Many Democrats were quick to condemn former President Donald Trump over news of his indictment and arraignment in New York. But in the week since, the party’s largely been quiet about Trump’s legal issues.
That’s because as tempting as it might seem for Democrats to seize on the former president’s arraignment — or even potential indictments to come — the party has more to gain by speaking to voters’ worries about kitchen table issues, like gas prices, health care, and inflation, than by touching Trump’s legal troubles.
“Legal stories produce a lot of oxygen,” James Carville, the longtime Democratic political consultant and campaign strategist, told me. “This story does not need Democratic politicians and pundits to feed the fire. This fire is raging. Go start another fire.”
If the indictment fire is raging, that’s in large part thanks to Trump himself. Two weeks after news of the indictment broke, Trump’s still trying to make his indictment page-one news, especially to conservative and Republican audiences. He’s given a speech from his Mar-a-Lago home, run digital ads hyping (and raising money off of) his indictment, and sat down for a primetime interview with Fox News to try to spin these charges into positive political capital.
But he’s had mixed success so far. While he’s succeeded in rallying much of the Republican Party’s elite around him, big national stories that cater to the Democratic platform have retaken the national spotlight from him: mass shootings in Tennessee and Kentucky, the expulsion and reinstatement of two Tennessee lawmakers who led gun control protests in Nashville, and conflicting rulings by federal judges over the future of the abortion pill mifepristone have refocused voters’ attention on perennial social issues that go beyond Trump.
The return to prominence of these issues gives Democrats another opportunity to address the issues that helped them win in 2022: gun safety, abortion access, and…
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