MAYBE DEMOCRATS NEED TO TREAT CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS AS SCARIER THAN TRUMP

President Biden regularly warns voters of the dangers of "MAGA Republicans." His point is that Donald Trump is really awful, and the specific way that other Republicans are awful is that they embrace the ethos of Trump. But regrettably, many voters don't seem to believe Trump is all that scary, even now that he's a convicted felon:

A new Emerson College Polling national survey of U.S. voters finds 46% of voters support former President Donald Trump and 45% support President Biden in the 2024 presidential election. Nine percent are undecided. Since last month, Trump’s support has stayed the same, while Biden’s support has increased one point....

Forty percent of voters say Trump’s criminal conviction of 34 felonies makes no impact on their vote this November — 33% say it makes them less likely to support the former president this November, and 27% more likely.

“Trump’s support in our polling remained the same before and after his conviction,” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, said.

We've been told that voters will eventually focus on the election, realize that Trump is running, and recoil in horror. But what if they don't? What if fourteen years of The Apprentice and three years of relative prosperity prior to the COVID pandemic left a plurality of voters believing that Trump is basically harmless, and actually pretty good at presidenting? What if he simply doesn't scare enough voters to give Biden a win?

Maybe congressional Republicans (and judicial Republicans) can be made to seem scarier than Trump now:

On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., held a vote on the Right to Contraception Act, which guarantees the right of an individual "to obtain contraceptives and to voluntarily engage in contraception." The legislation also protects the right of licensed health care providers "to provide contraceptives, contraception, and information, referrals, and services related to contraception." Despite loudly insisting they have no desire to take away birth control, all but two Republicans voted against the bill....

The misnamed Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), one of the groups behind the Supreme Court's 2022 decision that ended abortion rights, claims they are "not working to ban contraception and has never done so." This is untrue ... because ADF has "labeled birth-control methods as abortifacients in various lawsuits." The reason to do that is to create a pretext to ban birth control under existing abortion laws. The pill, the injection, the implant, IUDs, and emergency contraception are all reimagined, falsely as "abortion," which would make it illegal in many states.

The current strategy -- saying Trump is scary, and Republicans will follow his lead if he's elected -- isn't working. Maybe Democrats need to tell voters that Trump will follow the rest of the GOP's lead if he's elected. He'll appoint judges and Supreme Court justices who'll ban many forms of contraception -- in fact, he may already have done so. He'll sign radical bills put forward by extremists in Congress. The message: Even if you don't think he's scary, they are.

Democrats have probably scared as many voters as they're going to scare with warnings about Trump. But they haven't really issued enough warnings about the rest of Trump's party. That might be what's necessary to make voters understand the stakes in this election.