Joe Biden Can't Win Without Looking Backward
Joe Biden Can't Win Without Looking Backward
Donald Trump and the GOP propaganda machine have courted swing voters by revising the sordid history of his first term; that can't be undone by looking forward
If Joe Biden is to claim a lead in polls, which currently have him losing to Donald Trump, he’s going to have to accomplish a mix of two things, one easier than the other.
First, he’ll have to more fully consolidate the Democratic Party base. Many candidates seeking re-election have to do this, and a bunch of things in the offing between now and the election could ease the process along. Forecasters expect the economy to continue to improve. An even stronger economy would create a better news environment. Israel’s war on Gaza could come to an end. Joe Biden might do more publicity. Many base voters will come home simply to oppose Donald Trump.
That’s the easier problem.
He also has to limit swing-voter defections, which are already substantial enough to cost him the election. As the New York Times noted in a write up of its latest national poll, “Trump is winning 97 percent of those who say they voted for him four years ago, and virtually none of his past supporters said they are casting a ballot for Mr. Biden. In contrast, Mr. Biden is winning only 83 percent of his 2020 voters, with 10 percent saying they now back Mr. Trump.”
That’s a much trickier problem to solve. Convincing people to change their current voting preference is harder than convincing them to vote at all. And swing voters are mercurial by nature; Biden can’t convert people who currently plan to be Trump-Biden-Trump voters into Trump-Biden-Biden voters by pulling obvious partisan strings.
The best he can do, apart from what you might call clumsy micro-pandering to certain counties, is to recall why people who’d voted for Trump once decided to vote against him four years later; assess why they might now be thinking they made a mistake; and try to convince them their first instinct was correct.
Some subset of voters may simply be whimsical or malcontented by nature. They might not be reachable through any combination of strategies and tactics. But others are telling themselves some coherent story about why they’ve come full circle back to Trump, and they might be reachable if they can be persuaded that the story is false.
Perhaps in 2020 they were exhausted by Trump, they were aghast at his response to the pandemic, and sick of all the “chaos.” (There’s surely a reason “chaos” has become Democrats’ favorite term for disparaging Trump.) And to the extent that’s true, reminding them how Trump’s first term actually ended is important. But it’s only half of the equation—because for some reason, over the past three years, they’ve also settled on a story to convince themselves the “chaos” (or lying, or meanness, or depravity) was preferable to what’s come since. What do they think they know about Biden’s presidency that’s changed their calculation?
Some of it may be a hangover effect from inflation, residual anger over feeling financially pinched for several months. That might fade on its own, or perhaps it can be made to fade over time. Much of it is surely “vibe”—the best American economy in decades depicted in journalism as a place of mass privation on the brink of collapse; social media wired to reward anti-democratic disinformation; a fixation, in good faith and bad faith, on Biden’s age, which has created the mass, false impression that Biden’s enfeebled and less mentally acute than Donald Trump.
Those challenges can be addressed at least to some extent with patience and media ref working.
But I fear there’s one more layer: