Hope vs Hopelessness Sounds Better Than Lesser Of Two Evils... But Is It As Accurate?

Since Tuesday, the Democrats may have saddled themselves with the worst presidential candidate since the Democrats ran John Breckinridge— James Buchanan’s vice president— in 1860. (He supported “states’ rights” and the extension of slavery into the western territories and Lincoln beat him.) But you know who’s worse than Biden? Meatball Ron. As for Trump… well, speaking strictly historically, he’s a worse candidate than dog shit you have to scrape off the sidewalk. Yesterday, rightwing kook Marc Thiessen (a former Bush speechwriter and torture defender) noted that most voters agree that no matter how unenthusiastic they are about Biden— and they are— they view Trump as much worse— the greater evil.

Biden’s disapproval rating, according to a new NBC News poll, is 54%, “while a whopping 70 percent of Americans say they don’t want him to run again. With those numbers, his campaign should be politically dead-on-arrival.” If you’re a Republican, don’t get excited. If voters are forced to choose between Biden and Trump, a Wall Street Journal poll (conducted by pro-Trump super PAC pollster Tony Fabrizio) found that “among voters who disapprove of both Trump and Biden, Biden leads Trump by a massive 39 points: 54 percent to 15 percent. Clearly, swing voters who dislike Biden dislike Trump even more.”

To beat Biden, Republicans need the votes of the 54 percent majority who disapprove of his performance in office. And Trump appears to be the one candidate who can’t deliver those votes. If Republicans force these voters to choose between Trump and Biden, they will push these voters into a position they don’t want: picking Biden.

Trump is effectively Biden’s “get out of jail free” card— the former president is the one Republican candidate who can save Biden from the political consequences of all the serial disasters he’s unleashed on the country during this term: from the worst inflation in 40 years, to the worst decline in real wages in four decades, the highest gas prices ever recorded in the United States, the biggest annual rise in food prices since 1979, the worst labor shortages in American history and the worst crime wave since the 1990s.

That record should doom any president’s chances of winning reelection. But if Trump is the Republican nominee, Biden likely gets away with it. By contrast, if Republicans nominate someone else— almost anyone else— then the GOP can turn Biden’s 54 percent disapproval rating into an albatross around his neck.

It should not take another election loss for Republicans to understand this. Swing voters have already sent this message to the GOP— twice. In 2020, despite the fact that a record 56 percent of registered voters told Gallup that they were better off under Trump than they had been four years earlier, Trump lost— because he alienated too many people. Voters liked Trump’s policies, but they did not like him.

Then, in 2022, Biden turned in nearly the best first midterm performance of any president since John F. Kennedy— despite being the most unpopular U.S. president since Harry S. Truman. (He was exceeded only by George W. Bush’s midterm results after the 9/11 attacks.) Democrats didn’t do so well because voters approved of Biden; it was because they disapproved of Trump’s handpicked House and Senate candidates, who lost winnable race after winnable race.

…Trump has already cost the GOP two elections. Will it take a third for some to wake up to the fact that he is political kryptonite?

That Fabrizo-conducted Wall Street Journal poll he referred to found that among voters who disapprove of both Trump and Biden, Biden leads Trump by a massive 39 points: 54 percent to 15 percent. The takeaway is that swing voters who dislike Biden dislike Trump far more. But numbers like those don’t necessarily tell us anything about numbers like these: Reuters reported this morning that fascist billionaire Peter Thiel, one of the biggest financial contributors to the MAGA Movement, has closed his checkbook for 2024. “Thiel,” wrote Anna Tang, “is unhappy with the Republican Party's focus on hot-button U.S. cultural issues, said one of the sources, a business associate, citing abortion and restrictions on which bathrooms transgender students can use in schools as two examples… The source who knows Thiel personally said he had cautioned that he could still support candidates who have worked for him, as he did in 2022, when the bulk of his $35 million in donations went to two former colleagues running for the Senate as Republicans: J.D. Vance, who won, and Blake Masters, who lost a race pundits considered winnable even though he received some $20 million from Thiel… Thiel is married to businessman Matt Danzeisen, with whom he has two toddlers. Concerns about his family's safety have weighed in Thiel's decision to step back as well, the source who knows him personally told Reuters.” Thiel spent over $35 million during the midterms and 12 of his 16 federal-level candidates won their races.

