Democrats need to stop undermining their nominee
Between Nikki Haley dropping out on Wednesday and the state of the union address on Thursday, the general election has begun. It will be a very long campaign. The rematch has been obvious for months for those who follow politics closely, but normal people are still going through various stages of grief before reaching acceptance. They won’t reach acceptance at the same time, but they all will at some point between now and November.
Neither parties’ primaries were eventful. It looked like Trump was vulnerable a year ago, but he wound up winning easily. Biden never had anything more than token opposition. Both technically still have to win more delegates before officially clinching their party’s nomination, which will happen within the next week.
On paper, very few people wanted to see a rematch, but in practice no alternatives proved to be viable. It’s easy for someone to say in the abstract that they want “someone else” to run, but that idealized person doesn’t exist. Ron DeSantis looked amazing from a distance, but upon closer inspection his political skills are zero and he has the personality of a moldy piece of bread. For all the supposed angst Democrats have about Biden’s age, no serious challenger ever stepped forward. I have no doubt other Democrats conducted polling looking at how they would do against Biden and it showed they wouldn’t do well. If concerns about his age were really as widespread as they are in polls, there would be a much larger number of protest votes against him and/or Dean Phillips would have done a lot better than 2%.[i]
Biden begins the campaign with a huge cash advantage. Two Democratic-aligned Super PACs are planning to spend a combined $450 million on ads. The Democratic National Committee has a lot more money now than the Republican National Committee. In light of Trump being on the hook for more than $500 million, there is a good chance a substantial amount of the money given to the RNC and his campaign will wind up going towards paying his legal bills.
Having a big money advantage doesn’t guarantee a win, but it’s never a bad thing. It gives Biden the opportunity to remind everyone of what they don’t like about Trump and won’t like about him if he wins again. For those wondering why Biden isn't crushing Trump in the polls, you have to understand that for the last three years, Biden has been attacked on three fronts while Trump has largely been out of the spotlight. The first two fronts are normal for an incumbent president, but the third is not.
The first is being attacked by the opposition party. That is to be expected. Republicans are going to attack Biden all the time because he is the president. Since Trump is not the president, Democratic attacks on him haven’t gotten as much attention as they did when he was in office.
The second front is being subject to bad press. That, too, is normal. There is not a single president who hasn’t been subjected to it. Every president thinks the DC press corps is against them and has complained bitterly about their coverage of them. For the last three years, Biden has gotten vastly more press coverage than Trump has. That has had the effect of focusing everyone on his problems and making people forget about Trump.
Undermined by the left
The third front isn’t unprecedented, but it is unusual. That is the attacks Biden has faced from within his own party. In the last few months, those attacks have increased. Many have come from the left and far left.
Protestors demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza have shown up almost everywhere he goes. Some on the left have become so obsessed with hating his policies on Gaza that they’ve convinced themselves that Trump would be better for Palestinians. In Michigan, there was an organized campaign to get people to vote “uncommitted” to protest his Gaza policies.
The environmental activist crowd has also been doing their part to sabotage Biden. Not content to take the W and enjoy the successes they achieved from 2021-2022, they’re demanding Biden move further left and are acting like nothing happened. I really wish Biden and other Democrats would tell them to go do something anatomically impossible and never pay attention to them again. Not only does that crowd not speak for any actual voters, but they will never be happy with anything.
I’m sure many in the activist left world would prefer it if Trump won. It would give them something to hate and raise money off of. They would get to argue (falsely, of course) that Biden lost because he didn’t do what they wanted. Best of all, they could protest against Trump non-stop and get themselves even more attention, which is what they crave most of all.
It’s not just environmental and Gaza activists who have undermined Biden, but the entire left-wing advocacy world has also made his reelection efforts harder. As I have discussed before, the left-wing advocacy world has adopted a mindset of doomerism. They think the only way to motivate people to care about things is to convince them that everything is awful. Believing everything is terrible means they can never talk about any progress that has been made.
While that crowd, like the professional protestor crowd, is a small number of people, they are very overrepresented in media circles and have a large microphone. Because of that, their influence on political discourse is much greater than their numbers.[ii] That’s a problem for Biden and other Democrats running because they need to talk about the good things going on.
This economy is a success story, for example. By most any metric, things are going very well and getting better. Biden would love to tout that and convince more people of it. He’s being undermined in that effort by having a small, but vocal chunk of his party saying everything is terrible.
Undermined by the mainstream
The biggest way Biden has been undermined by people in his own party is not from the left or far left, but from center/center-left, normal Democrats. These are people who like Biden and think he’s a good president, but think he shouldn’t run again because of his age. Like the activist wing of the party, they have a big platform and can help shape media narratives about Biden.
