Earlier in the week, we highlighted new polling data showing red-flag-level softness in President Biden's support among key components of his 2020 victory coalition. As we noted, the USA Today/Suffolk survey wasn't an outlier in this regard, as similar data has been raising fears among Democrat-aligned strategists and journalists for months. Biden is seriously underperforming among black voters and young voters at the moment. He's also losing independents to Trump in a lot of recent polling, a group that was central to his victory last presidential cycle. His campaign and defenders may be downplaying the depth of his vulnerability in public, but their actions indicate that they realize they have real problems in all three areas. Look how they're tailoring the president's calendar, rhetoric, and agenda:
(1) Hello, black voters:
President Joe Biden is headed to Charleston, South Carolina, next week to visit Mother Emanuel AME Church in the latest signal of a campaign eager to shore up its standing with Black voters. It will be the president’s first trip to the storied church since he was vice president. Biden is expected to speak at the church, his campaign told reporters on Tuesday evening. It is one of the oldest Black churches in the South and the site where nine parishioners were shot and killed by a white supremacist in 2015. “Because whether it is white supremacists descending on a historic American city of Charlottesville, the assault on our nation’s capital on Jan. 6, or white supremacists murdering churchgoers at Mother Emanuel nearly nine years ago, America is worried about the rise in political violence and determined to stand against it,” principal deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said in a call with reporters.
(2) Hello, young voters:
My Administration has cancelled student debt for 3.6 million people through various actions, bringing the promise of higher education to more hardworking Americans.
— President Biden (@POTUS) January 2, 2024
And we’re going to keep going.
They don't care if it's regressive, unfair, inflationary, and illegal. They think it's good politics for revving up a specific, targeted group of heavily-Democratic voters who are generally ambivalent on Biden.
(3) Hello, moderates and independents:
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President Joe Biden will enter full campaign mode when he returns from his St. Croix vacation, including hosting events on Saturday, Jan. 6, in which campaign officials say he will specifically outline former President Donald Trump's plans to "dismantle and destroy our democracy." The president ended 2023 by slowly shifting his core campaign focus away from "Bidenomics," the summation of his economic policies, and back toward Trump. Democratic lawmakers and activists had pressured him for the better part of the year to revisit his winning 2020 campaign formula, where he framed that election as a choice between good and evil. Biden's first foray back to the campaign trail will come Saturday, the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, in a speech delivered near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, "the same spot where nearly 250 years ago, our nation's forefathers transformed a disorganized alliance of colonial militias to a cohesive coalition united in their fight for our democracy," Quinton Fulks, Biden campaign principal manager, said Tuesday evening.
Biden and his party leaned hard into this narrative in the midterms, and did historically well under the circumstances, especially against particularly Trump-loyal Republicans in competitive races. The incumbent is in some trouble as things stand, including among demographics he'll rely on to win again. His campaign is responding accordingly. Whether this festival of obvious pandering works, and distracts people from Biden's dismal record, remains to be seen. And since I mentioned Biden's issues with black voters at the top, I'll leave you with this:
The co-host of the influential “Breakfast Club” radio show said Biden and others in his circle spend too much time posturing. Instead of thinking of better ways to play up policy achievements, he argues, Democrats rely too much on depicting former President Donald Trump as a crook...increasingly, Charlamagne’s appraisal of the Biden administration has been sour. While he anguishes at the thought of a 2020 rematch, the radio personality gives Trump props for commanding attention and selling his ideas...Charlamagne doesn’t consider himself a Democrat or a Republican — a position he says allows him to call bullshit on empty campaign rhetoric politicians spew when they decide it’s time to engage Black audiences to wrangle up votes. “In 2024, it’s a race between the cowards, the crooks and the couch,” he said, referring to Biden, Trump and the option to stay home. Charlamagne suspects the couch will win...
Reluctantly, Charlamagne did something he said he rarely does — he endorsed Biden’s 2020 presidential bid. Not because he was enamored by the promise of what Biden was selling, but because he selected Kamala Harris as his vice president. While she was a candidate for the Democratic nomination, she and the radio personality, eager to leave behind his shock jock persona, had forged a mutual friendship. That too seems a bit distant now. After more than three years of Biden in office, Charlamagne openly questions his endorsement...“I’ve learned my lesson from doing that,” he said. “Once they got in the White House, [Harris] … kind of disappeared.” He suspects neither Biden nor Harris will make a return to “The Breakfast Club” this cycle. Charlamagne knows his word holds weight with his audience. “When I give people my word like: ‘Yo man, I think we should be supporting Kamala Harris for vice president … because she’s going to hold it down.’ When we say those things and people don’t see her holding it down, that causes issues,” he said. He says he still gets blowback from it. “‘Damn, you told us to vote for [them].’ Do you know how many people say that to me all the time?”
Not especially encouraging at all for Bidenworld, is it? As I mentioned in my previous analysis, if this man is right about 'the couch' winning, Biden could very well be a one-termer.
