Election Countdown, 276 Days to Go: An ‘Up’ for Team Biden, with the Unknowable Ahead.
Tracing the narratives about Biden, eight so far, to see which will prevail by election day.
Results this week from Quinnipiac’s survey of registered voters nationwide. The pollsters said that this six-point margin for Biden is “outside the margin of error.” If it held up it would presumably also be outside the margin of Electoral College distortion. No one in modern times has won the Electoral College after losing the popular vote by more than 2.1%, which was how far Donald Trump trailed Hillary Clinton in 2016. (Screenshot image from ‘Morning Joe.’)
This post comes at an “up” moment for Joe Biden and his prospects, nine months before the election. It’s meant to mark that moment and chronicle what led up to it, as we navigate the unknowable ahead.
Why “up”? Yesterday’s retaliatory strikes on Iranian allies underscore how volatile that part of the world remains. No one can tell how Biden’s management of Iran—or Israel and Hamas, or Russia and Ukraine, or the PRC and Taiwan, or a dozen other war-and-tension points—will look by year’s end. This is the fate of most presidents, and it comes with the US’s world-girdling role.1
But coinciding with that uncertainty, three important factors have broken Biden’s way:
The news about the US economy has become so good that Donald Trump is trying to take credit for it. As a weightier indication, early this week Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said “This is a good situation. Let’s be honest. This is a good economy.” I have been around for a long time and don’t recall words as direct as those from Powell’s predecessors. Also, as we’ll get to in a minute, the dreaded “vibecession”—an economy that “feels” bad even if it’s technically “good”—could be receding.
Head-to-head polls, which have been heralded as showing Biden far behind Trump, have for now turned around—as with the image above. Polls are volatile, but this is a shift that Biden must welcome.
In the form of Nikki Haley, the GOP finally has someone who will play the role of the outspoken child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and mention in public Donald Trump’s emotional and cognitive decline. For Rudy Giuliani, the before-and-after moment in public standing was his appearance four years ago with melted hair dye streaming down his face. Nikki Haley is cueing to voters to see the clownishly spray-tanned Trump the same way.
So as of today, February 3, we can say that “the narrative” has turned in Biden’s favor. My point through the rest of this post is note the various Biden narratives we’ve been through till now. I’ll mention eight of them.
Stage One: No one likes Biden. Also, Biden is too old. (2021 → present.)
Starting not long after his inauguration, the go-to description of Biden in standard media accounts was as no one’s first choice. The Democrats were fractured, and unenthusiastic about him; the electorate as a whole thought his time (it if had ever come) had passed.
Just one day before the 2022 midterm elections, the New York Times devoted most of its front page to stories of how a historically unpopular Biden was about to drag his whole party down to historic defeat. Days before that, a lead front-page story in the Times had the headline: “Democrats Say Party Stumbles on Messaging: Lacking Strategy for a Case on the Economy.” In the same vein, most stories through years two and three of Biden’s term said that he was out of touch in harping on “democracy” and “reproductive rights” in his speeches, and had no idea of how to talk about the economy. Moments after the polls closed on the East Coast in the 2022 midterms, the first edition of the NYT had an across-the-front-page banner headline saying “GOP Collects Early Win in Pivotal Vote.” Its lead story announced that Republicans “were making inroads deep into territory” that Biden had previously won.
As it turned out, of course, the Democrats, behind Biden, scored a historic mid-term success.2
The same reporters, pollsters, and analysts moved on unfazed. Last fall the very same reporter who pre-wrote the story of a Democratic rout in the midterms had a news-rather-than-opinion story about Biden’s “suffering from enormous doubts about his age and deep dissatisfaction about his handling of the economy.” His article accompanied a poll suggesting that Trump was ahead of Biden in all the important swing states:
In short: the appositive phrases for Biden in much of the media until recently have been “Joe Biden, historically unpopular in the polls,” or “Joe Biden, with record-low public support.” Could these turn out to be true? Of course. But so far the media have placed nearly all their bets on one side.
Stage Two: Inflation will doom Biden. (2021 → about three days ago).
Browse through the news clips of Biden’s first two-plus years in office, and you’ll see more stories about inflation than just about anything else. Prices at the pump! Egg-flation! It’s all Biden’s fault. And if you think inflation might finally be going down—well think again!
Now all the trends are pointing the other way, and the inflation stories are thinning out. I haven’t seen a TV report from a gas station or the egg section of a grocery store in quite a while.
Biden himself doesn’t want to say much about inflation, since any claim would have to begin, “Prices are still higher than we’d like, and I know families are feeling the pain. And yet….” But the news organizations that talked so much about the problem might note what has happened since.
Stage Three: OK, the Biden economy might be ‘good.’ But it still ‘feels’ bad. And that will doom him. (2021 → ten days ago.)
Someone looking back on our times will write a book about the “feels” theme.
The job market is stronger than in most Americans’ lifetimes. Inflation is going down. The wage-share for lower-income workers is going up. Most measures of economic inequality are finally improving. Unions are starting to recover from decades-long decline. Although the Biden administration would rather not trumpet this fact, the US is now producing more oil than ever, and more than any other country. No other country on Earth has staged an economic recovery from the pandemic to rival that of the US.
But as the press has ceaselessly reminded us, it “feels” bad. I am sorry that my parents, who grew up during the Depression and started their family in a tiny rented flat after what they went through during World War II, are not around to share how the economy “felt” back then.3
Stage Four: Urban crime ‘feels like’ it is up. And that will doom Biden. (2021 → a month or two ago.)
Urban crime is down. The scare stories about roving gangs pillaging retail stores were false.
But thanks to Fox and the GOP, these crime wave stories “felt” true. Just like the idea of Portland, Oregon, as the new Mogadishu.
I keep watching Fox, for the same reason that in my piloting life I watch the long-term weather. It’s how you know what’s ahead. Six months ago, rampant street crime was Fox’s bread-and-butter. For now they’ve eased off.
Stage Five: Hunter Biden will doom Biden. (Ongoing.)
Sigh.
This remains an issue within the Fox/Bannon hot-house. But so far it’s proving to be a counterpart to the Benghazi hearings with the general public. Not even DeSantis or Ramaswamy thought it would really pay off on the campaign trail.
Stage Six: The combo menace, ‘Woke’ and DEI, will doom Biden. (Woke: 2021 → end of DeSantis campaign. DEI ongoing.)
Ron DeSantis told us that Florida was “where woke goes to die.” This died as a campaign theme in sync with his own doomed effort.
DEI is the latest name for America’s oldest struggle. Every Democratic candidate since Harry Truman has been criticized for his own era’s version of DEI.
Stage Seven: “Biden’s Wars.” (February 2022 → ongoing.)
OK, now we move into more difficult terrain. These are presidential-scale and world-strategic challenges, and they’re genuinely hard—even more than engineering an economic “soft landing.”