By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, October 27, 2022
Yesterday, Politico ran a story with the headline, “Biden insists the
polls will turn in his favor. Privately, the White House is anxious.” Sometime after I tweeted about it, the headline changed to
“Election anxiety creeps inside the White House.”
I noted that it feels like every day we get some headline
that is a version of, “Amidst a long run of bad news, President Biden insists
good news is just around the corner.” Inflation is temporary, or it’s at zero
percent, or it’s peaked, or it’s tapering off. The economy is “strong as
hell.” The border is secure. There’s optimism, and then there’s
blind denial.
That Politico article noted:
In the stretch run before the
election, Biden has held far fewer events than his immediate predecessors,
Barack Obama and Donald Trump, did in the closing weeks of their own first
midterm election season. The president is slated for a trip to upstate New York
on Thursday but did not campaign last weekend — and he currently has no
campaign events planned for this coming weekend, just 10 days before voters go
to the polls. On both weekends, he has opted instead to remain at one of his
Delaware homes.
As I have been metaphorically shouting all autumn, this is highly
abnormal. Either Biden is too unpopular to be of any use to any Democrats other
than in a handful of races, or as he approaches his 80th birthday he doesn’t
have the stamina to handle the traditional late-campaign schedule, or both.
Recall that back in 2006, President George W. Bush was
awfully unpopular, with a job-approval rating below 40 percent. And yet, Bush
went out and held rallies with Republican candidates in then-solidly red
states such as Indiana, Georgia, Montana, Nevada, Texas, and Nebraska. Obama campaigned all over the country in 2010 and
2014, even though his approval rating was lousy, and Trump did the same in
2018.
I remind you, Biden’s absence from the campaign trail and
weekends at home was not the plan, as of a few months ago. In late August,
Biden attended a traditional-style Democratic Party rally in Rockville, Md.,
and White House officials told the New York Times that
Biden was “embracing the role as his party’s top campaigner.”
One of the few places it has been safe for President
Biden to hold something akin to a traditional rally was literally inside the Democratic National Committee’s offices
Monday. And once again, Biden stated he was seeing an imminent victory that
no one else sees.
“Whether we maintain control of the Senate and the House
is a big deal. And so far, we’re running against the tide, and we’re beating
the tide!” Biden said.
Where? Where, in this political environment,
are Democrats beating the tide? The only group who has beaten a tide this
autumn is the University of Tennessee football team.
Thankfully, Biden spared us the cliché, “The only poll
that matters is the one on Election Day.” But he insisted that the polling was
just too contradictory to be a useful measurement of the state of the electorate:
The polls have been all over the
place. First of all, if you speak to most pollsters, they’re not sure anymore —
not about the outcome, but about polling. No, I’m not being facetious. It’s
awful hard to do it these days. It’s awful hard to do it these days.
“Republicans ahead.” “Democrats ahead.” “Republicans ahead.” But it’s going to
close, I think, with seeing one more shift: “Democrats ahead” in the closing
days.
But the polls really aren’t vague or
contradictory this fall. In the generic-ballot question, Republicans have led 15 of
the last 18 public polls, and most people think Democrats need to be ahead by
three or four percentage points to keep the House. Democrats got excited when
the Politico/Morning Consult survey showed them
ahead by four percentage points, but that was a poll of registered voters, not
likely voters.
The polls aren’t just bad for Democrats; some of the
results almost look too good for Republicans.
What are we to make of a Fox/Insider Advantage poll in
Arizona that has Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake ahead of Democrat Katie Hobbs by eleven points?
(By refusing to debate, Hobbs is going to be remembered as the Martha Coakley of this election cycle —
an entitled, down-ticket state official with spectacularly bad instincts who
fumbled away a race that, on paper, she had at least a decent shot of winning.)
What are we to make of Data for Progress, a progressive
polling firm, finding Florida governor Ron DeSantis beating Charlie
Crist by twelve points? Or the University of North Florida survey finding DeSantis
ahead by 14 points?
What are we to make of the last bunch of surveys of
likely voters in Texas putting Greg Abbott ahead by nine to eleven points?
If Republicans are winning the governor’s races by
double-digit or near-double-digit margins, they will likely also enjoy sweeping
down-ticket state legislative wins in Arizona, Florida, and Texas. FiveThirtyEight noted this week that
Democrats could lose control of the state legislatures in Nevada, Maine, and
Oregon. Republicans could win complete control of state legislatures in Alaska,
North Carolina, and Wisconsin.
Speaking of Wisconsin, that Politico article
also mentioned, “Biden has voiced strong interest in seeing incumbent
Republican Ron Johnson defeated in Wisconsin.” Johnson hasn’t trailed in a poll since early September. Has
anyone told Biden how that Senate race is going for Mandela Barnes?
What is Biden being told about the outlook for Democrats
in the midterms? Back in May, he publicly predicted that Democrats would add three more Senate
seats to their current “majority” of 50 seats. This week’s confident
“We’re beating the tide!” declaration is the inverse of his nuclear
“Armageddon” warning at a Democratic fundraiser, which left the rest of the
U.S. government, including the parts assigned the vital duty of watching
Russia’s nuclear arsenal, scratching their heads and wondering what the
president was talking about.
To whom is Biden listening? To whom is he talking? What
is he reading? What is being discussed in his briefings? There’s this unnerving
pattern in which the president regularly blurts out things that seem
disconnected from reality or blatantly contradict his earlier statements.
Earlier this week, Biden did an event urging Americans to get their Covid-19 booster shots, and
his off-the-cuff remarks veered into ominous doomsaying:
As we know, this virus is
constantly changing. New variants have emerged here in the U.S. and around the
world. We’ve seen cases and hospitalizations rise in Europe in recent weeks.
Your old vaccine or your previous Covid infection will not give you maximum
protection. Let me as plain as I — let me be as plain as I can. We still have
hundreds of people dying each day from Covid in this country — hundreds. That
number is likely to rise this winter.
That stern warning about the lingering threat is very
hard to rectify with Biden’s statement from five weeks ago that, “The pandemic is over.
We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. It’s
— but the pandemic is over. if you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody
seems to be in pretty good shape.”
It’s just the continuing adventures of President Mr.
Magoo, making grandiose promises — “I’m going to shut down the virus!” “We’re
gonna cure cancer!” — and stumbling and wandering and insisting everything is
going great, you’ve never had it so good, and anything that is going wrong is
somebody else’s fault. Infant formula is easier to find than it was a few
months ago, but NPR reports this morning that the ability to find it
in stores is hit and miss, depending upon where you live. “We are nowhere close
to anywhere near being at a normal supply compared to May,” a pediatrician
lamented.
A problem emerges, Biden insists he would have to be
a mind reader to have seen the problem coming, he promises it will be solved
soon, eventually some half-measures get started, and then he and his team
forget about it and move on to the next problem. Lather, rinse, repeat.
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