A recent post on the Lawyers Guns & Money site articulated the basic problem with the Biden re-election campaign:
"I do think that “I’m Not Donald Trump” is not really going to work here. But I haven’t seen Biden really articulate much more than his return to normalcy campaign of 2020."
Biden (true to form) publicly confirmed this problem in speaking to a group of Democratic investors (they’re NOT “donors”) on Tuesday night:
“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running.”
As an initial point, there’s no guarantee that a man of Trump’s age and physical condition will still be physically capable of seeking the presidency next fall. There’s considerable uncertainty as to whether he might be a convicted felon by then and what impact a conviction might have on his presidential prospects. There’s also at least the possibility that the current Haley boomlet might actually have legs.
Yes, the odds currently favor Trump as the GOP nominee. Trump’s health, a jury in any of 4 different jurisdictions, and/or the vagaries of the GOP primary process could, however, dramatically change those odds in a (literal) heartbeat. Were that to happen, what would be the raison d’ etre of the Biden re-election campaign?
Even assuming that Trump and Biden are the 2 viable choices next fall, this chart demonstrates the central underlying weakness of the Biden campaign:
This trend line started moving negatively in 2020. It has continued to trend negatively during Biden’s presidency. I haven’t seen a study trying to correlate that trend line with Biden’s sagging approval ratings, which now approach net negatives of -18%. The economic trend line clearly has not helped those ratings, and it will continue to be an albatross around his neck for the rest of this campaign.
There is a widely shared consensus among (wealthy) party mandarins that continued low U-3 unemployment rates and a tempering of increases in the consumer price index means that all is well with the economy. The chart above indicates why voters further down the economic pyramid might have a less rosy outlook. As the linked Jacobin piece summarized it:
If we look only at recent changes in the economy, what we see is a very mixed bag. On the one hand, the recovery from the COVID recession has increased employment and compressed the wage schedule, both good things. On the other hand, the rollback of the COVID welfare state has seen free school meals eliminated, cash benefits for the poorest kids eliminated, ten million people kicked off Medicaid, and the return of our completely dysfunctional unemployment benefit system, all bad things.
Letting the Senate parliamentarian effectively veto the first minimum wage increase since 2009, not even bothering to try to pass a public option on health care (a 2020 Democratic platform plank), and letting the New Deal-style benefits that got us through Covid lapse, will hurt the donkey next year. So will the party’s abject failure to recognize that a frizzy-haired senator’s attempts at adapting old FDR principles to new realities just might have some appeal to middle and lower-income voters. The Dems opposing the Trump tax cuts when they were out of power and then doing nothing to try and rescind any of those cuts when they regained power doesn’t help, either.
We can all agree that Trump I was an unmitigated disaster and that Trump II could prove to be catastrophic. Running an incumbent with declining popularity, a clear physical inability to run a vigorous re-election campaign, and no discernable second-term platform may not be enough to prevent such dire consequences. It definitely will not be enough if, for some reason, Trump isn’t the GOP nominee.
A challenger can run against the incumbent, as Biden did in 2020. The incumbent, at some point, has to run on his record and on his hopes for a second term. The Democrats are openly indicating that that won’t happen in this campaign.