Is the Biden Coalition Really Breaking Apart?

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, May 09, 2023

 

Joe Biden is the first president in over a decade to serve in the Oval Office without the benefit of a cult of personality around him — the cloying, strained, and ultimately aborted efforts to make “Dark Brandon” a thing notwithstanding. For the country, that’s no loss. Biden’s relative charisma deficit has restored to its proper place the transactional interdependence between a public servant and the public he serves. For Biden, though, that’s cold comfort. If the president cannot hold up his end of the bargain, his value to his constituents is spent.

 

The value proposition Joe Biden’s presidency represents varies depending on the constituency to whom he is appealing. He’s a bridge to the next generation of Democrats. Well, the Democratic farm team’s bench is looking mighty thin these days, and Biden himself seems to believe that his party’s progeny isn’t ready to take the reins. He’s a dealmaker who can get things done. Biden has delivered the goods on some fronts, but not nearly what he promised — sapping the already overhyped importance of bipartisan legislation on climate, guns, and infrastructure significance and disappointing his more naïve constituents. Maybe most critically to the Biden brand, he’s a winner — the insurmountable obstacle before the Trumpified Republican Party’s resurgence. Recent polling has called even this mantle of success into question.

 

The argument that presumes Joe Biden’s electability has become something of a tautology: He can win the election, so we must vote for him. But the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll has called even this assumption into question. The president’s job-approval rating is in the basement at just 36 percent. Americans don’t think he has the “mental sharpness” or physical fitness to be president. A majority of Americans and nearly half of Democrats want him to abjure his party’s nomination. The public thinks Donald Trump did a better job managing the economy. Hypothetical head-to-head matchups with Trump and Ron DeSantis show them both handily defeating the incumbent president.

 

Although it’s not the first recent poll to show the national political landscape turning against Joe Biden, the Post-ABC survey has produced some of the most vocal bouts of trepidation among Democratic partisans.

 

“The data has left many Democrats feeling anywhere from queasy to alarmed,” New York Times analyst Peter Baker observed. “It’s sobering in the sense that the coalition that elected Joe Biden, with the historic numbers that we saw in 2020, that coalition right now is fragmented,” former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile confessed. Even prior to the release of this bombshell survey, Democratic political professionals were reaching for their smelling salts. “It’s bad,” one party strategist told reporters from the Hill in April. “The problem is simple. The American people have lost confidence in him.”

 

To a certain degree, however, Democratic dissatisfaction with Joe Biden’s polling has become a self-reinforcing phenomenon. Citing Ron DeSantis pollster Chris Wilson’s analysis, center-left columnist Ed Kilgore observes that some of the numbers giving Democrats agita are unlikely to obtain on Election Day 2024. Will Biden win Hispanic voters by single digits even when Trump lost this demographic by over 20 points in 2020 despite the GOP’s gains? Will only eight-in-ten Democrats be able to bring themselves to cast a ballot for Biden after a grueling, year-long general-election campaign? Will Joe Biden lose the youngest voters in America by eleven points to Trump? The Post-ABC survey does show the Biden coalition fragmenting — to a degree that is hard to believe.

 

The head-to-head polling that has Democrats wringing their hands also deserves a closer look. In the Post-ABC survey, Donald Trump is winning 45 percent of the vote share to Biden’s 39 percent, but Joe Biden will win more votes than that. Donald Trump, however, tends to hover in that range (46.1 percent of the popular vote in 2016, and 46.8 in 2020). DeSantis has never been tested on the national stage, but he draws, on average, a higher vote share than Trump does. Nevertheless, no national survey at this early stage has shown him attracting the support of more than 48 percent of registered voters.

 

Electability myths are fickle things. They can appear formidable until they are exposed as hollow, only for them to reemerge as unassailable arguments in a candidate’s favor upon victory. Joe Biden has lived through enough political ups and downs to take a solemn view of his present conundrum. After all, the prognosis on even the last campaign he ran — the one that won him the White House — was once unsparingly bleak.

 

When Biden turned in underwhelming performances in Iowa and New Hampshire — two contests in which white progressives dominated the Democratic primary vote — his campaign was placed on life support in the Washington press, which is predominated by the same demographic.

 

“What becomes of the ‘electability candidate’ when he starts to lose?” the Washington Post asked, observing a “surreal” disconnect between Biden’s presumed strength and his stumbles on the campaign trail. Joe Biden “is worse than unelectable,” the writer Molly Jong-Fast proclaimed. He is a “spoiler,” drawing would-be saviors like Michael Bloomberg into the race and foreclosing on the prospect that Democrats could coalesce early around an alternative nominee. Two professors of political science writing for the Post insisted that defeat would beget more defeats, particularly in South Carolina where the black Democratic vote was presumably “up for grabs.” They presumed that the case progressives made against Biden’s record on criminal justice and his handling of Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination might, in fact, scuttle his bid.

 

Biden’s stumbles proved no obstacle to his campaign’s resurrection. He was neither “unelectable” nor a “spoiler.” The myopic fixations upon which progressives dwell washed over the African Americans in South Carolina, where he won almost two-thirds of the black vote. Democrats coalesced, and Joe Biden won the White House.

 

Republicans should try to avoid the temptation to believe that the doldrums in which Biden languishes today will still prevail in 18 months. Absent a crippling recession, an all-consuming scandal, or a prolonged national crisis, an incumbent president is a hardened target. Those conditions may materialize, but only a fool would bet on their inevitability. Moreover, Democrats are certain to rationalize themselves into an enthusiastic state by the end of the general-election cycle, and the GOP will have to campaign hard and smart to overcome the Democratic Party’s demonstrable strengths.