Joe Biden's Campaign Advisers Are Delusional
You never want to count votes in March, and lots of things could change before November's election, but as things stand, Joe Biden is having one of the worst stretches for an incumbent president in modern history.
His approval aggregate currently sits at just 39.1 percent, with the spread being -18.2 percent. That is the worst of the modern polling era for an incumbent president. For comparison, Donald Trump was at 45 percent heading into the fourth year of his term.
What are Biden and his campaign advisers doing to turn the ship around? They aren't doing anything. Instead, they are leaning into the idea that everything is fine, doubling down on the tired strategy of bleating about "protecting democracy." That's political malpractice, but great news for Republicans who are currently seizing the initiative on major issues from the economy to the border crisis.
As RedState recently reported, long-time Biden adviser Mike Donilon believes yet another round of January 6th talking points will save the current president's collapsing campaign.
READ: Joe Biden Plans to Campaign on Keeping Democracy Safe From Trump
Donilon’s mild demeanor can be misleading. Like Biden, he has firm beliefs—about politics, the public, the press—and a contrarian side. In 2020, he and his campaign team had to decide whether to emphasize the economy or the more abstract idea that Trump imperilled the essence of America. “We bet on the latter,” Donilon said, even though “our own pollsters told us that talking about ‘the soul of the nation’ was nutty.” That experience fortified his belief that this year’s campaign should center on what he calls “the freedom agenda.” By November, he predicted, “the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.”
To be fair, there is something to be said about the sheer amount of money Democrats are going to spend in the coming months to try to reignite the "Trump is an insurrectionist" talking point they ran on during the 2022 mid-terms. With that said, because of the amount of chaos currently enveloping the country regarding real issues that affect the everyday lives of normal Americans, I'm skeptical that going back to that well is going to pay off.
In fact, it strikes me as delusional to think that simply focusing on January 6th again is going to take the place of a real economic agenda or plan to secure the border. Cumulative inflation and sky-high interest rates have crushed the American dream, and voters tend to care more about that sort of thing. Certainly, those struggles will be a more relevant campaign issue than Biden giving another speech mumbling about a four-year-old riot.
Still, the president's advisers appear to be content living in a fantasyland of their own making.
To start, the exit polls made it fairly clear that the lion's share of Haley's support on Super Tuesday came from Democrats, with her voters giving Biden high marks. So is Donald Trump really having a hard time pulling the party together? I don't see much evidence for that.
Regardless, what Biden's advisers didn't mention is that the president is having a hard time pulling his own party together. The pro-Hamas contingent within the Democratic Party is large and growing, and that played out with "uncommitted" garnering significant support against Biden on Super Tuesday.
In Minnesota, for example, "uncommitted" came in at a whopping 20 percent of primary voters. Meanwhile, in Colorado, "uncommitted" took seven percent of the vote. Those aren't insignificant numbers, and they represent a far greater internal challenge to an incumbent like Biden because he can't appease the radicals in his party with a few empty promises.
To win those voters back, Biden has to openly side with the terrorists in Gaza. If he does that, though, he'll alienate another portion of his base that he can't afford to lose. Trump's challenge of unifying his party is far simpler and more traditional coming out of an open primary.
But hey, if Biden's advisers want to keep pumping sunshine, who am I to stop them? They can keep doing what they're doing right up until their defeat in November.
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