There's Plenty I Don't Like About Biden— But There Is No Instance In Which Trump Would Not Be Worse

We’re in a hyper-partisan era right now. Over the past decade or two, the ideological positions of the two parties, have become more distinct, leading to a situation where individuals identify strongly with one party and often view the other party with hostility. You can’t blame it all on Hate Talk Radio and Fox News. Politicized evangelical churches share some of the blame. But the rise of cable news networks (and social media and online news sources) has led to increased media fragmentation giving people more options to consume news that aligns with their preexisting beliefs and creating ideological echo chambers or bubbles. Media outlets catering to specific political viewpoints reinforce partisan divides rather than fostering nuanced dialogue. On top of that— and exacerbated because of gerrymandering creating “safe” red and blue districts— professional politicians often engage in behavior that emphasizes and inflames partisan divisions for strategic reasons, including using rhetoric that demonizes the opposition, prioritizing party loyalty over compromise and engaging in obstructionist tactics.

This kind of behavior has become de rigueur among Republicans and there are some Democrats who have started down this remunerative slippery slope as well.

And when someone is asked if they have a positive or negative view a politician of the opposing party, pretty much all the Republicans and Republican-leaners will give the expected team answer and generally the Democrats and Democrat-leaners will do the same to be part of their own team. But that doesn’t explain Biden’s abysmally low numbers. In 2020, Biden had 81,283,501 votes (51.3%) to Trump’s 74,223,975 (46.8%). According to the Edison Research exit polls, Biden received around 52% of the independent vote, while Trump received around 42%. Biden’s positives are down among Democrats, especially Democrats who are pissed off about his unwavering support for Israeli’s genocide. And, for a great many more reasons, down among independents. If those pissed off Democrats stay home and those unhappy independents vote for Trump or stay home, Biden won’t be reelected, especially if that scenario happens to play out in the swing states— Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and New Hampshire.

In his NY Times column yesterday, Ross Douthat gleefully noted that Biden’s “approval ratings are lower than those of any president embarking on a re-election campaign, from Dwight Eisenhower to Donald Trump… worse by far than Trump’s at the same point in his first term.” Is it all dissatisfaction over Gaza? It can’t be.

Douthat, a rotgut conservative Republican through and through, wrote that “Apart from anxiety about his age, there isn’t a chattering-class consensus or common shorthand for why his presidency is such a political flop.” That might be because his presidency isn’t a flop, even if so many people don’t like him... perhaps because they've spent too much time taking chatterers like Ross Douthat more seriously than they should.

When things went south for other recent chief executives, there was usually a clearer theory of what was happening. Trump’s unpopularity was understood to reflect his chaos and craziness and authoritarian forays. The story of George W. Bush’s descending polls was all about Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. When Barack Obama was at his polling nadir, most observers blamed the unemployment rate and the Obamacare backlash, and when Bill Clinton struggled through his first two years, there was a clear media narrative about his lack of discipline and White House scandals.

With Biden, it has been different. Attempts to reduce his struggles to the inflation rate are usually met with vehement rebuttals, there’s a strong market for ‘bad vibes’ explanations of his troubles, a lot of blame gets placed on partisan polarization even though Biden won a clear popular majority not so long ago, and even the age issue has taken center stage only in the past few months.

…I think that Biden’s record has big problems and that the economy isn’t as golden as some of his defenders claim. But even I look at his numbers and think, really, that bad?

I also think, though, that this kind of media mystification is what you’d expect given the political realignment we’re experiencing, where right and left are sorting increasingly by class and education, and where anti-institutionalism has migrated more to the political right.

This transformation means that the Republican voters whose support Biden never had are often more culturally distant from liberal tastemakers than were the Republicans of the Clinton or Obama years. But it also means that many of the voters Biden is losing now, the swing voters driving his approval ratings down and down, are likewise fairly alien to the cultural and media establishment.

Some of them are the sort of disillusioned and infrequent voters whose grievances tend to be harder to pin down. But many are politically moderate minority voters, especially lower-middle-class Hispanics and African Americans, who already tended somewhat rightward in 2016 and 2020 but now seem to be abandoning Biden in larger numbers. In a recent Substack post, Ruy Teixeira described the realignment since 2012: “In that election, Obama carried nonwhite working-class (noncollege) voters by a massive 67 points, while losing white college graduates by seven points.” Whereas today, “Biden is actually doing worse among the nonwhite working class, carrying them by a mere six points, than among white college graduates, where he enjoys a 15 point advantage over Trump.”

…Again, I’m part of that establishment, and I don’t want to pretend that I have my finger fully on the pulse of, say, blue-collar Hispanics who went for Biden in 2020 but now lean toward Trump.

But if you take that kind of constituency as a starting place, you may be able to reason your way to a clearer understanding of Biden’s troubles: by thinking about ways in which high borrowing costs for homes and cars seem especially punishing to voters trying to move up the economic ladder, for instance, or how the hold of cultural progressivism over Democratic politics might be pushing more culturally conservative minorities to the right even if wokeness has peaked in some elite settings.

These are theories; maybe there’s a better one. But the first step to saving Biden’s re-election effort is to acknowledge the need for such an explanation— because unpopularity that you can’t fathom can still throw you out of office.

I didn’t vote for Biden in 2020. And I didn’t vote for him in the primary last week. But in November, when it’s Trump or Biden… no contest, that's how much worse Trump is since 2020. Even with Biden's morally vile and utterly inexcusable complicity in genocide, I’d crawl to the polls to vote against Trump. And voting against Trump doesn’t mean voting for a third party candidate. It only means one thing: voting for Joe Biden, who I’ve intensely disliked since he ran a racist, conservative Senate campaign in 1972.