The Biden Campaign’s Unconvincing Theory of the Race

By Noah Rothman 

Tuesday, May 15, 2024 

 

Joe Biden is delusional. At least, that’s the upshot of Axios’s latest piece on the president’s outlook toward his reelection prospects. 

 

Joe Biden “doesn’t believe his bad poll numbers,” according to reporters Hans Nichols and Alex Thompson. Neither do “his closest advisors,” most of whom agree that the “public polling simply doesn’t reflect the president’s support.” That suffices to explain the president’s “largely steady-as-she-goes campaign.” 

 

It is quite possible that the president and his coterie don’t believe that the polling landscape today is indicative of where voters will end up in November, but Axios’s own reporting indicates that Biden does pay close attention to his numbers. The report says that the president tells donors in closed-door settings that “the momentum is clearly in our favor, with the polls moving towards us and away from Trump.” That alone suggests Biden puts at least some stock in the survey data. As for the notion that the president is unfazed by his standing with the public, the administration’s utterly confused and increasingly manic approach to navigating the politics of Israel’s war against Hamas betrays the White House’s understanding that the political state-of-play today is potentially fatal. 

 

By the end of the report, Axios treats its readers to the impetus for its dispatch on Biden’s myopia: “Some Democrats think the Biden team is in denial about the polling and sleepwalking into defeat.” On that score, there can be no doubt. And the Biden campaign appears to be fully appraised of the panic settling over the Democratic landscape. To assuage the concerns expressed by party stalwarts, the Biden campaign dispatched one of its pollsters, Jefrey Pollock, to outline the president’s theory of the race as we head into the summer. 

 

Listeners to Pollock’s recent conversation with the New Republic’s Greg Sargent will not come away with the impression that the campaign is deluding itself about the scale of its challenges. As Pollock said, the campaign has to actively “move the numbers” because “there’s clear evidence that we are not doing well enough.” But the campaign’s strategy to achieve that is no mystery. It is heavily reliant on Donald Trump and the issue of abortion to do much of the work. And to the extent that the president’s reelection effort is dedicated to persuasion, it will be almost wholly focused on the disaffected progressive constituencies whose enthusiasm for Biden has ebbed along with his adoption of policies preferable to the vast center of the American electorate. 

 

Pollock admitted that Biden “needs to do better with younger voters, black voters, and Hispanic voters.” But it’s clear that the campaign is counting on entropy to draw those voters back into the president’s camp. 

 

“What we’re really seeing is some defection to both undecided and third party,” Pollock said. The campaign intends to devote its attention to these demographics, spending to court them at a level that Trump cannot match. But by late fall, the campaign expects the threat of a Trump restoration will be sufficient to get those “people off their proverbial asses.” 

 

If Democrats find some reassurance in the campaign’s diagnosis of its problems, they are unlikely to be relieved by Pollock’s prescription. “The Biden campaign has to do what they are doing,” Pollock insisted — specifically, keep promoting its underappreciated legislative accomplishments, keep promising taxpayer-funded giveaways to disaffected young people, and keep pounding the table about the unacceptability of Donald Trump as a potential president. 

 

“Trump and the Trump dynamic is going to be important,” Pollock assured Sargent when he was asked if the campaign will balance its base-mobilization strategy with efforts to appeal to persuadable voters in the middle of the electorate. Pollock called that a “false choice,” because, of course, you have to do both. But he failed to articulate how the Biden campaign intends to retail itself to independents and even centrist Republicans who are turned off by Trump. Rather, the campaign appears to believe that the former president is just as contemptuous of the electorate’s moderate elements. It’s counting on that, in combination with the pile of money under which it intends to bury Trump in the fall, to be enough to pull out a squeaker victory in November. 

 

And this is what should terrify Democrats. The Biden campaign lacks either the imagination or the will to craft for itself a broader coalition of voters that might yield a commanding victory. It seems convinced that Biden’s only pathway to reelection is extraordinarily narrow. So, expect to see more slavish pandering to avaricious degree-holders who resent their financial circumstances. Steel yourself for more efforts to weaken America’s strategic relationship with our lone stalwart ally in the Middle East. Anticipate more bribes, more tedious celebrity solicitations, and more appeals to solidarity among Americans who identify themselves with the Democratic lifestyle brand. That’s all they’ve got. 

 

Joe Biden and his campaign team aren’t delusional. It’s worse than that. They’re beholden to a theory of the race that puts Donald Trump in the driver’s seat. He will be the ultimate arbiter of events in 2024. Democrats are right to worry.