Not one of them misses Trump as a leader, but they do miss him as a foil. And a growing number of them are convinced that the ex-president’s increasingly certain return to national politics with a 2024 campaign announcement before the midterms can only help them. Some go so far as to hope that, along with post-Roe outrage, it may even turn the midterm tide altogether.

“It’d be terrible! We don’t want him back!” one leading Democratic pollster told me last week. “But it would highlight the contrast between Biden and Trump. Biden beat him in 2020, he’s beating him in polls now, and if there’s a rematch he’ll beat him again. I don’t want to say it’d be good for the president, but it continues that dynamic.” Yet the hope isn’t only that Biden’s popularity will rebound simply because voters will perceive him as the anti-Trump. It’s that the sheer gravity of Trump’s announcement would reshape the conversation down the ballot, too. Republicans “want to make the election about gas prices and inflation, and that is top of mind for voters,” said Democratic strategist Xochitl Hinojosa. But “now you have Roe, and if you also have the threat of Trump becoming president, that becomes a motivating factor not just for the Democratic base to turn out but also for moderate voters who didn’t vote for him in the last election.”…

More specifically, if Trump were to start campaigning again before November’s voting, few doubt he would orient that effort around his preposterous claims of election theft, which would likely yank the political media’s harsh spotlight far away from Biden’s White House while foregrounding Republicans’ own internal debates. “Trump is going to talk about the election being stolen, he’s not going to be bringing the gravitas and bipartisanship and statesmanlike qualities of other former presidents,” said the pollster, in whose focus groups GOP voters have been expressing exhaustion with Trump’s favored argument. “It’s going to highlight, once again, how toxic he is for everybody.”