The Imperative to Reduce the Chances of a Trump Victory
Top Trump strategists are very eager for their candidate to run against
Joe Biden. They’re now worried that the Democratic Party might end up
with a different standard bearer.
Days ago, The Atlantic
published
journalist Tim Alberta’s in-depth examination of the Trump campaign’s
strategic approach. “Everything they have been doing, the targeting
that they have been doing of voters, the advertisements that they’re
cutting, the fund-raising ploys that they’re making, the viral Internet
videos that they have been churning out, they’re all designed around
Joe Biden,” Alberta
told
the PBS NewsHour.
“So if suddenly he were replaced at the top of the ticket,” he added,
“I think in many ways it’s back to square one for the Trump campaign.
They recognize this. And I think they’re deeply unnerved by the
possibility of a switcheroo at the top of the Democratic ticket.”
Last weekend, the Washington Post
put it this way
: “As Democrats debate the future of Biden’s reelection bid,
Republicans would prefer he stay in a race they believe they are
already winning.”
On Sunday, Face the Nation
reported
“top Democratic sources believe that Democrats who had thoughts about
challenging President Biden are now standing down ‘because of this
fragile political moment.’” Yet a guest on the same CBS program,
Democratic Rep. Jason Crow,
warned
of a “high risk” that his party will lose the election “unless there is
a major change.” He
said
that messaging from Biden’s campaign “is not effectively breaking
through.”
While Biden boosters like to talk about national polling that sometimes
puts Biden within a couple of points of Trump, such surveys mean
little. Due to the Electoral College, the swing states will determine
the winner. Biden is behind -- and
falling further behind
in most of them. Arizona, Georgia and Nevada have moved
from “toss up” states to “lean Republican”
according to the Cook Political Report.
And with an
approval rating
that now hovers around an abysmal 37 percent, Biden is increasingly
playing defense in states he won easily four years ago.
“Democrats’ concerns about Biden’s ability to win are expanding beyond
this cycle’s predetermined battlegrounds into states that long ago
turned blue in presidential elections,” Politico
reported
last week, in an article raising doubts about Biden’s prospects in New
Hampshire, Maine, New Mexico and Minnesota. The headline: “Dems Are
Freaking Out About Biden Even in Once Safely Blue States.”
Around the country, Democratic candidates are running well ahead of
Biden. Last week, the Economist/YouGov poll
found
that “96 percent of registered Democrats say they will vote for a
Democratic House candidate in the fall, compared with 85 percent who
plan to vote for Biden.”
Biden’s presence at the top of the ticket promises to not only deliver
the White House to Trump but also the House and Senate to Republicans.
In the light of such realities less than four months before Election
Day, it’s alarming to hear many elected Democrats -- including some
progressives in Congress -- publicly claim that Biden is just fine as
the party’s nominee.
The happy-talk denialism from those congressional progressives shows a
disconnect from the progressive grassroots. Many activists who devoted
months of their lives on behalf of Biden in 2020 to
vote Trump out
are disaffected from Biden in 2024. Many are furious over Biden’s
nonstop support of Israel during its continuous slaughter of civilians
in Gaza. That includes Arab-American and Muslim
activists
and
groups
who mobilized for Biden
four years ago
against his Islamophobic opponent. Many
climate activists
who fought for Biden in 2020 against the “drill, baby, drill” Trump are
disgusted with
his reversals on climate policy
.
So, the depressing poll numbers may understate the problem for Biden as
the Democratic nominee, because they don’t count the gap in campaign
volunteer energy -- especially in contrast with the highly energized
MAGA base. Early this year, an anonymous letter from 17
Biden 2024 campaign staffers
urged Biden to reverse himself on Gaza and seek an immediate ceasefire:
“Biden for President staff have seen volunteers quit in droves, and
people who have voted blue for decades feel uncertain about doing so for
the first time ever.”
In 2017, the Trump presidency was properly mocked for its brazen
assertions of
“alternative
facts.” It’s now disconcerting that Biden and his advocates so
often lapse into puffery as to his true political situation.
That situation was laid out with chilling candor in a detailed
New York Times
piece
by longtime Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, who was a senior adviser
to President Bill Clinton and has advised dozens of governors and
senators. The article makes for grim reading: “President Biden has
spent much of 2024 with a more challenging path to winning a second
presidential term in November than Donald Trump. But for reasons that
have become glaringly obvious, that path has all but vanished.”
Biden “not only faces losing battleground states he won in 2020,”
Sosnik wrote, “he is also at risk of losing traditional Democratic
states like Minnesota and New Hampshire, which Hillary Clinton and
Barack Obama carried. If current trends continue, Mr. Trump could rack
up one of the most decisive presidential victories since 2008.”
But so many Democrats in Congress are refusing to call for Biden to
step aside. And a lot of them are even cheering him on, encouraging his
intransigence, as though nothing is amiss.
Until the Democratic Party officially nominates its presidential
candidate, the
push for Biden to withdraw
from the ticket should continue.
_____________________________
Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive
director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many
books including War Made Easy. His latest book,
War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its
Military Machine
, was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.
Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism
professor at Ithaca College, and author of
Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media
. In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.
https://www.politico.com/dims4/default/7c09a34/2147483647/resize/1160x%3E/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F51%2F5c%2F132622ee4563ae7f809dd0a67a22%2Fwu240701-1160.jpg
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