Democrats are hoping that, in the wake of President Biden’s debate performance last week, they will be able to turn voters’ attention toward the Supreme Court, and its expansion of presidential powers, as they did with much success in 2022 regarding the Nine’s abortion ruling. 

No respected polls have been released yet that survey Americans’ feelings about Monday’s landmark decision on presidential immunity, but that isn’t stopping Democrats from going on the offense and painting President Trump as a would-be, all-powerful dictator. 

One major Democratic fundraiser who served for years on the executive staff of the Democratic National Committee tells the Sun that, in the past, the court has “been off the table” for political attacks, but the justices are now inviting major scrutiny for their immunity decision. 

“For the first time in our history, it’s an important [electoral] issue,” the source, who was granted anonymity to speak freely, says. The source, who is deeply concerned about Mr. Biden’s performance but plans to stick with him, says the court has invited both a potential “tyrant of the right, but also a tyrant of the left.”

The polling on presidential immunity, when it comes, may give Democrats a slight advantage, though it’s yet to be seen if it becomes a salient issue before November. According to a Marquette Law School poll released in May, Americans strongly disagree with the idea that presidents should be immune from prosecution for their official acts while in office. 

The poll found that just 16 percent of Americans believe former presidents should be immune, while 71 percent believe that prosecutions of official acts, if they are crimes, are fair game. Republican respondents to the poll, however, give a special advantage to Trump. When asked if “former presidents” should be immune from prosecution, just 29 percent say yes, but when they are asked if Trump should be immune, 61 percent say yes. 

The Biden campaign has been looking for good news wherever it can find it since the president’s disastrous debate on Thursday. There has been no shortage of Democrats going on cable news and texting reporters on background and off the record saying how bad the performance was and raising the possibility that he should be replaced. Congressman Mike Quigley on Tuesday morning said the president “has to be honest with himself” and that “it wasn’t just a horrible night,” but rather a larger problem. Mr. Biden could be costing Democrats down-ballot races, Mr. Quigley warned on CNN. 

Mr. Quigley isn’t the only elected Democrat who is going public. Senator Whitehouse told local Rhode Island news station WPRI that he was “horrified” by the president’s performance. Senator Welch told Semafor that the Biden campaign is being too dismissive of voters,’ and more specifically Democrats,’ concerns. A former congressman, Tim Ryan, who was the Senate nominee in Ohio in 2022, says on X that “it’s time” for Vice President Harris to take the reins. 

The immunity decision, in that context, may have come as a godsend for the Biden team that has long painted their boss as the only person capable enough and stable enough to keep Trump out of the White House. Fear mongering about what Trump would be able to do in his second term may be one of the few things Democrats have going for them headed into November. 

During a White House address on Monday, Mr. Biden — who had apparently been overdone with bronzer after his team had complained makeup artists made him appear too pale during the debate — slammed the decision and tried to make everything about his predecessor. 

“The only limits will be self-imposed by the president alone. This decision today has continued the court’s attack in recent years on a wide-range of long-established legal principles in our nation,” Mr. Biden said. 

On Monday, Mr. Biden said explicitly for the first time that the election interference case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith should be tried and concluded before the November election — something that will certainly not happen now given the lengthy appellate process that has played out in recent months. 

“The man who sent that mob to the U.S. Capitol is facing potential criminal conviction for what happened that day, and the American people deserve to have an answer in the courts before the upcoming election. The public has a right to know the answer about what happened on January 6 before they’re asked to vote again this year,” Mr. Biden said. “Now, because of today’s decision, that is highly, highly unlikely. It’s a terrible disservice to the people of this nation.”

The court’s approval rating has hit historic lows in recent weeks, even before a number of landmark cases decided in recent weeks, including the immunity case, the overturning of Chevron deference, and their Second Amendment case, Rahimi v. United States. 

According to the Marquette poll, just 39 percent of Americans approved of the job the Supreme Court was doing in May of this year, while 61 percent disapproved. It is the worst approval rating for the court since July 2022, just weeks after Roe v. Wade was overturned in the Dobbs decision. 

That landmark case, for all of its downstream effects on abortion rights, ended up being a saving grace for Democrats that year. Mr. Biden became one of the few presidents to not suffer devastating losses in his first midterm elections thanks, in part, to abortion rights being on the ballot. Democrats ended up picking up one Senate seat, flipping two governorships, and only losing the House by a handful of seats. 

The Supreme Court as a foil in 2022 was an extremely successful ploy by Democrats, yet it’s unclear if using the justices as such a boogeyman this time around will be as fortuitous. Abortion referenda were on the ballot across the country throughout 2022 and 2023, leading to wins for abortion rights advocates in states as red as Montana and Kansas. 

It’s also an open question if abortion, or the Supreme Court in general, is important to the sliver of undecided voters in key swing states who, according to many pollsters and political strategists, will decide the election. Top strategists such as Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s “architect,” have said abortion is not a big issue for these voters, who are more concerned with kitchen table economic concerns.

Beyond the Supreme Court decisions themselves, some Democrats have made the case rather forcefully that while the court may already be at a 6–3 conservative supermajority, liberals are at risk of falling even further behind if Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito make the decision to retire during the second Trump administration, which would mean Trump would become the first president since President Eisenhowever to appoint a majority of the court. 

Replacing Justice Thomas and Justice Alito — both of whom are in their seventies — with like-minded jurists who are in their fifties would be a nearly guaranteed conservative supermajority on the court for at least another three decades. 

A liberal outside spending group, Demand Justice, which was involved with the successful effort to publicly pressure Justice Stephen Breyer to retire in 2022, is already preparing to spend tens of millions of dollars this year to highlight the necessity of reelecting Mr. Biden for the sake of court nominations alone. According to Politico, the group has already formulated their first $10 million advertising push set to begin in the coming weeks.