Sorry, But I Have to Interrupt Your Doom and Gloom Parade

Biden and the Democrats have a clear path to victory in 2024

The media in this country is in an anti-Biden doom loop. According to this narrative, everything that happens -- a bad debate, a few donors and members of Congress being upset, now the assassination attempt -- spells doom for President Biden. The Republicans are doing a good job at taking advantage of this narrative, being very aggressive in their messaging. Democrats need to move past their pessimism and move forward with a strong, optimistic message about their campaign for America’s future. The media focus on the assassination attempt will fade, and this race will return to its core narrative and dynamics.

There are plenty of good people saying Joe Biden should pass the torch to another candidate. I get it -- the media is beating the drum incessantly, people are scared of Trump winning again, and that debate was painful to watch. Conventional wisdom says that Trump is likely to win. Fortunately, conventional wisdom is wrong most of the time. Everything I know about politics after 45 years in the business tells me that Biden is well positioned to win this election.

Let me start with a story. After the 1992 primary fight was over, I signed up to go down to Little Rock and join the Clinton campaign. It had been a tough primary campaign for Bill Clinton with various scandals -- from womanizing to draft dodging to not-inhaling-marijuana -- feeding the Slick Willie narrative. Clinton was battered and bruised, bleeding from a thousand cuts, and with only 25% of the vote, running a weak third to Ross Perot and George Bush. The day I signed up, a close friend of Clinton who had been one of his biggest contributors called me to say I shouldn’t be signing up for the campaign, that instead I should be trying to talk Clinton into dropping out of the race. 

1992 hasn’t been the only time in presidential election history the Democratic candidate was down but not out. Harry Truman, with a deeply divided party, was down in every poll in 1948 and came back to win. JFK was behind Nixon in a lot of the polls in 1960. After the disastrous 1968 convention, Humphrey was 30 points down and thought to be dead as a doorknob but came roaring back at the end to almost beat Nixon in one of the closest elections in history. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were both thought to be toast after midterm tsunamis against them in their first terms.

In all of those cases, Democratic candidates were well behind in the polls (although in fairness, Clinton and Obama had come back by this time in their respective re-election cycles), and came back to win, or in Humphrey’s case, come very close. By contrast, President Biden is in a dead heat in several recent national polls, even after the worst stretch of his campaign with the debate and some Democrats publicly bailing on his campaign. Here is a list of recent national polls compiled by Simon Rosenberg:

• 50%-48% NPR/Marist

• 44%-42% GW/YouGov

• 47%-46% Split Ticket/Data For Progress

• 47%-46% Clarity

• 50%-50% Emerson College

• 46%-46% Washington Post (Harris leads Trump 49-47)

• 42%-43% Redfield & Wilton

• 42%-43% Bendixen and Amandi (Harris leads Trump)

• 41%-42% Big Village

• 42%-44% Morning Consult

• 40%-43% Economist/YouGov
  

And in the three most important battleground states, Biden is tied (MI), down 1 (WI), and down 2 (PA) in the public poll averages. Even in the four battleground states he is a little further behind in, the margins are barely outside the margin of error: 4 points in NV and AZ, 5 in GA, and 6 in NC.

People are calling Biden too old, but in the last few days he hosted and led a successful week long NATO summit, did an hour-long press conference, gave an inspiring speech at a Black church in Philly, and gave a passionate, fighting populist speech to a fired up crowd in Michigan.

Democrats, we have challenges to overcome, but the idea we should be panicking is dead wrong. Here are the reasons we are positioned to win the 2024 election:

Our issue agenda is so much more popular than theirs.

The legislation and executive actions that Biden and the Democrats have accomplished in the last 3+ years are overwhelmingly popular. People like lower insulin prices, drug companies having to negotiate with Medicare, the government taking on monopoly power and price gouging, building roads and bridges, and all the new jobs in the electric car, solar, and wind energy industries. Voters don’t always know that it was Biden who delivered all those things to them, but the campaign can deliver that news to them.

In terms of the agenda for the next four years, people vastly prefer ours. They like the idea of paying for child and elder and disability care. They like strengthening Social Security by making the wealthy pay more into the system. Speaking of which, they love the idea of millionaires, billionaires, and wealthy corporations paying more in taxes. They want strong antitrust enforcement. They want labor law reform and a higher minimum wage.

By contrast, when voters read the Project 2025 agenda, they are horrified. They don’t want abortion bans or making it tougher to get contraception. They don’t want tax cuts for the rich. They don’t want civil servants being turned into partisan hacks. They don’t want the Supreme Court giving Trump dictatorial powers. Even on issues like immigration, when you read people specific policy ideas from Democrats and Republicans, they like ours better than theirs.

When Democrats start talking about issues again, the tide will turn in our favor.

Trump is a terribly weak candidate.