This morning, David Frum was already predicting a 2024 Biden Blowout, one the GOP could have avoided by dumping Trump, as many of them wanted to, and putting forward a reasonable set of policy proposals. He noted that “Despite lavish anti-Trump donations by big-money Republicans, Trump is cruising to easy renomination. Rather than capitalize on existing economic troubles, Republicans have started a debt-ceiling fight that will cast them as the cause of America’s economic troubles. Worse for them, the troubles are fast receding. Inflation is vexing, but the recession that Republicans hoped for did not materialize: Instead, Joe Biden has presided over the fastest and steepest unemployment reduction in U.S. economic history since he took office in January 2021. The big new Republican idea to halt the flow of drugs is to bomb or invade Mexico. Instead of reassuring women, Republican state legislators and Republican judges are signaling that they will support a national abortion ban if their party wins in 2024— and are already building the apparatus of surveillance and control of women necessary to make such a ban effective. Republican state-level voter-suppression schemes have been noisy and alarming when the GOP plan called for them to be subtle and technical.

"Playing His Tune" by Nancy Ohanian

Biden’s poll numbers are only so-so. But a presidential election offers a stark and binary choice: this or that? Biden may fall short of some voters’ imagined ideal of a president, but in 2024, voters won’t be comparing the Democrat with that ideal. They will be comparing him with the Republican alternative.

…The potential strength of the Democratic coalition is greater than that of the Trump coalition. The Democratic disadvantage is that their coalition spans a lot of groups that face extra difficulties casting a ballot: renters, college students, hourly workers, single parents, people who don’t own cars. The American voting system has been engineered to deter and discourage them.

If motivated to turn out, however, those deterred and discouraged blocs can swing elections. In 2018, 36 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds turned out, the highest level recorded. Their votes helped change control of the House. Turnout of this cohort in 2022 finished second only to what it had been in 2018, and those votes altered the political complexion of many state legislatures. The state that had the highest youth turnout in 2022 was Michigan— not so coincidentally, the state where Democrats scored some of their biggest gains, flipping both chambers of the state legislature from red to blue.

Chief among what motivates voters who face obstacles is hope. People will endure and overcome barriers when they feel that their vote can make a difference. If Democrats succeed in communicating hope in 2024 that young people can contribute to a decisive defeat of Trump and MAGA extremism, then that is what they will do.

This cycle, that hope is well founded. Republicans are doing everything wrong. They are talking to their voters about Trump’s personal grievances and about boutique culture-war issues that their own base does not much care about, such as the state of Florida’s “war on Disney.” At the same time, Republican leaders are confronting Democratic voters with extremist threats on issues they care intensely about: bans on abortion medication by mail, restrictions on the freedom of young women to travel across state lines, attacks on student voting rights, proposed big cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in the GOP debt-ceiling ransom demand. Republicans offer no economic message and no affirming vision, even as they make new moves to police women’s bodies and start a land war in Mexico. They are well on their way to earning a deep, nasty defeat— and the smell of that defeat may be an additional draw to the polls for the Democratic-leaning constituencies that will inflict it.

…Biden’s reelection-announcement video, released yesterday, defines the principal issue at stake in 2024 as “freedom.” From the New Deal to Trump, “freedom” was a Republican slogan; “security” was its Democratic counterpart. But Trump, together with DeSantis, has completely rebranded the GOP as the party of bossing around women, minorities, and young people.

If Trump secures the GOP nomination to run for a second term in 2024, the conditions are all in place to transfer the title of “worst popular-vote loser of the century” from the great Arizona senator to the putsch-plotting ex-president. Trump’s own party is doing its part to deliver this debacle. Soon enough, all Americans will have the opportunity to do theirs.