in many ways been fortunate as he’s campaigned for a second term, despite a cascade of legal issues that often kept him off the trail.
He was charged in four separate criminal cases, and while he was convicted on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in New York, none of the other cases he still faces are expected to go to trial before Election Day.
But then he scored what was unthinkable one year ago — the dismissal of a case involving the potential mishandling of classified documents. Those charges had been considered among the most serious ones Trump was facing, but a judge in Florida agreed with his defense team’s argument that special counsel Jack Smith was not lawfully appointed to oversee the prosecution.
“I think that this whole situation just could not have gone better for Donald Trump,” one former Trump White House official said, referring specifically to how the legal issues have played out.
Trump himself has acknowledged how fortunate he is to even be alive after an assassination attempt at a Saturday campaign rally left him bloodied by a bullet that hit his ear.
“I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be dead,” Trump told reporters from the New York Post and Washington Examiner aboard his plane to Wisconsin on the way to the convention.
“By luck or by God — many people are saying it’s by God — I’m still here,” he said.
Trump’s opponent in Biden is the same man who defeated him in 2020. But in recent weeks, Democrats have crippled Biden’s standing by calling on him to step aside and suggesting he cannot win in November.
One Senate Democrat and more than a dozen House Democrats have urged the president to withdraw from the race amid fears that Biden’s debate performance, which underscored concerns about his age and mental fitness, could cost the party in November.
An NBC News poll conducted July 7-9 found just 33 percent of Democratic voters and Democratic-leaning independents said they are satisfied with their party’s nominee for president, compared to 71 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who said the same.
Biden, through it all, remained adamant about staying in the race.
Former Trump White House press secretary Sean Spicer explained that the recent events have tamped down talk among Democrats of replacing Biden on the ticket, handing the president a win.
“The best thing to happen for Biden right now is that I think this has ended the calls, or … at least temporarily halted the calls for him to drop out. This is a political short-term win for Biden,” Spicer said. “It stops the flow of dissent against him, but it doesn’t help him. It just stops the negativity.”
“Biden benefited from this. Democrats at large lost,” he said.
The attempted assassination, a watershed moment in American history, also offered an unintended contrast between the two presidential candidates: A 78-year-old former president, energized and unshakeable, fist-pumping the crowd just minutes after being shot, in comparison to Biden, 81, who’s appeared soft-spoken and at times mumbling at events.
Trump’s calls for unity, too, have offered Republicans an easy and persuasive message to rally around amid a Republican presidential primary where intra-party tensions spilled out into the open. Notably former Trump rivals Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis are expected to speak at the RNC.
“Fourteen million Democrats voted for Joe Biden, but plenty of them voted uncommitted or did not show up, and that was … in part because of the war between Israel and Hamas and not pursuing the ideological purity that the progressives would want, and that has fractured the base for Biden,” said Erin Perrine, who served as the 2020 Trump campaign’s communications director, referring to those who voted for him in the Democratic primary.
“But Trump — the party is completely unified behind him right now, and to see him bring in Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, this is exactly what the Republicans need to be doing going into November.”