Amid political violence and rise of disinformation, Biden looks to keep focus on economy

A brutal assault on the husband of the House speaker. A rise in celebrities spouting antisemitic beliefs. The world’s richest man pushing fake news on his newly acquired social media site.

With a week until the midterms, a series of major events have fueled a growing sense of national unrest and division and sparked larger debates about the future the country is charting.

Against this backdrop, President Joe Biden plans to stay the course. His closing campaign argument will remain largely centered on economic themes and messages that aides believe are closer to immediate voter interests.

But Biden now has to strike a balancing act.

He can not ignore the rise of political violence and disinformation as his campaign travel finally ramps. That’s true even as aides plan to have him focus on pocketbook issues to underscore how his administration has and will battle inflation and to draw sharp contrasts with the Republicans’ economic plans.

And White House aides said on Wednesday that Biden would deliver a head-on speech addressing threats to democracy on Wednesday evening. The speech will be delivered at the Capitol.

“The president’s value right now is that he has to be used in a very targeted way: What headline do I want the president to produce wherever he goes?” asked Jennifer Palmieri, White House communications director under former President Barack Obama. “The most helpful thing is that they have one [headline] on making inflation better. The Democrats’ economic argument does not get heard unless the president makes it.”

The dichotomy was on full display in Florida on Tuesday. Biden hammered home how GOP policies may accelerate inflation as well as endanger Medicare and Social Security. But he also warned that democracy was “on the ballot” and accused Republicans of being “broken” for their rhetoric and response to the attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul.

“Look at the response of Republicans, making jokes about it,” said Biden, who slammed the lack of condemnation within the GOP. “These guys are extremely extreme.”

Historical trends suggest that the party which controls the White House suffers during the midterms. But while Democrats’ hopes were bolstered this summer in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning federal abortion protections, the final stage of the campaign has been dominated by fears about crime and the economy, issues that tend to benefit Republicans.

Most Democrats privately believe that the House will be lost and that maintaining control of the Senate is a toss-up. Biden has largely stayed on the campaign sidelines but will plunge into the foray this week with stops in Florida, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and California.

Economic arguments, per White House aides, will be the centerpiece of Biden’s closing campaign argument, as well as touting the bipartisan infrastructure deal and Democrats’ accomplishments on prescription drugs and health care.

But the White House and allied Democrats know Biden will also need to address how the stretch run of the campaign has featured a confluence of dark conspiracies that have further tested the nation’s stability.

“My view is you don’t twist yourself into a pretzel, you talk about both,” said former White House press secretary Jen Psaki. “Biden is going to continue to make the contrast on what Democrats are putting forward, but he also needs to address — and I expect he will — these types of threats, and this type of silence, and what it does to allow conspiracy theories to move forward and give people license to act on them.”

Since the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, government and law enforcement officials have warned about a surge in political violence, fears that have grown alongside the inflammatory rhetoric used by Donald Trump and his allies in the aftermath of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in August.

Those worries were born out by Friday’s brutal assault of Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in the couple’s San Francisco home. The suspect, 42-year-old David DePape, who trolled in far-right online conspiracy theories, attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, fracturing his skull. Authorities said that he told police he aimed to hold the speaker hostage while breaking her knees.

Elon Musk, the controversial new owner of Twitter, amplified conspiracy theories from the darkest corner of the internet about the attack, posting to his nearly 113 million followers a false account that suggested the assailant and victim knew each other.

The assault also came amid fresh worries of anti-Jewish violence and discrimination after celebrities Ye, better known as Kanye West, and Kyrie Irving respectively espoused and disseminated antisemitic views.

But voters seem far more focused on other issues, according to polling. And Republicans in particular feel that any time Democrats spend talking about abstract issues like threats to democracy, they are ceding the more electorally important economic turf to them.

“The most important thing to do right now in any closing argument is to focus on the fundamentals, and that’s the economy,” said Kevin Madden, senior adviser to Republican Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign. “I don’t want to trivialize it, but ‘threats to democracy’ is much more elusive to the average swing voter right now. People aren’t voting on that.”

Biden has previously taken on extremism and the violence it spawns.

His decision to run for president came after a clash between white supremacists and anti-racist counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Va. And he has repeatedly called out radical elements of the Republican party – he has dubbed them “extreme MAGA” — most notably at a fiery speech in Philadelphia in September.

White House aides have counseled the president to avoid talking about Musk. The men have sparred before over auto unions, electric vehicles and taxes. But Biden has not weighed in on Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and aides believe it would do little good. The president has condemned the recent rise in antisemitism and called out Republicans for giving life to conspiracy theories by vilifying Pelosi and denying the results of the 2020 election.

“You can’t condemn the violence unless you condemn those people who continue to argue the election was not real, that it’s being stolen, that all the — all the malarkey that’s being put out there to undermine democracy,” Biden said Saturday.

But broad condemnations don’t always translate into voting issues. And as Biden treks across the country, aides have an eye on the local media coverage that his stops draw. The focus, for now, remains on emphasizing economic issues as Democrats try to hang onto at least one body of Congress and several key statehouses.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said Biden would continue to warn “that congressional Republicans’ agenda would worsen inflation and raise costs for middle class families in order to deliver tax welfare to rich special interests, which has made front page news across the country.”