Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on Gaza protests hurting Biden’s reelection bid

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• Amna Nawaz:

  As protests of the war in Gaza spread to more college campuses across the country, the impact on the 2024 presidential race could be growing too, just one of the stories to discuss with our Politics Monday team.

  That is Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

  Great to see you both.

  And let's begin with those protests.

  (Crosstalk)

• Amna Nawaz:

  Obviously, we have been seeing them spread across college campuses. We saw them outside the White House Correspondents Dinner this weekend.

  We're seeing them in countries around the world too, in Egypt and Jordan and France and Australia. It's not necessarily just young voters in America among Democrats or young voters of color. There's some concern expressed in a recent New York Times piece by Wisconsin Congressman Mark Pocan that some of his older and mostly white constituents there in Wisconsin have been increasingly asking about Biden's approach to the war in Gaza.

  So, Amy, walk us through this. I mean, can President Biden meet their concerns? And should he be more concerned about this growing campus and other protests?

• Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:

  Right.

  So I do think that the more attention that is being paid to, first let's start with college campuses…

• Amna Nawaz:

  Yes.

• Amy Walter:

  … and, as you pointed out, is now going everywhere, is also a little bit of a Rorschach test.

  If you are a progressive person, if you're a more liberal-leaning person, you see those protests and you think, oh, OK, these are people standing up for the rights of the oppressed, and this is a war that is now taking the lives of innocent people, and we have to protest that.

  If you're a conservative, you look at it and say, this is chaos. This is — there's disorder everywhere. These schools need to crack down on these encampments. And so I don't know, though, if that more broadly means that this issue itself is a more salient voting issue.

  And that's the real — that's sort of the real question here, in the sense of, is it something that is uniting liberals and conservatives over the approach to these issues, yes, or how maybe the framework in which they see this issue? They are united on that.

  What it actually means for how they vote. So, for example, the most recent CNN poll found that among people who say they are supporting Joe Biden right now, 44 percent of them disagree or dislike the way he's handling the situation.

• Amna Nawaz:

  What does your reporting show, Tam?

• Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

  Well, the Biden White House and the Biden campaign are in something of a bind, because there's not a lot of wiggle room on policy.

  These protests have not pushed Biden to change his policy really in any way. He is continuing — he had a call with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, yesterday, where he continued to apply pressure to Netanyahu to help resolve some of the very serious humanitarian challenges in Gaza, to open up new humanitarian aid routes and otherwise.

  He's putting as much pressure as he can. He's been talking to various world leaders trying to get a cease-fire. Short of the cease-fire happening and the hostages being released, there's not a lot of wiggle room for Biden. He's pretty stuck. And he's Joe Biden.

  And he does not appear to have any desire to move toward the more progressive wing of his party, particularly because there are real divisions about these protests and whether they're effective and also whether the rhetoric of the protesters has moved too far to the left, to the point of antisemitism, that will cause backlash.

• Amna Nawaz:

  In the meantime, here is what the matchup looks like between President Biden and former President Trump. This is a moment in time captured in a poll from CNN.

  Right now, you have Mr. Trump leading President Biden 49-43. And Republicans continue to line up behind Mr. Trump, right?

• Tamara Keith:

  Yes.

• Amna Nawaz:

  You have former challenger Ron DeSantis who met with him at his Florida estate over the weekend.

  His former Attorney General Bill Barr, who has testified to Trump's efforts to overturn legitimate election, had this to say this weekend:

• William Barr, Former U.S. Attorney General:

  If faced with a choice between two people, neither of which I think should be president, I feel it's my duty to pick the person who I think would do the least damage to the country. And I think Trump would do less damage than Biden.

• Amna Nawaz:

  That follows New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who once told Judy Woodruff on this set that voting for Trump is like — quote — "throwing gasoline on a firework."

  Here's what he had to say in a recent exchange on ABC.

