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Tag: Democrats’ best bet

  • Can Biden Begin a Reset Tonight?

    Can Biden Begin a Reset Tonight?

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    As President Joe Biden prepares to deliver his State of the Union address tonight, his pathways to reelection are narrowing. His best remaining option, despite all of the concerns about his age, may be to persuade voters to look forward, not back.

    In his now-certain rematch against former President Donald Trump, Biden has three broad possibilities for framing the contest to voters. One is to present the race as a referendum on Biden’s performance during his four years in office. The second is to structure it as a comparison between his four years and Trump’s four years as president. The third is to offer it as a choice between what he and Trump would do over the next four years in the White House.

    The referendum route already looks like a dead end for Biden. The comparison path remains difficult terrain for him, given that voters now express more satisfaction with Trump’s performance as president than they ever did while he was in office. The third option probably offers Biden the best chance to recover from his consistent deficit to Trump in polls.

    Read: Biden is still the Democrats’ best bet for November

    Political scientists agree: Every presidential reelection campaign combines elements of a backward-looking referendum on the incumbent and a forward-looking choice between the incumbent and the challenger.

    But on balance, the referendum element of presidential reelection campaigns has appeared to influence the outcome the most. Since modern polling began, the presidents whose approval ratings stood well above 50 percent in Gallup surveys through the election year (including Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton) all won a second term comfortably. Conversely, the presidents whose approval ratings fell well below 50 percent in election-year Gallup polls all lost their reelection bids: Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Trump.

    That history isn’t encouraging for Biden. His approval rating in a wide array of national polls has been stuck at about 40 percent or less. What’s more, most voters are returning intensely negative verdicts on specific elements of Biden’s record. In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, released last weekend, just 20 percent of Americans said Biden’s policies had helped them personally; more than twice as many said his policies had hurt them. In the lastest Fox News poll, about three-fifths of Americans said Biden had mostly failed at helping working-class Americans, handling the economy, and improving America’s image around the world, while about seven in 10 said he had failed at managing security at the border.

    In the past, such withering judgments almost certainly would have ensured defeat for an incumbent president, and if Biden loses in November, analysts may conclude that he simply failed a referendum on his performance.

    But Democrats, and even some Republicans, see more opportunity for Biden than previous presidents to surmount negative grades about his tenure.

    One reason is that in an era when distrust of political leaders and institutions is so endemic, officeholders are winning reelection with approval ratings much lower than in earlier generations, pollsters in both parties told me. The other reason is that the intense passions provoked by Trump may make this year less of a referendum and more of a choice than is typical in reelection campaigns.

    The choice, though, has unusual dimensions that complicate Biden’s situation, including an especially concrete element of comparison: Trump was president so recently that most voters still have strong impressions about his performance. For Biden, comparing his four years to Trump’s represents the second broad way to frame the election. But at this point, that doesn’t look like a winning hand for the incumbent either.

    One of the scariest trends for Democrats is that retrospective assessments of Trump’s performance are rising, perhaps in reaction to voter discontent over Biden’s record. Nearly half of voters in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal national poll said they now approve of Trump’s performance as president—10 percentage points more than those who said the same about Biden’s current performance.

    Trump has made clear that he wants voters to view the contest mostly as a comparison between his time in office and Biden’s. “We had everything going so beautifully,” Trump declared in his victory speech after the Super Tuesday primaries. “Joe Biden, if he would have just left everything alone, he could have gone to the beach. He would have had a tremendous success at the border and elsewhere.”

    Facing these dismal reviews in polls of his job performance, and the tendency among many voters to view Trump’s record more favorably than his, Biden naturally will be tempted in tonight’s State of the Union to emphasize all that he has accomplished. And he has many positive trends that he can highlight.

    Yet every Democratic strategist I spoke with in recent days agreed that Biden would be mistaken to spend too much time trying to burnish perceptions of his record. “The challenge for Biden is his inclination to want credit and claim credit and talk about the greatest economy in 50 years or whatever,” David Axelrod, who served as the top political adviser to Barack Obama during his presidency, told me. “You have to resist that.”

    The veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg reacts as if he hears nails on a chalkboard whenever Biden stresses positive trends in the economy. That emphasis, he argues, is “missing how angry voters are,” particularly over the cumulative increase in prices for essentials such as groceries and rent since Biden took office. Greenberg told me, “That defines the economy for people, and they are angry at the huge inequality, the big monopolies that are profiteering. They are also angry about what’s happening with crime, and they are angry now with the border.” To tout other accomplishments against that backdrop, Greenberg said, makes Biden look out of touch.