I don’t expect much from the activist wing of the party anymore because I’ve given up hope that they’ll change their ways. They live in a fantasy world completely detached from everyone else. Some people in that crowd are bad and don’t actually care about the causes they claim to be fighting for. Others sincerely believe in what they’re advocating for, but are naïve, clueless and speak in jargon nobody else understands.
I do, however, have expectations of most everyone else in the Democratic Party. When people with a large platform like, for example, Ezra Klein, start saying that Biden should drop out because he is incapable of campaigning, I have a real problem with it. The same is true for people like David Axelrod and nationally syndicated columnists. When one of them undermines Biden, it’s bad. When they all do it, it can create a narrative and generate a whole new cycle of bad press for him, which at this point is an in-kind contribution to Trump.
It should be obvious that Biden is not going to drop out. He will be making many more public appearances and doing more interviews as the campaign kicks into full swing. That’s something some pundits have been demanding he do as a test of his mental acuity. He was always going to do that. He’s just going to do it based on what he and his team believe is strategically optimal, not based on the whims of the punditocracy.
At this point, any mainstream Democrat with a large platform who thinks Biden shouldn’t run again should shut the hell up. If they continue to say he should drop out, they might as well join the Trump campaign. A short while ago, I found them saying Biden should drop out to be annoying. With the campaign now underway, that annoyance is becoming anger.
I’m especially mad at people like David Axelrod. He’s someone I like a lot. As the head strategist for both of Obama’s campaigns, he did an amazing job. He deserves a place in Democratic Asgard for it. But like all strategists on past campaigns, he’s way past his prime.
Campaign strategists love to think they have timeless wisdom, but they don’t. At most, their shelf life lasts for two campaign cycles. James Carville and Paul Begala did an amazing job running Clinton’s 1992 campaign. I like both of them, but they haven’t had anything new to offer since then. The same is true for Jim Messina and David Plouffe. They did a great job on both of Obama’s campaigns, but that was then, this is now.
Campaigns certainly matter, but what matters far more is the candidate. The Obama and Clinton teams were great, but Obama and Clinton were both great candidates. Obama was a once-in-a-generation phenom. His going from a complete unknown to president in four years is unprecedented.
Clinton had empathy like few others. He could meet someone for the first time and make them feel like they had known him their whole life. That’s an ability only a few people have. It’s not something any campaign can create.
The kind of things that worked for Clinton didn’t apply to Obama. The kind of things that worked for Obama don’t apply to Biden. Biden is facing different issues and challenges and is an entirely different kind of candidate with a very different kind of opponent. In 2024, taking advice from someone who last ran a campaign in 1992 or 2012 is like Steve Jobs taking advice from Alexander Graham Bell.
In my view, it’s very unprofessional for strategists from previous campaigns to be shitting on the current president and his campaign. I remember during Obama’s first term when James Carville and others from the Clinton team acted as backseat drivers and constantly criticized what he was doing. I didn’t like it at all. By the same token, I don’t like it when David Axelrod shits on Biden. He and James Carville both had their time in the sun, but it’s long over. They’re just sitting on the sidelines now like the rest of us.
Fortune favors the Biden
As much as I don’t like seeing fellow Democrats write Biden off, they’re not the only ones doing it. Republicans have done it many times, but that’s to be expected. Explicitly or implicitly, plenty of reporters have done it as well. Conventional wisdom among the punditocracy has been bearish about him since he first announced he was running for president in 2019.
I’m not going to lie, seeing so many people write Biden off before the campaign even begins makes me feel better about his prospects. I have long been much more bullish about his chances than almost everyone who gets paid to write and talk about politics. Looking at the last five years, the evidence is in that Biden has not only been underestimated electorally and legislatively, but fortune has heavily favored him.
I have to admit I have underestimated him, too. Like virtually everyone else, when he first announced he was running I thought he would go nowhere. He led in the polls for almost all of 2019 and 2020, but most everyone thought it was a mirage. After he did poorly in Iowa, many wrote him off. In New Hampshire, he came in fifth place. No Democratic nominee had ever lost both of those states. Just when it looked like he was a dead man, he won South Carolina in a rout.
During the months leading up to the 2020 primary, there was plenty of talk about a brokered convention. There were so many candidates running they would split the delegates and nobody would get a majority. They would have to fight it out at the convention, which would be a bloody mess. That take wound up aging like spoiled milk. After winning South Carolina, Biden killed it on Super Tuesday and the primary was over.
When campaigning for president, Biden talked about getting things done on a bipartisan basis. That was dismissed as naïve by many, including plenty of Democrats. I didn’t think it would work either. The joke was on us.
