Democrats Need To Take A Pill And Calm Down
Biden is losing right now. The special counsel report is bad. But the bomb can be defused.
In 2021, a guy was driving through my small town and struck a pedestrian in a crosswalk. The pedestrian was thrown across the intersection. The driver got out of his car, observed the scene, and knew instantly that the pedestrian was dead. The driver promptly got back into his car, pulled a gun out of his glove compartment, and blew his brains out. Moments later, the pedestrian stood up. They were injured and had some broken bones, but they were alive. The driver, on the other hand, was very dead.
The moral of this story is that you shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Always check for a pulse!
This is a post about Joe Biden’s reelection campaign.
Yesterday, Matt Yglesias published a smart post that I basically agree with, which argued that Biden is losing the election. If it were held today, Trump would win straight out, no shenanigans, fair and square. I started writing a post making the case for why, though I agree with that, I still think Biden is slightly more likely than not to win in November. It boiled down to the fact that the election is not today, and there are lots of reasons to think Biden’s support is going to improve over the next 9 months. Virtually none of those reasons had anything to do with Biden himself. The swing voters that Biden needs to recapture have, for the most part, consistently been turned off by Donald Trump the more they are exposed to him. They have not been exposed to him as much in the last few years as they had the previous five. It’s not like he’s hiding in a Unabomber shack in Montana, but he is sort of hiding in a Unabomber shack on Truth Social. The media largely does not give him the airtime they gave him during the 2016 campaign and his presidency. They talk about him a lot! But he doesn’t get to speak directly to their audiences.
People don’t like “the media” because “the media” generally, if not individually, are self-righteous condescending deviants, and their opinions about Trump—though shared by many—are priced in. They can write the best columns and give the best direct-to-camera speeches in the world about how Trump is bad, but it won’t accomplish much since everyone knows how they feel about him.
(This is not to say that journalism isn’t important! If there is some reporting into new facts, that could be meaningful! I’m talking about words and style and emphasis and stuff like that. That is the stuff that means mostly nothing.)
The only thing that Trump can’t spin is himself. When he goes on television and rambles about how people should shoot bleach into their eyeballs, people recoil. When he used to use a social media platform that was not solely populated by his supporters, people recoiled. None of that has basically happened for 3 years.
Fortunately for Democrats, Trump has a little voice in his head that is constantly saying, “strip naked and run through the outfield at Yankee Stadium!” He has only been out of the spotlight because liberals bullied the “oh no, what have I done” narcissistic cowards in the media and Silicon Valley into saving him from himself by de-platforming and mediating him.
But that is probably about to change. We are entering the general election, and voters will be confronted more with his presence. Nothing that has happened since 2015 suggests that will help him with anyone other than GOP primary voters.
Another liability for Trump that must be disclosed is all of these trials. The indictments have not hurt him politically. In fact, among Republicans, they triggered a rally around the leader effect. A fair number of people who tell pollsters that today they would vote for Trump also claim that they would not vote for him should he be convicted by a jury of a felony. I am somewhat suspicious of that claim. In general, our brains are pretty good at coming up with justifications for sticking to our guns. But it’s not completely impossible to imagine that it would be a political problem for him should he be convicted. I wouldn’t count on convictions having an effect—I also wouldn’t count on him being convicted or even going to trial before the election—but you can’t completely discount the possibility.
Still, it is his track record of repelling swing voters with his personality that is my main reason for thinking Biden’s support will rise between now and November.
OK, so that is the post I was planning on writing yesterday. Then things changed
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