Young Voters Are Too Smart To Be Sold On Biden
New Hampshire Republican David Scanlan was elected to the state legislature in 1984 and served until 2002, when he ended his legislative career as House Majority Leader. In New Hampshire, the state legislature elects the Secretary of State. With Republican majorities in both chambers, Scanlan, already Acting Secretary, was an easy pick. Scanlan, who will be overseeing the first primary of the 2024 cycle, may be thrust into the center of a political fulcrum. In theory, the 14th Amendment gives him the power to block Trump’s presence on the ballot. And he’s being urged to do just that. He’s seeking legal advice from the attorney general so that he and his team understand the arguments. And Scanlan isn't the only Secretary of State grappling with the question. Yesterday, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said he's getting complaints about Trump being on the ballot and demands he be disqualified.
Yesterday, David Frum wrote that the whole 14th amendment “solution” is a fantasy or a “cheat code” that “won’t save us from Donald Trump” and called the whole project to disqualify Trump from running “misguided and dangerous.” Not only will it not work, he predicts that if it somehow did work, “it would create problems worse even than Americans already face.”
Consider the scenario in which Section 3 is invoked against Trump in 2024. Although he has won the Republican nomination, Democratic secretaries of state in key states refuse to place his name on their ballots, as a person who engaged in insurrection against the United States. With Trump’s name deleted from some swing-state ballots, President Joe Biden is easily reelected.
But only kind of reelected. How in the world are Republicans likely to react to such an outcome? Will any of them regard such a victory as legitimate? The rage and chaos that would follow are beyond imagining.
And then what? If Section 3 can be reactivated in this way, then reactivated it will be. Republicans will hunt for Democrats to disqualify, and not only for president, but for any race where Democrats present someone who said or did something that can be represented as “aid and comfort” to enemies of the United States. Didn’t progressive Representative Ilhan Omar once seemingly equate al-Qaeda with the U.S. military? Do we think that her political enemies will accept that she was making only a stupid rhetorical point? Earlier this year, Tennessee Republicans tossed out of the legislature two Black Democrats for allegedly violating House rules. Might Tennessee Republicans next deem unruly Democrats “rebels” forbidden ever to run for office again?
…The good news is that a consistent majority of the U.S. electorate has been anti-Trump every day since he declared for president in June 2015. The bad news is that the anti-Trump majority is a narrow one, and disfavored by the Electoral College.
Stopping Trump by electoral means will be a tough and arduous fight. The fancied alternatives are dreams and delusions. Legal process can prosecute and punish crimes. It cannot save a nation from itself. That duty falls instead on each of us.
This summer’s wish for a constitutional anti-Trump magic wand is an unfeasible, unhelpful fantasy. Let it go.
If Frum is correct about that a “consistent majority of the U.S. electorate has been anti-Trump,” why, asked Dan Pfeiffer yesterday, do polls show the election neck and neck? A better question might be to ask why American politics has devolved into a lesser-of-two-evils model. But that isn’t where Pfeiffer wanted to take his readers.
Pfeiffer will never write that Biden is a mediocre president, nor will he write that the 74,223,976 people who voted for Trump in 2020 should all be euthanized— or at least never allowed anywhere near a ballot box again. In Pfeiffer’s eyes— eyes of the Democratic Party establishment— Biden “conducted his presidency with decency and compassion, exceeding even the most optimistic expectations of what could be achieved with a Republican Party that won’t acknowledge the legitimacy of his electoral victory. Unemployment is under 4%, the economy is growing and inflation has been coming down for months.”
He’s confused how a failed crook like Trump could be in close contention with someone as “competent” as Biden. (Nevermind that, after unrelentless GOP propaganda on their networks— most Americans see Biden as too old— and feeble— to be president.) The race, he wrote, “is closer than it should be.”