    Patrick Gaspard, the CEO of the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank, says that although Biden may want to accentuate the positive, it is more important for him to acknowledge the frustration that so many Americans feel about their “lived experience with inflation and immigration.” “You can’t just race ahead with your policy prescriptions without people feeling that you actually get it and telling them that they are right to feel the way they do,” he told me.

    Gaspard, Axelrod, and Greenberg each said they believed that Biden, rather than looking back, must shift the economic argument as much as possible toward what he and Trump would do if returned to power. That’s Biden’s third broad option for framing the race. “I don’t think you want to argue about whether you are better off in those [Trump] years or these years,” Axelrod told me. “You want to argue about who will help you be better off in the future, and what you have to do to make people better off in the future.”

    That future-oriented frame, all three said, will allow Biden to highlight more effectively his legislative achievements not as proof of how much he has accomplished for Americans but as evidence that he’s committed in a second term to fighting for average families against powerful interests.

    Biden has already been portraying himself in that populist mode, with his regulatory moves against “junk fees” and surprise medical bills, and the ongoing negotiations by Medicare with big pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices for seniors. “President Biden took on drug companies to get a better deal for the American people, and he won,” Neera Tanden, the chief White House domestic policy adviser told reporters yesterday, in a preview of what will likely be a common refrain through the campaign.

    Greenberg believes that the president needs to drastically amplify the volume on this argument: He says that Democratic base voters expressing discontent over Biden are eager to hear him take on “the top one percent, the big companies, the monopolies that have price gouged, [made] huge profits at your expense, didn’t raise your wages, didn’t cut prices.” Greenberg, like many other Democrats, also thinks Biden’s best chance to narrow Trump’s advantage on the economy is to portray him as most concerned about serving the same powerful interests that voters are angry about.

    Yet the viewpoint of many, Black and Latino voters included, that they were better off under Trump could blunt the impact of those Democratic arguments. Many voters may not mind that Trump’s presidency delivered the greatest rewards to the affluent and corporations if they feel that they also benefited more from his tenure than they have under Biden. With inflation still weighing so heavily on voters living paycheck to paycheck, “they blame [Biden] for the problem in the first place, and they don’t think his solutions help the situation,” Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump, told me.

    Democrats view the rising retrospective ratings for Trump’s presidency as a sign that many voters are forgetting what they didn’t like about it at the time, whether his belligerent tweets or his role in the January 6 insurrection. With those memories fading, fewer voters in polls are expressing alarm about the dangers a reelected Trump could pose to democracy and the rule of law as Democrats hoped or expected.

    “This is one of the existential narratives of the campaign: How do we make people really fear his second term?” Leslie Dach, a veteran Democratic communications strategist, told me. “People aren’t focused. They are still in the denial phase. They think, Oh, he’s just a showman.”

    A survey of swing voters released earlier this week by Save My Country Action Fund, a group that Dach co-founded, quantified that challenge. The survey found that less than one-third of swing voters in key states had heard much about Trump’s most inflammatory recent statements, such as his declaration that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country and his pledge to pardon some of the January 6 rioters. Extreme comments like those, Dach argues, provide Democrats with an opportunity to refresh voters’ concerns that a second Trump term will bring chaos, division, and even violence.

    “He has created an extraordinary body of evidence that he will be more extreme and more dangerous in a second term than he was in the first, and he keeps refreshing the body of evidence every day,” Geoff Garin, who conducted the poll, told me.

    Read: The Americans who need chaos

    Abortion may offer Biden similar opportunities. In the new CBS/YouGov poll, just one-third of voters said Trump deserved blame for the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision rescinding the nationwide right to abortion, even though he’s claimed credit for appointing the three justices who tipped the balance. If Biden and his allies can increase the share who blame Trump, they will likely make voters more concerned that a reelected Trump would seek to ban abortion nationwide. Climate could serve the same function for young people: A survey of battleground states released yesterday by the advocacy group Climate Power found that “when people are reminded about Trump’s [climate] record, they become more concerned about what he will do” if reelected, Christina Polizzi, the group’s deputy managing director for communications, told me.

    Though a race focused more on the future than the past might improve Biden’s prospects, it wouldn’t offer him guarantees. Voters’ judgments about what the two men will do are influenced by their assessments of what they have done; significantly more voters in the CBS/YouGov poll, for instance, said that Trump’s policies going forward were more likely than Biden’s to improve both inflation and border security. And a forward-looking race also forces voters to consider which man they believe is physically more capable of handling the job for the next four years.