It isn’t just the Republican issue agenda that is terribly unpopular. It is common knowledge among Democratic pollsters that focus groups and dial tests show that the more people see of Trump and his speeches, the more they turn against him. They don’t like his talk of dictatorship, or his embrace of the January 6th mob. They don’t like his rape conviction. They don’t like the fraud his businesses committed. They don’t like all the convictions, or the charges filed against him.

Mitch McConnell, Mike Johnson, and the Republican House are widely unpopular.

The approval rating of the Republican Congress is down to 16%. Mitch McConnell’s approval rating is awful, and Mike Johnson’s approval rating is almost as bad. The Republican Party is deeply unpopular right now.

Democrats, labor unions, and the progressive movement know how to turn out their vote.

Turning out the Democratic base vote is never easy, and it won’t be this year. Our voters are restless and have been relatively unmotivated. But since 2016, the organizations doing GOTV operations have been studying how to turn people out and doing a good job. It also helps that Trump is a great motivator. 

The 2018 midterms were a historically high turnout of young voters, people of color, and Democratic voters. The 2020 presidential election was the highest turnout ever recorded. In the battleground states in 2022, Democrats did a good enough job to win most of the big statewide races. In the special elections and off-year elections since Biden was elected, Democrats have out-performed the Biden 2020 vote consistently.

There is an anti-MAGA majority in this country.

One of the most brilliant analysts in American politics is former AFL-CIO political director Mike Podhorzer. He has done a thorough job of analyzing electoral politics in recent years, and is certain that an anti-MAGA electoral majority has emerged in this country.

As Podhorzer notes:

Since 2016, Republicans have lost 23 of the 27 elections in the five states everyone agrees Democratic hopes in the Electoral College and the Senate depend on. When Trump was sworn in, Republicans held four of those five states’ governorships, and six of the ten Senate seats. Moreover, Republicans defied history by losing nearly across the board in those states last year, the only time anything like that has happened to a party running against such an unpopular president in a midterm.

This anti-MAGA majority needs to be organized, motivated, and convinced to turn out again, and to vote for Biden again, but we know to do those things.

The unknown unknowns vs the known knowns

Donald Rumsfeld used the strange phrase “the unknown unknowns” to describe variables we have no way of predicting or guessing. The attempted assassination attempt of Trump reminds us how many of those there are likely to be before Election Day 2024. We can’t know all the twists and turns remaining in this race, and that makes all the predictions and prognostications even more likely to be wrong. However, we do know that elections tend to be won on certain fundamentals: 

• Are we talking about the most important issues in the most persuasive ways? 

• Are we making a convincing case on the economy?

• Have we built an effective field organization at a big enough scale to talk to the voters we need to reach?

• Are we registering voters likely to vote for us?

• Are we doing a good job of turning those voters out?

If we get that stuff right in the battleground states, we are likely to win this election.

The main fight within the Democratic Party

The fight within our party over whether Biden should step aside will be over soon, one way of the other. I suspect it is already winding down no matter how much the media tries to fan the flames. Getting this fight over quickly will be good news.

But there is a bigger fight within the Democratic Party that this short-term should-Biden-pass-the-torch kerfuffle is influenced by, and that is a fight over economics. I know we’re not using the term anymore because it doesn’t poll very well, but Bidenomics is a real thing. It’s a BFD. Biden has shifted the Democratic Party’s economics away from the Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, pro-free trade neoliberalism of the Clinton/Obama era, and into an economics that is focused on improving the lives of working-class families.

There are some Democrats who are very unhappy with this new approach, and I see them quietly fueling this push. Not all for sure, but a great many of the Democratic officials and donors who are pushing for Biden to step down are closer to that side of the party. They are hoping that whoever the new standard bearer ends up being will be less inclined to appoint strong progressives to key regulatory roles, and less inclined to push legislation that progressive minded folks can be excited about supporting. 

Whatever happens next, this quiet fight going on will be one to watch. 

We have work to do, but we have a clear path to victory.

Given how shaky polling has been in predicting results in the modern era, you wouldn’t think people would get so freaked out by it, but even if you buy into it, right now this is a very close election. We all wish Joe Biden was a little younger and hadn’t had a bad debate night, but I guarantee you that there are no perfect candidates -- I have worked for ones with far more flaws than Biden and still won.

I hope I haven’t made anyone over-confident in this essay. We all have to work our butts off to win this election, but let’s stop wringing our hands: this election can be won. Just as Republicans and their enablers in the media pushed the idea of a red wave in 2022, they are doing the same thing today. And just like in 2022, we will overcome the conventional wisdom and have a great surprise in store for our pundit and Republican friends. 

It’s time to go out and win this election. If Democrats do the work to turn out our voters and persuade those in the middle, we will have a very good election night.