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Four years later, surprisingly, the negative effects of the pandemic have been reversed. President Trump is benefiting from the blinkered idea that his presidency was a huge success due to an out-of-control virus. Biden is struggling with the long-tail effects of the pandemic, especially the role it has played in inflation. If the presidential election were held today, polls show Biden would lose a rematch with Donald Trump.
So, as he did in 2020, the incumbent president wants to center the election on President Trump and its importance in protecting the election itself.
Two polls released over the weekend highlight the challenges for Biden heading into the November election, which the incumbent president, who oversees high stock prices and low unemployment, will likely want. When asked by Siena College pollsters surveying Americans for the New York Times, multiple respondents said Biden’s policies had hurt them personally. Fewer than one in five people said Biden’s policies were helpful. Even among Democrats, many said his policies would not change much.
That wasn’t the case with Trump. Multiple people said his policies had helped them personally. Only about half of Democrats say they have been hurt by President Trump’s policies. (Seven out of 10 Republicans said they were hurt by Biden’s policies.)
A Fox News poll found similar results. Almost half of respondents said Biden’s policies are harming them and their families. Only about half of Democrats said they were being helped. Many people said President Trump’s policies helped them.
(Note: While Fox News itself is less than circumspect about its efforts to frame the political moment in favor of the right, its pollsters have a well-deserved reputation for objectivity and impartiality.)
This is necessarily an abstraction. What kind of “policy” are we talking about? It is clear that two things are involved. First, partisanship. It means that partisans are much more likely to say that their own men helped them and that other men hurt them. But secondly, we are talking about the economy and inflation. Fox News asked respondents whether they had more money in their pockets than they did a year ago. Most people (including his two-thirds of independents) said they had less.
Again, this sentiment is valid. Although wages were maintained, the rise in inflation was significant. Biden was seen as responsible, especially when gas prices skyrocketed due in part to the pandemic.
For months, the president and his team touted the success of “Bidenomics” and sought to reshape perceptions of the economic response. Opinion polls over the weekend suggest it didn’t work very well. But as the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos’ report details, the Biden campaign is focusing in a different direction anyway.
Osnos spoke with campaign adviser Mike Donilon, a longtime Biden aide.
“In 2020, [Donilon] And his campaign needed to decide whether to focus on the economy or on the more abstract idea that President Trump is endangering the very essence of America. “We’re betting on the latter, even though our own pollsters say it’s crazy to talk about the ‘soul of the nation,'” Donilon said. His experience has strengthened his belief that this year’s campaign should be centered around what he calls a “freedom agenda.” By November, he predicted, “the focus on democracy will be overwhelming.” I think the biggest image in people’s minds is of January 6th. ”
One pattern shown here is that political actors tend to extrapolate outward from small sample sizes. That means if something worked in the last election, we’ll try again. But that doesn’t mean Donilon is wrong.
Polls already show that much of Biden’s support comes not from people who are satisfied with his economic policies, but rather from people who oppose Donald Trump. In a Fox News poll, 67% of independents said they had less money in their pockets than a year ago. Even in a direct showdown with Trump, he supported Biden by 8 points. Among these voters, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump were viewed with roughly equal favorability.
If the Biden campaign can make this approach work, there are clear benefits. Placing the risk Trump poses to democracy at the center of the election means that perceptions of Biden become less important. Low support for Biden among young voters (as seen in the Times-Siena poll) may be due to their high self-identification as independents and independents’ influence on the campaign (as seen in the Fox News poll). This overlaps with the fact that I don’t pay much attention to it. Young Americans are on the left, but they don’t particularly like Biden. If the election were about Trump, the latter issue would matter less to the incumbent. If they vote.
As Donilon points out, this approach is not new. Biden focused on this issue in 2020. He raised the same issue in 2022, just before Democrats performed better than expected in the midterm elections. (The success is mainly due to Roe vs. WadeYes, but that issue also plays into the narrative that Trump is disrupting America. ) Biden has focused generally on the tension between democracy and authoritarianism since his first day in office. That’s a useful framework for a rematch between Biden and Trump.
There is certainly no guarantee that it will work.even among some people vocal Biden supporter, there is skepticism that Trump’s re-election would be a beneficial endgame scenario for the Biden campaign. But for now, it could prove useful for Biden to at least raise concerns that this might happen.
If people thought they were doing better under President Trump than Biden, they would at least realize that America itself could be far worse off if President Trump were to return to the White House. That seems to be the president’s pitch.
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