    In the 2022 election, Democrats won an unprecedented number of voters with negative views of Biden’s performance and the economy because those voters considered the Republican alternatives a threat to their rights, values, and democracy itself. That dynamic may work for Biden again—but only to a point: There’s a limit to how many voters disappointed in an incumbent president will vote for him anyway because they consider the alternative unacceptable. If Biden, starting tonight, can’t generate at least some additional hope about what his own second term would bring, fear about a second Trump term may not be enough to save him.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Closing This Gap May Be Biden’s Key to a Second Term

    Closing This Gap May Be Biden’s Key to a Second Term

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    Just since last November, the most closely watched measure of consumer confidence about the economy has soared by about 25 percent. That’s among the most rapid improvements recorded in years for the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, even after a slight decline in the latest figures released yesterday.

    And yet, even as consumer confidence has rebounded since last fall, President Joe Biden’s approval rating has remained virtually unchanged—and negative. Now, as then, a solid 55 percent majority of Americans say they disapprove of his performance as president in the index maintained by FiveThirtyEight, while only about 40 percent approve.

    That divergence between improving attitudes about the economy and stubbornly negative assessments of the president’s performance is compounding the unease of Democratic strategists as they contemplate the impending rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump. Most Democratic strategists I spoke with believe that brightening views about the economy could still benefit Biden. But many also acknowledge that each month that passes without improvement for Biden raises more questions about whether even growing economic optimism will overcome voters’ doubts about him on other fronts.

    Read: The real reason Trump loves Putin

    Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser to Bill Clinton during his 1996 reelection, told me that if he was in the White House again today, “I would say I’m not that concerned” about improving economic attitudes not lifting Biden yet, “because this takes time.” But, Sosnik added, “if you come back to me in six weeks or two months and we haven’t seen any movement, then I’d start becoming very concerned.”

    Historically, measures of consumer confidence have been a revealing gauge of an incumbent president’s reelection chances. Presidents Ronald Reagan, Clinton, and Barack Obama, as I’ve written, all saw their job-approval ratings tumble when consumer confidence fell early in their first terms amid widespread unease over the economy. But when the economy revived and consumer confidence improved later in their term, each man’s approval rating rose with it. Riding the wave of those improving attitudes, all three won their reelection campaigns, Reagan in a historic 49-state landslide.

    By contrast, when Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush lost their reelection bids, declining or stagnant consumer confidence was an early augur of their eventual defeat. Collapsing consumer confidence amid the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 also foreshadowed Trump’s defeat, after sustained optimism about the economy had been one of his greatest political strengths during his first three years.

    Read: Biden Is still the Democrats’ best bet for November

    Polling leaves little doubt that since last fall, more Americans are starting to feel better about the economy. An index of economic attitudes compiled by the Gallup Organization recently reached its highest level since September 2021. Even after the small retreat in the latest numbers, the University of Michigan’s index is now at its highest level since the summer of 2021. A separate consumer-confidence survey conducted by the Conference Board, a business group, also slipped slightly in February but remains higher than its level last fall.

    None of this, though, has yet generated any discernible improvement in Biden’s standing with the public. In fact, the recent Gallup Poll that documented the rise in economic optimism since last October found that Biden’s approval rating over the same period had fallen, from 41 to 38 percent—a single percentage point above the lowest mark Gallup has ever measured for him. The fact that consumer confidence has revived without elevating Biden’s ratings suggests “that impressions of his economic handling have been set and will likely be hard to change as he faces other struggles with perceptions of age and capacity,” the Republican pollster Micah Roberts told me.

    Paul Kellstedt, a political scientist at Texas A&M University, told me that two big structural shifts in public opinion help explain why Biden has not benefited more so far from these green shoots of optimism.

    One, Kellstedt said, is that the relationship is weakening between objective economic trends and consumer confidence. Compared with the days of Reagan or Clinton, more voters in both parties are reluctant to describe even a booming economy in positive terms when the other party holds the White House, Kellstedt noted. Given Biden’s record of overall economic growth and job creation, as well as the dramatic rise in the stock market, the consumer-confidence numbers, though improving, are still lower “than they should be based on objective fundamentals,” he told me.

    Still, optimism about the economy has increased since last fall, not only among Democrats but also among independents and even Republicans, trends that have lifted previous presidents. That points to what Kellstedt calls the second structural challenge facing Biden: The relationship between voters’ attitudes about the economy and their judgments about the president is also weakening.

    Amid these new patterns in public opinion, “a strengthening economy is not going to hurt Biden, of course, but how much it is going to help him is quite uncertain,” Kellstedt told me.

