Media flood Biden with advice
Byron York
MEDIA FLOOD BIDEN WITH ADVICE. Several recent polls have shown President Joe Biden losing to former President Donald Trump if the 2024 election were held today. RealClearPolitics’s Tom Bevan noted Thursday that five of six national polls released in the previous 72 hours had Trump beating Biden. The former president was up by 4 points in a new Fox News poll, 2 points in polls by Yahoo News and Quinnipiac, and 1 point in polls by Economist-YouGov and Morning Consult.
That polling comes on top of a New York Times survey that shook the Democratic Party to its core: “Trump leads in 5 critical states as voters blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds.” And lest anyone think the New York Times polling was an outlier, a Bloomberg poll quickly followed showing Trump ahead of Biden in six key states. New York magazine summed it up this way: “2024 Polls Agree: Trump has a significant Lead Over Biden.”
Collectively, the polls led to panic in several corners of the Democratic world — officeholders, candidates, donors, strategists, hangers-on, and pundits. And in the media, it has led to a spate of how-Biden-can-still-win pieces offering the president and Democrats hope. From Politico came “Here’s how Biden can turn it around.” From the New York Times came a bunch of articles: “What can Biden do?” and “Why Biden is Behind, and how he could come back” and “The Bush-Obama blueprint that gives Biden hope for ’24.” (In addition to its depressing-for-Democrats poll, the New York Times is perhaps the leading source of editorial encouragement for the president.) For its part, the Washington Post’s commentary has been a bit more downbeat, but it did publish the classic headline, “Biden’s economy is great everywhere except in the polls.”
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Here’s the funny thing about the articles. Most of them overlook what Biden, with a lot of media help, will actually do if the 2024 race comes down to Biden vs. Trump and if Trump is leading as the race enters its final months. Biden’s liabilities are obvious. He turns 81 next week, and large majorities of voters believe he is too old to serve a second term. That problem can’t be fixed no matter what Biden does. His second-biggest problem, the economy, might improve in ways that consumers can feel, but enormous damage has already been done by the cost-of-living increases in Biden’s first three years. Then there is the border, which is a disaster that has lately spread to blue cities. And then there is the chaos afoot in the world since Biden entered the White House.
That’s a big set of liabilities. The how-Biden-can-win articles don’t offer much in the way of solutions, but they do spend a good deal of time discussing how Biden might do other things: focus his campaign on abortion, be nicer to allies, use Vice President Kamala Harris more effectively, move staff around, and more. Such talk feeds the political conversation, but it doesn’t address some of the most fundamental problems of Biden’s reelection effort.
And then there is this. If the fall of 2024 comes and Biden is trailing Trump, nearly all other considerations will fall away, and the Biden campaign will be guided by one and only purpose: Destroy Trump.
Maybe you laugh at that. Haven’t Democrats been trying to destroy Trump since day one? Yes, it’s been going on for years. Didn’t they accuse him of being an agent of Russia, push for a special counsel investigation, and impeach him twice? Yes. Hasn’t the Biden administration already indicted Trump twice, to go along with Democratic-led local indictments in New York and Georgia? Yes.
Given all they’ve already done, how could they turn the Trump Destruction Machine up to 11? Trials on at least some of the criminal charges against Trump are one part of the story. And the rest of it is to build the president’s appeal around a multifront attack on what Biden calls “MAGA extremism.”
Biden and Democrats realize that relentless attacks on Trump do two things. First, they damage Trump with the small number of voters who might actually be on the fence between voting for Trump or Biden. And second, they unite the Democratic coalition.
The second is critically important these days. Just look at the various wings of the Democratic Party being torn apart by the conflict in Israel and Gaza. What could unite those various factions? Hating Trump. “Biden aides can point to heaps of evidence in elections since 2020 that campaigning against MAGA extremism is the glue that holds the Biden coalition together,” Politico Playbook reported Friday morning.
Go back to the 2022 campaign and search for Biden and the phrase “MAGA extremism.” He said it a lot. And now the campaign is gearing up again. “We have to be honest about the brick wall of MAGA extremism that we continue to run into when we’re trying to get things done for the American people,” a Biden spokesman named Michael Tyler said on CNN recently. “That’s precisely why we need another four years to continue to finish the job.”
The election is still nearly a year away. Attacks will be refined along the way. But you know the Democratic theme already: Stop MAGA extremism. They’ll say it if Trump is the Republican nominee. They’ll say it if Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is the nominee. They’ll say it if former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is the nominee.
That gives Republicans an opportunity. For them, the campaign can be about the economy. The cost of living. Chaos on the border. Chaos in the world. All the things that seem to have gone terribly wrong since Biden became president. But whatever Republicans say, from the Democratic side, the campaign will be about MAGA extremism.
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