The Democrats' strategy for winning in 2024 is coming into focus, and it boils down to doubling down on their favorite post-2020 tactic: talking about democracy. As President Joe Biden's Jan. 5 speech in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania indicated, his party believes that continuing to harp on the theme that Trump and the GOP are proto-authoritarians and that Democrats are the last hope of defending democracy is the way to hold the political center and the White House.
It's astonishing: The party that is doing everything in its power to use banana republic tactics to imprison or throw off the ballot their likely opponent is claiming to be the party of democracy. It's hypocrisy on steroids.
It won't work. Focusing on theoretical and largely fictional scenarios in which Trump ends American democracy won't convince anyone to vote for a president who, recent rhetoric notwithstanding, created a catastrophe at the southern border and seems unwilling or unable to address the collapse of security and the rule of law that goes with their commitment to open borders. Nor will it persuade those who understand that flooding the country with millions of illegal immigrants undermines the ability of workers already struggling to get by and will make their plight that much worse. The same applies to the impact of an opioid addiction crisis that afflicts the lower classes disproportionately and that is exacerbated by the open border that allows Mexican drug cartels bringing fentanyl into the United States to grow richer and more powerful.
It's true that the Defenders of Democracy rallying cry helped Biden's party to a better-than-expected outcome in the 2022 midterms. But it's a mistake to think that simply waving the proverbial "bloody shirt" of Jan. 6 or talking about Trump as a would-be dictator is going to save Biden. Because the Democrats are almost completely focused on the shortcomings of their almost-certain opponent—while elections are always referendums on incumbents.
Unlike in 2016 and 2020 when Trump never led in national polls against the presumptive Democratic nominee at any point in the election cycle, at the moment he is ahead (+4.3 percent) of Biden in every single current head-to-head matchup. He also leads by an even larger margin (+6.2 percent) in those involving third party candidates. That is not a guarantee of anything in November. But it does illustrate that three years of non-stop bludgeoning of Trump by the corporate media over Jan. 6 as well as the Democrats' lawfare campaign of indictments and civil trials have failed to render him unelectable.
Biden's polling numbers initially turned from positive to negative after the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, but he made up a lot of ground until the second turning point of his presidency took place: the derailment of a train full of toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, an obscure rust belt town that epitomized the America that the educated classes that back Biden and hate Trump don't care about. The town was left to fend for itself for far too long while Biden and his criminally incompetent Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg failed to even visit the site of the disaster—that is, until long after Trump went there.
Biden's numbers never recovered since then. In the last year, as Trump's support grew thanks to the indictments, Biden has continued to sink with polls showing that 56.5 percent disapprove of him and only 40 percent approve.
They're the sort of numbers that generally doom incumbents this late in a presidential election cycle.
Biden and the Democrats still don't understand that a vast number of Americans who aren't thriving under Bidenomics saw the incident at East Palestine as symbolic of the elites' contempt for them. Without credibly addressing their concerns, all the rhetoric in the world about Trump being a threat to democracy won't re-elect the president.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow him at: @jonathans_tobin.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
