President Joe Biden‘s reelection team is grasping at straws, and for good reason. The RealClearPolitics polling average has the incumbent down a point to former President Donald Trump nationally, and, more importantly, RCP has Trump slightly ahead in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, and North Carolina — also known as the states that pick the president.
The bellwethers of days gone by, Ohio and Florida, are almost certainly out of reach for the 46th president. If polls are to be believed, those contests will likely be double-digit victories for Trump.
Sixty-five percent of people say inflation has negatively affected their finances, with 19% saying inflation has made their personal finances “much worse.” One in six people are unable to pay their monthly bills.
Biden has managed to thread the needle in such a way that leftists, libertarians, and Muslim voters, as well as the vast majority of the electorate that supports Israel, all disapprove of the president’s handling of the Gaza war. North of 65% of voters believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. These are abysmal, some could argue insurmountable, numbers for an incumbent in his early 80s dealing with increasingly indefensible mental decline.
It probably wouldn’t use the term “Hail Mary,” considering the administration’s open hostility toward the Catholic Church and Christianity generally, but team Biden is certainly looking for ways to change the narrative. Last week, in a move that surprised even yours truly, Biden agreed to two debates with Trump, albeit with Biden-friendly stipulations that will make sure the senile president cannot be booed by an audience, be forced to stay up too late, or face questions from objective journalists.
The White House is hoping for a repeat of the two candidates’ first debate in the 2020 cycle, where a belligerent Trump was viewed as abusing a kindly old man. This is risky for two reasons. One, Trump seemed to learn from his mistakes in their first debate and was more measured in the second. And two, Biden’s actions since his inauguration have done nothing to convince the public that they made the right assessment that Old Joe was the “normalcy” candidate, to steal a term from the 1920 election of Warren G. Harding.
On Tuesday, the White House announced that it is releasing a million barrels of gas from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices. This blatant vote-buying scheme, in a long line of vote-buying schemes from the 46th president, is unlikely to move the needle in the polls considering Americans use 20 million barrels of oil per day and the nation’s strategic oil reserve cannot support much more of Biden’s electioneering.
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Republicans would be fools to get complacent — a desperate Democrat is a dangerous Democrat. The president has all of the corporate media at his command and a rogue Justice Department on speed dial. The last time Democrats feared they would lose an election to Trump, they unleashed hordes of street communists who proceeded to burn cities while the future vice president raised money for their bail.
It’s unlikely that they will employ 2020 tactics again — riots tend to reflect poorly on incumbents — but make no mistake, the most powerful and well-funded political party in the history of the world will have some tricks up its sleeve this summer to try to drag its man over the finish line.
Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a musician, political strategist, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.