A Year from Now
It’s Election Day – 2023. There’s important contested races in Virginia, Kentucky, and even in Mississippi (a Democrat has a shot at Governor??). And then there’s Issue One in Ohio, where women’s rights are on the line, again. By the way, Ohio Democrats, don’t get too excited even if Issue One passes by a landslide. It doesn’t mean that the Ohio Democratic Party can figure out how to win a statewide seat, or deliver the Buckeye State for a Democratic Presidential candidate in 2024. That doesn’t seem to be “their thing”.
What’s not so surprising in our ADHD, “What have you done for me in the last sixty seconds,” media environment; is that the talk is all about November of 2024. A few recent polls show Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in several of the critical swing states, and some Democrats are prematurely, positively, panicking.
Polls
So, before we commence with handwringing and begging California Governor Gavin Newsom to come save the Party, let’s talk a little bit about polls. Do we really believe in the sanctity of polling anymore; after the last four election cycles? The entire process of polling is suspect, now that everyone has personal phones and can screen every call. Sure, pollsters still swear by their methodology; if they can get a big enough sample to fit their “model”, they claim “accurate” results. But the proof is in the real outcomes. Polls have been wrong over and over again the last seven years. They aren’t dependable.
And the other issue, proven time and time again, is that Joe Biden never, ever, polls well. But somehow, he still manages to win at the ballot box. In fact, isn’t that part of the foundation of the Trumpian “Stolen Election” theory, that Biden never wins in polls but somehow people still vote for him? “The election must be rigged”; all the pollsters, particularly Rasmussen of the most Republican “model” in history, can’t be wrong.
All Trump
So here are the facts. The one thing that Donald Trump is right about is that any publicity, any media attention of him, is better than none. And the media is back to “All Trump, All the Time” again. Hell, I have MSNBC on TV eight hours a day, and at least a third of that time, it’s about Donald Trump. He’s in court, he’s not going to the debate, he yelled at a judge, he’s losing his company – we hear it all. So Trump gets to play his favorite role, victim.
Meanwhile Biden is trying to handle a world gone off the rails. Russia is still getting pushed back in Ukraine (that’s old-old news, past our sixty second attention span). And Israel has somehow managed to turn a brutal terror attack on their own civilians, killing 1400, into something that looks like genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza. No wonder no one likes Netanyahu.
All Trump, all victim; all Biden, all world turmoil: no wonder flawed polling shows Trump ahead.
Sages
And then there are the “wise sages” of the Democratic Party, acting all “courageous” by saying Biden should withdraw for 2024. James Carville, the master politician behind Bill Clinton (“it’s the economy, stupid”) and David Axelrod, Obama’s strategic genius, both are hinting that Democrats should move on. Even former Republican “sage” Steve Schmidt, McCain’s chief strategist and a Founder of the Lincoln Project, is behind Biden’s only Democratic challenger, Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota.
In short – Trump gets to play his favorite part – victim, while Biden grapples with all of the problems of the US and the World. Trump has nothing else to do – ninety-one felony counts take up a lot of time. Surprise; Biden isn’t running for President right now. He’s BEING President, making really tough decisions. Some of those have political ramifications: Palestinian/American voters are Democrats, now who knows where they’ll go. Certainly not to Trump. And Jewish Democrats aren’t all that happy with what Israel is doing in Gaza either.
Dementia and Kooks
Young people think Biden is too old, and old people can’t figure out how Biden even gets up in the morning. They know that they can’t. So what if Trump is afraid of the coming “World War II”, or thinks he beat “Obama” in 2016. Trump gets a pass on dementia. But Biden stutters a couple of times, and that’s obvious proof he’s “gone”.
And what about Robert Kennedy Junior, and Cornell West, and “No Labels” and other “third party” candidates? Well, I’m not so worried about Kennedy, he’s a kook, and he’s drawing as much support away from Trump as he is Biden. And while I admire a lot of what Cornell West did, he’s just not going to draw a lot of votes – nothing like Ralph Nader in 2000. And “No Labels” is revealing itself as a ploy to assure a Trump re-election, something most Americans will see through.
In the end it’s just going to be two that matter: two familiar, octogenarian, white men.
Two Old Guys
Don’t get me wrong – I think Joe Biden is old too. So, I suspect, does Joe Biden. But Biden achieved something no other Democrat, not even Carville’s Hillary, could achieve. He beat Donald Trump, unseating a serving President. And he did it in the middle of a pandemic, where it was even tougher to reach the American people.
Biden has a great phrase: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to my opponent”. Republicans seem dead set on nominating a man who is likely to be convicted of Federal felonies even before the nominating convention (“… (W)hen you’re a star, they let you do it. Grab them by the p—y. You can do anything”). Ten months from now, it’s not going to be Gavin Newsom, or Gretchen Whitmer, or Wes Moore against Ron DeSantis or Nicky Haley, or even Vivek Ramaswamy. It’s going to be Trump and Biden, focused down to just two old men; a rerun of 2020.
That’s when I’ll start sweating the “polls”. And even then, I’ll take them with a whole box of salt. I think that contest will work just fine for Democrats, just like it did in 2020.
