Are Democrats OK to keep sleepwalking with Biden?
Decorous panic is a difficult mannerism to master, as Democrats are finding out. Their divorce from President Biden is becoming increasingly likely.
The headlines from the New York Times-Siena College poll published this week were deflating: Donald Trump leading Biden in five of six swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania) and within the margin of polling error in Wisconsin (Biden +2). Beyond Biden’s obvious difficulty (he is “just too old to be an effective president,” 47% strongly agree, and 24% somewhat agree), the poll contained grim data.
“Do you think (Biden/ Trump) has the personality and temperament to be an effective president?” Trump: 43 yes, 55 no. Biden: 46 yes, 51 no. Biden is essentially tied with a coarse, erratic figure. Trump’s comprehensive vulgarity is unhelpful to Biden. The following also is ominous:
To the question “Are you currently personally paying off any student loans for yourself or your family?” the six-state average was 20% yes, 79% no. Biden is obsessed with unilaterally canceling the debts of the minority of borrowers among the minority of Americans who receive college degrees. Why?
Because he is eager to comfort, with a regressive transfer of wealth, a relatively small, relatively comfortable cohort — college graduates — who are mostly Democrats. What does Biden suppose the 79% think of his solicitousness toward the 20%?
The Democratic Party has benefited from the monochrome culture of campuses. Now, however, a bill is coming due for progressives’ identification with academia.
Today, whenever someone prominent says something grotesque, such as that Hamas’s predatory sadism is “exhilarating,” no one wonders whether it was said at a union hall or a Kiwanis luncheon. Everyone assumes, correctly, that it occurred in academia (in this instance, Cornell). The Republican Party has its share of weirdness, but its stupidity stops short of sympathy for genocide and enthusiasm for enforcing speech etiquette that bewilders almost everyone.
The Democratic Party did not, however, become the world’s oldest party by being suicidal. It is viscerally more serious about winning and keeping power than is the Republican Party. This is because so many Democratic factions are directly dependent on government.
In presidential politics, this is a period of equilibrium akin to the 1880s, when (analyst Michael Barone notes) both parties’ nominees in the three elections received between 47.8% and 48.9% of the popular votes. Barone says of 2016 that “the percentage of voters who switched from one party to the other — mainly white college graduates switching from Republicans to Hillary Clinton, and white non-college-graduates switching from Democrats to Donald Trump — is actually small in historical perspective.” And in 2016, Trump “lost the popular vote by 2%, the average for Republican nominees in the previous four presidential races.”
Trump’s 2016 popular-vote percentage was one point lower than Mitt Romney’s in 2012. Then, in 2020, having witnessed Trump govern for four years, voters increased his total by over 11 million.
Given the current equilibrium between the parties, and the almost uniformly awful (for Biden) data in the Times-Siena poll, it beggars belief that Biden’s party will sleepwalk with him for 12 months toward defeat.
Will the party allow him and his uniquely important (because of his infirmity) and uniquely implausible (because of her flat-as-Kansas learning curve) vice president to stand between the nation and a second Trump term?
If the Republican competition becomes, after Iowa ( Jan. 15), Trump vs. just three, and, after New Hampshire, Trump vs. just one, his rock-solid vote might be revealed to be at most 20% by South Carolina (Feb. 24). Then national polls might reveal the one non-Trump survivor leading Biden by even more than Trump now is.
This is not a probability, yet. It is, however, enough of a possibility that the Democratic Party should be making plans for a path different than the crumbling one it currently is on.