Democrats and Never Trumpers were driven into deepening depths of despair and disbelief by a new New York Times/Siena poll released over the weekend that showed former President Donald Trump leading President Joe Biden by 5 points in a two-way matchup. The survey of likely voters showed Trump leading Biden by 6 points with Hispanic voters and earning 23% of black voters — both are unprecedented figures for a Republican in modern elections.
The results line up neatly with other polls released this week, including surveys from the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, and Forbes, each of which shows Trump leading by 4 points. In fact, Biden has only led in one of the past 20 polls listed on RealClearPolitics. This is all the more remarkable in contrast with polling from the spring of 2020, in which Biden never trailed and often led by double digits.
Calls for Biden to drop out of the race are growing louder by the minute within the Democratic Party’s most reliable constituency: the legacy news media. Liberal stalwart Ezra Klein issued a 4,000-word screed in the New York Times calling for a brokered convention this summer. The piece begins, unironically, with the following sentence: “My heart breaks a bit for Joe Biden.”
MSNBC has taken to warning Biden about his “Michigan problem” due to his support for Israel’s war in Gaza and Michigan’s heavy Muslim population. Democratic media influencers such as Mehdi Hasan and Bill Kristol post their reservations about the Biden candidacy regularly.
But Biden’s opponents would do well to curb their enthusiasm over his perceived political woes. For one, the appearance of meanspiritedness toward a rapidly declining octogenarian isn’t a good look — and it never will be; it is, perhaps, the only thing that could cast Biden in a sympathetic light at this point. Everyone has grandparents, after all. In response to Biden’s deteriorating mental capacity, the wise political move is to hit mute and let nature take its course.
Casting Biden as a political (or literal) corpse also does him the tremendous service of lowering the bar even further. As ever, politics is the art of setting and clearing the public’s expectations. Contributing to the perception that Biden is a spent political force has the unintended effect of amplifying the instances in which he comes across as passable. This affords his sputtering political career precious oxygen and enables his backers to argue that reports of his cognitive decline are overblown.
For instance, due to diminished expectations, Bidenworld was able to celebrate his performance during a slow-pitch interview with Late Night with Seth Meyers last week, albeit with the desperate air of a gambler who’d finally won a hand after a long losing streak.
“Great interview. Biden was sharp, funny, and loose,” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau remarked on X.
“Biden came out swinging,” extolled popular liberal writer Aaron Rupar.
Of course, this is all preposterous to anyone who’s been paying even a little attention to politics in recent years. But the fact is many have been too busy working and raising families to follow the Washington horse race. It isn’t crazy to think they’re searching for a reason to vote against a Republican nominee who is wildly unpopular in his own right.
And at the risk of being overly cautious, it bears mentioning that Biden has been counted out many times before. It’s difficult to remember now how “dead” his national aspirations were after his plagiarism scandal in the 1988 Democratic primary or after he failed to win more than 1% of the vote in any of the states in which he competed in the 2008 Democratic primary, or after he failed to secure a victory in Iowa or New Hampshire in 2020. If nothing else, Biden has a singular talent for political survival. Yet following each supposed “death,” he managed to climb the ladder of power in Washington steadily.
Such a man shouldn’t be underestimated.
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Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.
