WHY DEMOCRATS ARE WINNING ELECTIONS BUT TRUMP'S POLLS ARE GOOD

No, I don't believe the outlier Washington Post/ABC poll that gave Donald Trump a 10-point lead over Joe Biden -- but I am concerned that other polling says the race is neck-and-neck, a bad sign given the fact that 2020 polling had Biden up by 7.2, after which he won the popular vote by 4.5 and barely won the Electoral College. Maybe Biden will exceed expectations, as other Democrats have recently. Or it's possible that the presidential race won't go the way other recent races have gone.

There is a big difference between, say, the Wisconsin judicial race that took place earlier this year (in which the candidate supported by the Democrats won a blowout victory) and the 2024 presidential race. The difference is that Democrats in state and local races are running against Republican power. They're running against abortion bans and book bans, against crackdowns on trans people, against efforts to remove facts about race in America from children's education.

By contrast, Biden is gearing up to run against a candidate whose top selling point is that he's being denied power.

Former President Donald J. Trump detoured from the campaign trail on Monday to attend the opening of the civil trial in the New York attorney general’s fraud case against him, as his political team seeks to turn the spectacle into a rallying cry for supporters....

The move ... reveals how inverted the norms of politics have become in the Trump-era Republican Party: Being accused of wrongdoing could be politically beneficial despite the very real legal jeopardy....

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump’s campaign openly sought to take advantage of the attention, sending fund-raising solicitations that teased his possible attendance and accusing Democrats of “trying to keep me off the campaign trail.”

“After four sham arrests, indictments, and even a mug shot failed to break me, a Democrat judge is now trying to destroy my Family Business,” Mr. Trump wrote in a fund-raising message on Saturday.

The Democrats' Trump narrative is: You can't be seriously considering a vote for this criminal degenerate, can you? But every day that Trump's legal problems are in the news is a day when people who don't like how the country is being run are reminded that Trump is not one of the people running the country. So if they're on the fence about their 2024 vote and they're upset about high gas prices or some other meat-and-potatoes issue, they're reminded -- by Democrats and the mainstream media as well by Trump himself -- that Trump is a person the government does things to, not a person with government power.

We need these voters to think about what Trump would do with power if he's elected again. We need to link him to all the bad things Republicans are doing. Instead, we've got him in the dock, where he doesn't look as dangerous as he actually is.