Democrats are worried about backlash over Trump ballot bans

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The states of Colorado and Maine have decided that Donald Trump can't be on their 2024 ballots because according to their courts he supposedly violated the Constitution.

The Supreme Court will have something to say about that in the near future.

In the meantime, some major Democratic leaders appear to be worried about backlash.

And they should be worried.

The Hill reports:

Decisions that would knock former President Trump off the ballot in two states run a high risk of backfiring on President Biden and his party.

Mindful of the dangers, high-profile Democrats in elected office including California Gov. Gavin Newsom — as well as influential commentators such as David Axelrod — have expressed their resistance to the effort.

The Colorado Supreme Court decided that Trump’s words and actions around the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, were egregious enough to merit disqualification. It announced the decision on Dec. 19. Nine days later, Bellows made a similar decision in Maine.

The two decisions were instantly controversial for obvious reasons. 

The Colorado Supreme Court split 4-3 on its verdict even though all seven justices were nominated by Democratic governors of the Centennial State. The state GOP has already filed an appeal urging the Supreme Court to intervene, and it is expected Trump will soon appeal himself.

With respect to Maine, Trump on Tuesday appealed Bellows’s decision to the state Superior Court, arguing that the secretary of state had failed to provide due process, was “biased” and lacked the proper “legal authority to consider the federal constitutional issues” at stake.

We can't predict what the Supreme Court will decide, but if it blocks these bans that could be a huge positive for the Trump campaign.

Some Democratic leaders already seem to get this.

More from The Hill:

Democrats who have tried to put some distance between themselves and the decision tend to worry more about the likely electoral impact than the finer points of the constitutional argument.

Exactly.

The Hill further states:

They fret that the efforts to keep Trump off the ballot play far too neatly into the former president’s claims that he is being unfairly targeted. They draw an analogy with the four times Trump was indicted on criminal charges last year. In each of those instances, Republican voters rallied around Trump, boosting his chances of claiming the party nomination.

Donald Trump's base and even many independent voters believe the Democratic political establishment is doing everything it can to undermine a true democratic election in 2024.

And once again, it seems they are right.