    Political strategists in both parties believe another central reason Biden isn’t benefiting more from the many positive economic trends under his presidency is that so many Americans remain scarred by the biggest exception: the highest inflation in four decades. Although costs aren’t rising nearly as fast as they were earlier in Biden’s presidency, for many essentials, such as food and rent, prices remain much higher than when he took office.

    Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who also surveys economic attitudes for CNBC, told me that more than anything else, “what is holding back” Biden from rising is that “it is still well within your memory when you were spending at the grocery store 10 to 20 percent less than you are now.”

    Republicans see a related factor constraining Biden’s potential gains: The baseline that voters are comparing him against is not in the distant past, but what they remember from the Trump presidency before the pandemic. Even though the University of Michigan’s consumer-confidence index and Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index have improved substantially since last year, for instance, in absolute terms they still stand well below their levels during Trump’s first three years. “There’s an alternative economic approach that voters can remember and compare to the years under Bidenomics,” Roberts told me. Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s 2024 campaign, told me voters don’t credit Biden for moderating inflation largely because they blame him for causing it in the first place.

    A silver lining in all this for Biden is that, as Kellstedt noted, voters’ judgments about which candidate can better manage the economy don’t determine their preferences in the presidential race as much as they once did. Today, as I’ve written over the years, the two political coalitions are held together more by shared cultural values than by common economic interests.

    As recently as the 2022 election, Democratic House candidates not only carried the small share of voters who described the economy as good, but also won more than three-fifths of the much larger group who called it only fair, according to exit polls. That was primarily because a historically large number of voters down on the economy, and Biden’s performance, nonetheless rejected Republican candidates whom they viewed as a threat to their rights (particularly on abortion), their values, and democracy itself. That same dynamic will undoubtedly help Biden in 2024, particularly among upper-middle-class voters who have felt less strain over inflation, are most likely to be benefiting from the stock market’s surge, and are the most receptive to Democratic charges that Trump will threaten democracy and their personal freedoms.

    But Biden also has plenty of his own vulnerabilities on noneconomic issues. Not only Republicans but also independents give him dismal ratings for his handling of immigration and the border. His expansive support of Israel’s war against Hamas has deeply divided the Democratic coalition. And a broad consensus of voters, now often about 80 percent or more in polls, worry that Biden is too old for another term. If attitudes about the economy continue to mend, and Biden’s approval remains mired, “the stories that will be written is that voters have tuned him out, they’ve made their minds up, he’s too old,” Sosnik told me.

    Trump inspires such intense resistance that Biden, in a rematch, is virtually certain to win more support than any modern president from voters who are pessimistic about the economy. But that doesn’t mean Biden can overcome any deficit to Trump on the economy, no matter how large. And that deficit right now is very large: In national polls released last month by both NBC News and Marquette University Law School, voters trusted Trump over Biden for handling the economy by about 20 percentage points.

    At some point, the strategists I spoke with agree, the economic hole could become too deep to climb from by relying on other issues. (Both the NBC and Marquette polls showed Biden running much closer to Trump in the ballot test than on the economy—but still trailing the former president on the ballot test.) To overtake Trump, Biden likely needs twin dynamics to continue. He needs the slight February pullback evident in the University of Michigan and Conference Board surveys to prove a blip, and the share of Americans satisfied with the economy to continue growing. And then he needs more of those satisfied voters to credit him for the improvement.

    Biden has some powerful arguments he can marshal to sell voters on his economic record. Wages have been rising faster than prices since last spring, particularly for low-income workers. The big three economic bills Biden passed in his first two years have triggered an enormous investment boom in new manufacturing plants for clean energy, electric vehicles, and semiconductors, with the benefits flowing disproportionately toward smaller blue-collar communities largely excluded from the tech-heavy information economy. He can also point to significant legislative achievements that are helping families afford prescription-drug and health-care costs—a potentially powerful calling card, especially with seniors. If the Federal Reserve Board cuts interest rates by this summer—which it has signaled it will do if inflation remains moderate—that could turbocharge the improvement in consumer confidence.

    “There is so much other good news that I feel like there’s a case to be made to people that this president has substantially improved the economy,” Campbell told me. “But whether that ultimately supersedes people’s negativity about [inflation] is a question that I don’t have an answer to.”

    Biden still has time to improve his standing on the economy, but that time isn’t unlimited. Sosnik says history has shown that voters solidify their judgments about a president’s performance in the period between the second half of his third year in office and the first half of his fourth year, about four months from now. President John F. Kennedy, speaking about the economy, famously said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” The next few months will reveal whether Biden’s has run aground too deeply for that still to apply.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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