Member Newsletter
We seem to have moved on, for the moment at least, from the Replace Biden!/Thunderdome Convention discourse. But a new poll out today reminds us of a key issue about Biden. Earlier this year a lot of people were operating on the assumption that the Democratic policy agenda is more popular with Americans and that President Biden is unpopular and old, both literally and metaphorically. So basically any other Democrat under 60 who’s got a little electoral success under their belt would be on course to defeating Trump, or at least doing substantially better than Biden.
That assumption was always highly questionable. Indeed polls provided consistent evidence that it was not the case. Polls aren’t everything of course. But it’s polls — Biden’s lackluster polls — that provide the premise of the whole conversation. So it’s not like we can easily dismiss them. But it’s not only the practical difficulty of swapping Biden out for someone else or giving up the incumbency which historically is the single greatest advantage to being elected president. There are important attributes of Biden himself.
It’s certainly not the only one, but the AP highlights a key one. Quite simply, Democrats are far more angry and frightened about a Trump presidency than Republicans are about another Biden one. 6 in 10 Democrats say they’d be “fearful” or “angry” about another Trump presidency whereas only 4 in 10 Republicans say the same about Biden.
The most salient point about this result is how commonsensical it is. Republicans can talk all they want about the “Biden Crime Family” and the “Biden dictatorship” and the “Jan 6 hostages.” But no non-cultists really buy that. And I mean, really buy it. Who do you think is really scared about another Biden term?
This gets to one of the guy’s underlying strengths. He’s just not demonizable in the way Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or a lot of other Democrats have been. Is that because he’s a white man? That’s definitely part of it. But it’s not all of it. One of his advantages is precisely that he is old. He’s been doing this for half a century. People know who he is. Joe Biden is just the apotheosis of Normie-dom. He’s also always been essentially a median Democrat. He’ll be pretty much where the center of gravity of his party is. And the center of gravity of the Democratic party is in a substantially more social-democratic place than it was a generation ago. And because of that so is he.
These facts about Biden aren’t things that get people super excited necessarily. But they’re a big reason for his political strength. And they’re at the center of why, despite many claims that he’s the only Democrat who could lose to Donald Trump, quite the opposite might be true.
To be clear, I’m not big on there being irreplaceable people. Put me still in the camp that Trump is a brittle candidate and one who I think will lose. But again, this is the heart of Biden’s strength. He radiates an underlying decency and normalness, and that makes him hard for the GOP to effectively demonize.