Here’s what Pfeiffer comes up with, rather than any critique of Biden or Kamala, Kamala being important here because many Republicans have been told and now believe that Biden won’t finish a second term and she’d wind up as president. Pfeiffer’s first reason rests on entirely unreliable polling statistics by a firm he puts great credence in but doesn’t deserve any (Siena) outside of New York. The diagnoses, just one step better than “so and so is winning because he has more voters”— “The primary reason for the statistical tie in the race is that Trump is holding onto more of his 2020 vote than Biden. In the NYT poll, 91% of Trump’s 2020 voters are supporting him again while only 87% percent of Biden’s voters plan to vote for him in 2024. Among Biden’s 2020 voters, 2% plan to vote for Trump, 4% claim they won’t if the race is between Biden and Trump, and 5% intend to vote for a candidate other than Biden or Trump. Trump loses 2% to Biden, 3% to another candidate, and 2% say they won’t vote.”
His second reason is more to the point: “[Y]oung voters are not yet as on board with Biden 2024 as they were the last time around. According to Pew, Biden won voters 18-29 by 24 points in 2020, but he is only winning them by 10 in the NYT poll. Biden won voters 30-44 by 12 points. For reasons unbeknownst to me, the Times poll breaks out the age as 30-44, not 30-49, but Biden is only up three points with that group.” [U]nbeknownst not just to Pfeiffer, but to the entire Democratic establishment. Maybe they should all get together in a big theater and have a special screening of Don’t Look Up, followed by a Q&A with writers David Sirota and Adam McKay.
“This change,” wrote Pfeiffer, “is not a bunch of young and young(ish) people deciding to support Trump. They are checking out of the election. — 9% of 18-29 year olds say they won’t vote if Biden and Trump are the nominees, and 16% of 30-44 year olds are either planning to vote for a third-party candidate or not vote at all. These numbers are probably not a surprise to folks who pay attention. Young voters are a challenge for Biden. He started off the 2020 general election underperforming with that group and ended up generating high levels of turnout and support. It will take a lot of work, but Biden did it before and I am confident he can do it again.”
Even if they already saw Don’t Look Up, maybe they should watch an oldie but goodie, The Day After Tomorrow. Imagine that the vice president in this clip represents every politician in America, including Biden and everyone around him:
Sorry to bring up such an inconvenient truth, but why should young people reengage if Biden is just a little better than the vice president in that scene? Pfeiffer wants to go in another direction though: economics. “The New York Times poll finds “modest Trump gains among Black, Hispanic, male and low-income voters.” The sample sizes of these subgroups are so small that I hesitate to pay much attention to them — even if other evidence suggests they might be real. Similarly, Biden is doing about four points worse with Independents than he did in 2020, but the universe of voters who refer to themselves as “Independent” is not static. If the past is precedent, the people who say they are “Independent” today are likely more Republican than they were four years ago.
The big takeaways:
Biden (and all of us) must work to reconstitute the coalition that defeated Trump in 2020;
Biden’s (and our) task is more difficult because the anti-MAGA majority is much more diverse generationally, demographically, geographically, and ideologically than the MAGA minority;
Communicating to younger voters Biden’s accomplishments and the stakes of this election are top priorities;
The Biden campaign clearly understands the task ahead, which is why their current flight of ads focuses on Biden, not Trump;
He concluded worrying about how “a viable third-party candidate like Larry Hogan or Cornell West is more damaging to Biden than Trump and could be what puts Trump over the top.” Was it Einstein who one said “If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself?” He was talking about how complex ideas, even in physics, should be able to be simplified and understood by anyone, including a child. It should be easiy applied to politics as well. What was that old saw about how “if you’re explaining you’re losing” or if it can’t fit on a bumper sticker it’s too complicated? In politics if you find yourself having to provide detailed explanations or justifications for your actions or positions, you’re on the defensive and losing ground in the debate. Biden’s regime, especially since the departure of Ron Klain, has not exactly been a fount of the kind of clear and straight-forward messaging that resonates with the voters without the need for lengthy explanations and verbal acrobats.
Trump's congressional allies feel no compunction whatsoever in trying to prove that Biden is just as corrupt as Trump-- or to at least muddy the waters in that regard. The Democrats, on the other hand, don't have what it takes to make the case to the public that Trump is at least just as senile as Biden is, probably more so. The Democrats only know one way to win: they claim to be the lesser evil... and the the GOP subsumed by MAGA, that's a relatively easy task (except in rural areas where too much Round Up and other glyphosates have destroyed everyones' critical thinking capacity)
