Joe Biden has made his presidential campaign all about one man: Donald Trump. Indeed, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate has said very little about what he’s campaigning for, but a lot about who he’s campaigning against.
The goal is to make the November election a referendum on Trump, which Democrats seem to think is a winning strategy. Convince voters that Biden is the only thing standing in between them and four more years of Trumpian chaos, and they’ll turn out for a candidate who still draws little enthusiasm from his own party.
But the Democratic Party is underestimating the electorate. To be sure, voters are displeased with Trump and the way he’s handled recent crises, if the polls are to be believed. But voters also care about issues and the larger debate that surrounds them. When it comes to healthcare, for example, 81% of voters said in a poll earlier this year that this debate will be very important come November. More than 84% said the same of the economy.
Trump seems to understand this, because his reelection pitch to voters is not about Biden, but about the ideology that Biden’s election threatens to usher in: socialism. Already, Trump’s new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, has worked overtime to paint Biden as an empty vessel for leftist extremists to exploit. Biden might be a self-proclaimed centrist, Stepien argued, but the people he’s surrounded himself with, the ones who will run the show, are not.
Stepien has a point: Biden has already caved to the Left on several issues, including healthcare, student loan forgiveness, and climate change. He asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an out-and-proud socialist, to sit on his climate change task force. And his decision to choose Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate confirms that Biden isn’t as averse to the far Left’s aggressive culture war as he’s made himself out to be.
Harris, we know from experience, is no moderate. When her voting record in the Senate was compared to every other Senate Democrat’s, hers was second only to Sen. Elizabeth Warren in terms of how far to the left she had voted. Harris endorsed and co-sponsored the Green New Deal, advocated for late-term abortion, co-sponsored Medicare for All, and argued for the repeal of tax cuts. She even tried to impose a religious litmus test on Catholic judicial nominees. Put simply, she’s a radical in sheep’s clothing, and she doesn’t really care who knows it.
This upends the Democrats’ argument that Biden is a safer choice. There is nothing safe about socialism. Only 28% of the public views it favorably.
Today’s Democratic Party doesn’t seem to care. If anything, Democrats are so worried about angering the far Left that they’ll do just about anything to appease it. In the party’s 2020 platform, Democrats gave a nod to “Medicare for all” advocates and admitted that the policy has some appeal. Biden has openly promised to raise taxes and, worse, undo some aspects of Trump’s tax reform, even as the United States suffers from economic upheaval thanks to the coronavirus pandemic.
Worst of all, Democrats still can’t bring themselves to disavow antifa, a radical, violent, and revolutionary group that has destroyed private and public property and injured dozens of law enforcement officers throughout riots in certain cities that initially had to do with George Floyd’s death, but really haven’t had anything to do with that for months now.
This is not a winning agenda. If Democrats aren’t careful, they could end up forcing voters to ask not whether they could stick with Trump for four more years, but whether they can afford not to.
