Poll numbers look bleak for Democrats. A wide range of surveys show twice as many people saying America is on the wrong track as saying it’s heading in the right direction. In the most recent polls aggregated by RealClearPolitics, right track/wrong track deficits were 31, 30, 37, 48, 39, 26, and 50 points. President Joe Biden is underwater by 16, 4, 11, 5, 17, 19, and 14 points on the approve-disapprove question.
Such figures point to an unambiguous electoral repudiation of the Democratic Party and its policies, wholly owned by left-wing extremists. The president, having thrown off the mantle of moderation, and the militants for whom he works are heading for what former President Barack Obama called a “shellacking.” Voters never gave them a mandate for radicalism and don’t like being played for saps in a bait and switch.
Biden’s White House website boasts that he’s building “a better America.” To which the looming electoral riposte is, “No, thanks, we like the America we already had. And, anyway, it’s not yours to change.”
The public knows that the Left and Democrats — a distinction without a difference — have spun out of control. To borrow the lyrics of Neil Young, the aging rocker who now pines for orthodoxy and cancel culture, the Left’s Cadillac “has got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.” The only problem with the analogy is that the Left no longer has even one wheel on the track. It has lurched out of control, leapt the verge, and is a steaming wreck in the undergrowth beyond the guardrail.
A week is a long time in politics, but even 10 months out from the midterm elections, the numbers are a nightmare for the Left. They could spell Democratic disaster and national salvation as far ahead as the 2024 presidential election. For the transformation of the Democratic Party is a long-term phenomenon. It is no quickly passing, easily forgotten squall. The party’s absorption into the sub-Marxist Left has taken decades.
Its emergence into plain sight has produced many related phenomena. One is, as Gerard Baker noted in the Wall Street Journal recently, that the ratchet that until recently made America’s leftward drift seem irreversible might be about to lose its grip. Like a spring that cannot be compressed any further, the nation’s politics and culture appear poised to snap back, retrieving common sense from its current marginalization and restoring it to its rightful place at the center of public life.
Another is the emergence of a more combative cadre of conservative Republican political leaders. People are almost always of their time, perhaps especially politicians. As James Antle writes in our
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, the likes of Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and other contenders for the 2024 GOP nomination are members of a rising generation no longer willing to go along and get along with the liberal dispensation. They have arrived, ready to fight, determined to win, at a moment when the nation seems to want that decisive victory.