Biden has signed a huge amount of bipartisan legislation since taking office. The list includes legislation dealing with infrastructure, guns, gay marriage, aid to Ukraine, semiconductors, the Electoral Count Act and the postal service. In negotiating over the debt ceiling last year, he wound up getting a deal that didn’t have anything awful in it and included some good things. Plenty in his own party criticized him for not being vocal about it and for not publicly leading, but he was right and they were wrong. For all the toxic partisanship we have now, Biden has shown that it’s not an insurmountable barrier to getting things done.
When Biden won, it looked like Republicans were going to keep the Senate. Democrats would have to win two runoffs in Georgia to win the majority. Historically, winning runoffs in Georgia wasn’t something Democrats did. They won both races. Biden’s agenda went from DOA to having a good shot.
For 2021 and most of 2022, it looked like nothing was going to get passed on climate change or anything big. Biden’s presidency was written off as a failure. His agenda was dead and his legacy would amount to nothing. Seemingly out of nowhere, Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin announced a deal that was the Inflation Reduction Act. Within a few weeks, Biden went from being a failure to a hugely consequential president.
Then came the midterms. It was supposed to be a red wave. Biden’s approval rating was stuck in the low 40s. Every midterm where the president had an approval rating that low had been a wipeout for their party. The idea that abortion and democracy would save Democrats was fantasy. Voters cared about inflation, crime and immigration. Abortion gave Democrats a sugar high, but it was fading as an issue and nobody cared about January 6 or election denial. The only question was whether Republicans would have a great night or a phenomenal night.
Republicans had a terrible night. Biden had the best midterm a president has had since 1934. People do in fact care about abortion and democracy. Those two issues were bigger than everything else. Because of them, a significant chunk of people who otherwise would have voted Republican voted for Democrats.
Democrats gained a seat in the Senate when they were supposed to lose three or more. Republicans won the House by an inch when they were supposed to win it by a mile. Democrats gained governorships and state legislatures when they were supposed to lose a whole bunch of them.
In the elections held since the midterms, Democrats have continued to win. Biden has done what no other president has. He has presided over the laws of political physics ceasing to exist. I emphasize that a lot, but it can never be emphasized enough. With Biden’s approval rating being where it is, Democrats should be getting crushed, but they’re thriving. What Democrats are doing now is akin to someone walking on water.
I can’t help but note that many in the punditocracy who are talking and writing about how Biden is in dire shape are also the same ones who predicted a red wave and downplayed abortion and democracy. Yes, it’s possible to explain why Democrats are doing well despite Biden’s approval rating. Yes, presidential elections are very different from other elections. You can find plenty of evidence to make the case that the Democrats’ good fortunes won’t continue in November.
The problem I have with doing that is not that it’s wrong. It’s that it’s missing the point. The point is that what happened in the midterms and subsequent elections shouldn’t be happening at all! Democrats should be getting wiped out. That doesn’t automatically mean Biden will win in November, but don’t tell me it’s meaningless either.
To top off Biden’s good fortunes, his opponent is Trump. I don’t buy into the idea that any other Republican would crush him. There are plenty of Republicans who I think would be even weaker. That, however, is entirely speculative. What’s very real is that Trump is a horrible candidate.
Despite disavowing some unpopular Republican positions, Democrats being the party in the White House for eight years and his opponent being unpopular, he barely won in 2016 because he’s toxic. He should have won in 2016 in a rout and been reelected easily in 2020. He lost because he alienated one person too many with his awful behavior.
Since 2020, Trump has tried to overturn an election, has been indicted and is newly vulnerable on abortion. Those are things normal people aren’t thinking about right now. That will change soon enough and when it does whatever nostalgia for him there is now will disintegrate. We have a long campaign ahead of us. Trump will be omnipresent again and will get attention he hasn’t gotten in over three years.
Trump versus Biden is still an abstract idea for many people. It will take time, but that will change. When it does, it won’t be Biden versus selectively remembered Trump. It will be Biden versus toxic Trump and people will be reminded again of why they don’t like him and why they shouldn’t want him back. Will that be enough for Biden to win? We’re only in March, folks, it’s going to be a while. Stay tuned.
[i] For all the hype about people voting “uncommitted” in Michigan, getting 13% was very unimpressive. In 2012, with Obama running, “uncommitted” got 11% in Michigan. That was without any organized campaign to get people to vote that way. Going from 11% to just 13% with a vocal and organized effort is pitiful. For all the passion in elite circles about Gaza, it’s not something more than a handful of people are voting on.
[ii] The best recent example of the ability of left-wing advocacy groups to influence the discourse is “defund the police.” It started off as a rallying cry at protests and online. Had it just been that, hardly anyone would have heard about it. What made it well-known was its endorsement by a whole host of advocacy groups, including Planned Parenthood, NARAL, NextGen and Indivisible. By endorsing it, those groups gave it a sense of legitimacy and helped it get attention and become known to normal people. Almost no Democrats endorsed it, but they had to play defense and runaway from it fast no thanks to those groups.