Scorched-earth summer: Biden, Sunak and Macron go negative

Even at a glittering Hollywood fundraiser, President Joe Biden’s message was dark.

Biden spoke from the stage last weekend about the possibility of former President Donald Trump making additional Supreme Court appointments as “one of the scariest parts” of the Republican’s potential return to office. First Lady Jill Biden went further, warning that Trump wants “absolute power” and aims to “destroy the democratic safeguards that stand in his way.”

Those comments mirrored the increasingly ominous tone of Biden’s latest campaign ads, which invoke the Jan. 6 riot, warn “Trump’s ready to burn it all down” and label him as “a convicted criminal.”

Biden’s team is on the attack. And they’re not alone.

Embattled leaders on both sides of the Atlantic are resorting to slashing attacks against their opponents, telling voters in dystopian terms about how bad things could get if their challengers win. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has warned that far-right and far-left candidates would inflict “an impoverishment of the country.” Across the channel in Britain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has mounted a nearly all-negative campaign against the ascendant Labour Party.

The three leaders represent different ideologies, cultures and generations. But they have one thing in common: all three are unpopular. Their caustic campaigns match a political atmosphere defined by frustration and fear.

“When voters are grouchy and angry, they don’t want to hear about rainbows and sunshine,” said Ben Tulchin, a Democratic pollster who worked on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. “When voters become recalcitrant, unwilling to hear a positive story, you have to shift gears to do scorched earth.”

By going negative, hoping to clarify the stakes of the election for voters, these leaders are also telegraphing a growing desperation. They have struggled to persuade voters with an affirmative case for their own ideas; now they are scrambling to break through before it’s too late.

In the United States and France, voters are disgusted enough with the political status quo that they’re more willing to support parties and politicians once deemed to be far outside the mainstream. In both countries, hard-right candidates are campaigning on near-apocalyptic rhetoric about immigration, security and national sovereignty, in many cases with draconian policies to match.

That has seemed to offer struggling incumbents a path to survival, if they can appeal to moderate voters’ underlying discomfort with political extremes.

Ever since Macron called a snap parliamentary election for June 30 after the far-right’s dominant showing in EU elections, his allies have been sounding the alarm about Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party. Macron and other centrists are chiefly attacking the hardline alternative parties rather than campaigning for their own unpopular agenda.

Prime Minister Gabriel Attal earlier this week predicted an "economic catastrophe" in case of a victory of the far right or the left. And Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire — a pillar of Macron’s Renaissance liberal party — was even harsher, lamenting that “the country is going to the dogs” and accusing Le Pen of concocting a “purely and simply Marxist” program that would gut the economy.  

Le Pen, like Trump, regularly espouses anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views, has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and questioned France’s involvement in NATO and its longstanding alliances with other democratic nations, specifically the United States. A victory in the snap election would be a convulsive event in French politics.

Matt Bennett, a leader of the centrist American think tank Third Way, said in an interview that Biden and Macron were right to address voters in stark terms about the implications of potentially electing the extreme right.

“This isn’t Mitt Romney. This isn’t the center-right we saw in Europe,” Bennett said. “They want to fundamentally alter what it means to live in a democratic state and that gets people’s blood up."

In the United Kingdom, where polls show the Tories headed for defeat in the July 4 snap election, Sunak has been trying to scare the public out of returning the center-left Labour party to power. The Conservatives have leveled wild accusations, including the false suggestion that Labour wants to do away with the British royal family.

Unlike Macron and Biden, however, Sunak does not have an ideologically extreme foil to campaign against: the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, may be most controversial for his purge of ultra-left forces from the party’s front lines.

That may be why Sunak seems most desperate of all three struggling leaders — and why every political indicator in Britain points toward a resounding defeat.

When Sunak made his shock snap election announcement last month, he promised to offer voters a bold vision for the future based on his party's 14-year legacy in government. Within hours, the attack ads on his opponents started.

At first, it was portraying Starmer as a "flip-flopper" who was willing to say anything to secure power. The Conservatives’ opening salvo included a slick video ad portraying Starmer as several versions of a Ken doll, joking he "comes in any colour.” Next came a barrage of largely confected warnings about supposed Labour plans to raise tax by £2,000 per household. Finally, the Tories claimed a vote for their upstart rival Reform UK — the right-wing party led by Nigel Farage — would hand Labour power for a generation.

The Tories even accuse Starmer of planning to rig future elections once in power by giving the vote to “immigrants and all the rest.” 

By the halfway point of the campaign, analysis by POLITICO showed nearly 95 percent of the Conservatives’ £500,000 (approximately $635,000) in spending on the Meta platform — which includes Facebook and Instagram — was plowed into attack ads.

In the U.S., Biden and his allies look less surely doomed than Sunak, in large part because their opponents are so politically divisive. The American presidential election continues to look like a toss-up race.

And in France, turnout may be stronger in the upcoming national election than it was in the June 9 EU election. Le Pen’s party triumphed in that vote after framing it as a way for voters to send a message to Macron.

Macron and his allies are hoping that voters will think twice about voting for Le Pen’s coalition when the consequences are closer to home. Polling suggests that looks like undue optimism, however; there is a real danger France’s liberal centrists could be wiped out next month, squeezed to death by a surge of support for both the left and far right.

In part, that’s because Le Pen’s movement has gained respectability in recent years. Alarmism from its opponents “doesn't work that well” anymore, according to Mathieu Gallard, research director at the Ipsos polling firm. “It has gradually worn out.

Similarly for Biden, getting attacks on Trump to stick some nine years after he first overtook American politics has been something of a conundrum.

Biden’s campaign, which was slow to ramp up after last year’s April launch, devoted its initial ads to promoting the president’s agenda, accomplishments and values. Last fall, amid rising concerns as polls showed Biden trailing Trump in battleground states, some aides began to discuss whether it made sense to change the campaign’s approach.

Despite spending at least $100 million on campaign ads to date, Biden’s campaign has barely improved his political standing. Most polls still showing him trailing Trump in key battleground states.

Now, with just five months left before Election Day, Biden aides are eager to engage with Trump more directly, pushing to move up the first presidential debate from the fall to late June, hammering him last week on everything from inciting an insurrection to his inaction on guns, and ramping up a TV blitz all in hopes of getting more voters to focus on an election matchup polls show most of the country doesn’t want.

“We’ve been hearing this [in focus groups] since 2021: people aren’t excited about a second term for Biden,” said one Democratic pollster who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the campaign’s strategy. "We’re not going to change how those people connect to Biden, but we can change how they emotionally connect to Trump.”

Biden, at a fundraiser in Virginia on Tuesday night, unleashed a stream of attacks on Trump, describing him as “a convicted felon” and warning that “he wants to, and these are his words, terminate the Constitution” and exact revenge.

“Folks, it's clear every day: the threat Trump poses will be greater in a second term than it was in his first term,” Biden said.