While President Joe Biden has been hidden away from public view as he prepares for his first debate against former President Donald Trump in the 2024 election, his handlers have previewed his purview on X. The president is largely ignoring his own abysmal record on the economy, foreign policy, and piss-poor state of the southern border, instead blasting his predecessor for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, which happened during Biden’s tenure, and calling Trump “the greatest threat to our democracy.” Biden clearly understands that although he is the incumbent, he is also, statistically speaking, the underdog, and rather than try to explain away the worst inflation crisis in 40 years or conflagrations in Ukraine and Gaza, he must redirect the narrative. The only problem is that the only issues that favor Biden in the polls are issues nobody cares about, and to the extent that Biden believes he’s even winning those issues, his support is still shockingly limited.

A wide plurality of 36% of voters polled by Gallup said the economy remains the single most important problem facing the country, with Pew determining that 62% of voters, including nearly half of all Democrats, said inflation specifically is a very big problem, the greatest share of any other issue. Just 4% of people cited either “abortion” or “democracy” as the biggest issues facing the nation.