  George Stephanopoulos, ABC "This Week" Anchor: You support him for president even if he's convicted in classified documents. You support him for president even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection. You support him for president even though you believe he's lying about the last election. You support him for president even if he's convicted in the Manhattan case.

  I just want to say, the answer to that is yes, correct?

• Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH):

  Yes, me and 51 percent of America.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Tam, other than Liz Cheney, there's really no part of the party that isn't behind him right now.

• Tamara Keith:

  Is that right? Well, Nikki Haley hasn't actually said anything. She hasn't yet endorsed Trump. Ron DeSantis endorsed Trump as soon as he dropped out of the race.

  And I do think it is interesting to continue to watch Nikki Haley voters and what happens with them. But we have been saying all along that Republicans, especially professional Republicans who want to continue to be professional Republicans, they're going to fall in line.

  The question is whether some of these voters who maybe didn't vote for Trump in 2020, whether there's any chance at all he could bring them back. And that seems somewhat less likely. The Biden campaign is putting real money and certainly targeted advertising behind sending ads in — digital ads into communities where Nikki Haley did surprisingly well in primaries weeks after she had dropped out.

  And they're using tape of former President Trump saying, ah, Nikki Haley voters, I don't need them.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Can they be persuaded, those four were Nikki Haley voters?

• Amy Walter:

  What we don't know is how many of them are already Biden 2020 voters. Where she did best are in some of the places where Biden also did the best.

  But it comes down to this issue and what these polls are also showing, Amna, which is, voters don't necessarily like Donald Trump anymore than they did back in 2020, but they feel a lot better about his presidency than they did in 2020. Or, actually, let me put it this way. They feel a lot better about his handling of pretty much every issue than they do about Joe Biden.

  That wasn't true back in 2020. So there is something of this nostalgia for the presidency, even though not necessarily for the person.

• Amna Nawaz:

  In the meantime, we know that his hush money trial in New York will pick back up tomorrow.

  And it's worth pointing out we now have numbers from the FEC filings from Save America PAC, which is his primary fund-raising and political spending arms since he left office. They show this. In March alone, this pack spent nearly $3.6 million Mr. Trump's legal fees alone. That is roughly the same amount that they spent on his presidential campaign in the month of March.

  Tam, how do you look at those numbers right now? Looks like his supporters are happy to continue to pay those legal fees?

• Tamara Keith:

  His fund-raising has not been as brisk as I think his campaign would like or his PAC would like. And they are working to turn that around.

  But in the meantime, yes, a lot of money is going to legal fees. Additionally, he's just not doing a lot of events. Now, I know he's in court three to four days a week, but even when he's not been in court, he hasn't been having events. That is changing this week. Wednesday, he has some rallies.

  But he just, since Super Tuesday, has not been campaigning in a way that you would expect from someone who's turning towards the general election. And that also goes to television ads, where the Biden campaign is just vastly outspending Trump. Now, what they say, what the Trump campaign says is, he earns media. He just gets it. He doesn't have to pay for it.

• Amna Nawaz:

  He does get a lot of attention, right?

• Amy Walter:

  He does.

  And this is where — this is what Biden is actually hoping, is that the media attention on the trial helps Biden, in that it reminds those voters who may have some nostalgia for, well, the economy was better back in 2020, or I wasn't as worried about the border in 2020, that they go, oh, right, these are the things that I didn't like about Donald Trump.

  If that focus continues while he's on trial, to the degree that it is not televised, I think, is a problem for the Biden campaign in that strategy, right, because they — he's — as we saw in those polls, he's running behind right now.

  If you are the Biden campaign, you need to make this a referendum on Trump more than anything. And the only way you do that is if there's a whole lot of attention the person who's not the president of the United States. And that's very hard to get that level of attention when you're not the president, unless you're a former president and happen to be in criminal court.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Amy Walter, Tamara Keith, always good to see you both. Thank you so much.

• Amy Walter:

  Thank you.

• Tamara Keith:

  You're welcome.