“I’m not asking you to vote against Donald Trump because he’s a bad guy, I’m urging you to vote against him because he’s done a bad job,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and presidential candidate, said at the convention, making explicit the different approach Democrats are taking this year.
Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman who ran for president in 2020, said in an interview that he hears none of the “bitterness and ugliness and divisiveness” that plagued the party in 2016.
“I don’t think anyone has ever unified us the way that Donald Trump has,” said Mr. O’Rourke.
Mr. O’Rourke was also part of a panel of defeated presidential primary rivals who offered a full-throated backing of Mr. Biden on Thursday night, including Senator Bernie Sanders, who said, “All of us, whether you’re progressives, whether you’re moderates or conservatives, have got to come together to defeat this president.”
Ceding the spotlight to an incumbent glad to bask in it isn’t entirely without risk, however. Some Democrats are bracing for an onslaught from the president aimed at Mr. Biden’s surviving son, Hunter, that they fear could rattle the former vice president.
Mr. Trump, who savaged Mr. Biden in Pennsylvania on Thursday in an effort to divert attention from the Democrat, has already steered his campaign in an overwhelmingly negative direction: Since mid-June, only 1 percent of Mr. Trump’s television ads were rated as positive by Advertising Analytics, a media tracking firm.
So far, the former vice president’s advisers have been pleased that Mr. Trump’s barrage of advertising — including booking the widely seen banner of YouTube this week that featured ads questioning Mr. Biden’s mental agility — has yet to sharply drive up Mr. Biden’s unfavorability ratings.
Democrats have good reason to keep the focus on Mr. Trump. Since 2016, his political standing has dipped when the focus is on him rather than his rivals. Both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris are prone to missteps when they are off-script. Perhaps most important, the president is the strongest adhesive holding together an ungainly Biden voter coalition that ranges from democratic socialists to four-star generals.