A lot can happen in 11 months. But as the new year begins, the 2022 elections look like they will be a disaster for the Democratic Party.
Not only are President Joe Biden’s approval ratings near historic lows, but Republicans enjoy an unprecedented 10-point advantage in congressional generic ballot polls.
Democrats are more than welcome to continue on the same path they’ve been traveling on since Biden took office, pursuing a radical far-left partisan agenda on a threadbare congressional majority. Or they can try a new path, one that is responsive to the commonsense priorities of voters.
Here is what such a successful shift might look like.
Step one: Secure the border. There is no domestic issue on which Biden has a lower approval rating than immigration. Some die-hard leftists continue to cling to the argument that voters want Biden to be even weaker on border security, but all available polling shows the opposite. The vast majority of voters, including a majority of Hispanic people, say Biden has been “not tough enough” on immigration.
Biden should send a strong signal by firing the incompetent Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and appointing a replacement who will prioritize the reimplementation of President Donald Trump’s highly successful “Remain in Mexico” policy. Such strong action would send a clear signal to migrants throughout the world that the southern border is closed and they should stay home. This would slow the gush of migrants to the border to a trickle and give immigration law enforcement officers the time they need to restore law and order to the southern border.
Step two: Biden should dispatch Vice President Kamala Harris to California, where she can marshal the power of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to quell the rampant thievery and killings that are plaguing cities run by far-left prosecutors. Harris already has a strong law enforcement resume, including successful stints as the district attorney for San Francisco and the attorney general of California.
If Democrats want to sell the rest of the nation on California as the embodiment of their vision for progressive governance, they need to make California look like a success first. With record homicide rates in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles, as well as brazen smash-and-grab crime rings, California now looks more like a dystopian hell-hole than something any red state should want to emulate. If Harris were able to turn California’s crime wave around, she’d be among the most successful vice presidents ever.
Finally, Biden needs to do something to get inflation under control. This would be easy — just drop Build Back Better, which includes trillions in new deficit spending, and end all the vaccine mandates. With COVID-19 significantly weakening in its severity, he has the luxury of backing off and treating it like the common flu. He can also mitigate the labor shortage and the supply-chain crisis that the vaccine mandates are unnecessarily exacerbating.
These all would be hard pills for various elements of the Democratic base to swallow. But what Biden has been doing so far clearly isn’t working. Democrats have to ask themselves if the above changes are worse than a landslide defeat in November. The choice is theirs.
