(Reuters) – For weeks, President Donald Trump has dominated television coverage with daily White House briefings on the coronavirus pandemic, declaring himself a “wartime president” and touting his administration’s response.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump addresses the daily coronavirus task force briefing at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 7, 2020. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo
But Trump’s tendency to pepper his news conferences with misstatements, untruths and scientifically questionable advice has armed Democrats with a wealth of ready-made sound-bites to use against him ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
The challenge for Democrats – and their presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden – is how to highlight what they see as Trump’s failures in handling the crisis without appearing too crassly political when Americans are dying and losing their livelihoods as a result of the disease.
“If you’re on the attack, you risk being seen as tone-deaf,” said Tom McMahon, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee. “People don’t want to be seen as playing partisan politics with a pandemic.”
The coronavirus outbreak has upended life across the country, shuttering large portions of the economy. Some 94% of Americans are under stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of the respiratory virus, which had infected about 430,000 people in the United States and killed more than 14,700 as of Wednesday night.
In advertisements in battleground states that will decide the election, the Biden campaign and Democratic-aligned groups are testing ways of counter-programming Trump’s messaging, while trying to avoid alienating swing voters whose allegiance remains up for grabs.
Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC that has spent $7 million on pandemic-themed digital and TV commercials in five swing states, is using online panel