It's the stakes of the election

Make the choice bigger than Biden or Trump. It's democracy or autocracy.

I’ll be traveling for Thanksgiving, so this may be my last post until next week. I hope you all have a happy and safe holiday. If you’re enjoying these posts and are not subscribed, please consider doing so. I promise to continue engaging content during this crucial upcoming election cycle.

Sunday was another day of polls and articles making Democrats nervous. An NBC poll showed Biden with his lowest approval yet and, according to the Washington Post, a group of elite Democratic donors are shocked that there’s no “Plan B” for Biden’s candidacy. They should spend less time worrying about what’s beyond their control and more time doing what’s in their power.

The press and pundits are ratcheting up the pressure, moving toward a doomsday narrative for Biden. Politico has an article titled “Five ways Democrats are coping with Biden’s terrible polls.” The author says Democrats are trying to rationalize away the bad news, writing, “And rather than confronting just how bleak things look at the moment, many Democrats are finding solace in a cycle of self-soothing spin that explains away the difficult political reality.”

There’s another reason a lot of Democrats aren’t panicking. For a year leading up to the 2022 elections, these same journalists told us a “red wave” was coming. In May 2022, Politico’s headline read, “A Red Wave? Oh, yeah. These GOP strategists are sure of it.” Just two weeks before the election, Axios titled a piece “Red tsunami watch.” Dave Wasserman, Cook Political Report’s prognosticator, predicted that GOP House pickups would be 15-25, “but it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if the Toss Ups broke mostly their way, pushing GOP gains even higher.” So, yeah, I’m skeptical of political narratives driven by people who are professional observers, not professional participants.

Look, Biden is not getting out of the race. He will be the Democratic nominee. His biggest liability is his age and there’s nothing he nor anyone else can do about it. Instead of worrying, Democrats should be raising money and organizing. The stakes are too high to be fantasizing about what could be instead of what is.

Some Democratic activists are trying to unskew the polls. That’s folly. The polls probably do reflect the reality of today. They are not predictive, though.

Young people are angry about Israel’s response to Hamas and blaming Biden for his support of the Israelis. According to the NBC poll, voters under 35-years-old disapprove of Biden’s handling of the crisis by more than 50 points. They prefer Trump by four points over Biden. That’s what they say today when the stakes are low and the election is not even on their radar screen.

Several commentators have compared the situation in Gaza to Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam in 1968. Back then, public support for the war was crashing and Johnson announced he would not run for re-election. His vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, became the Democratic nominee and lost to Richard Nixon.

That’s bogus comparison. By the time Johnson got out of the race, Americans had been dying in Vietnam for years. We had 500,000 troops on the ground. Two months before his announcement, the North Vietnamese forces and Vietcong guerrillas launched he Tet Offensive, invading Saigon and hundreds of other cities in South Vietnan, leading Walter Cronkite to call the war a “stalemate.

The war in Gaza is just over a month old. No American soldiers are on the ground and none will be. The bulk of the fighting will likely end before the summer, even if skirmishes go on much longer, and the news coverage and protests will die down. I do not believe the election will hinge on the war or any foreign policy, for that matter.

I also don’t believe that young people are voting for Trump in 2024. They are mad right now and registering their frustration in the polls. A year from now, they will have an actual choice and, by then, they will be reminded both of Trump’s threat to democracy and Biden’s accomplishments. But mostly they should be very scared of Donald Trump. It’s really their future he’s threatening.

As for finding an alternative to Biden, pundits and activists need to get over it. Biden’s running. It’s too late for a primary and there’s no group of power brokers with the influence to change that. The only way to switch horses now is for Biden himself to engineer it and that doesn’t seem likely.

Biden is old and nothing is going to change that, but that doesn’t mean he’s too old to serve. We live in a time when people in their late eighties are still productive citizens. Authors are still publishing books. Warren Buffett was running Berkshire Hathaway. Winston Churchill was 81 when he retired as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1955 and he was overweight and smoked cigars. Despite what Republicans say, nothing indicates Biden is slipping mentally or physically.

Democrats do need to start defining themselves and Trump sooner than later, though. The party has always been lousy at touting their accomplishments. If Donald Trump had passed the infrastructure bill, the inflation reduction act, bipartisan gun control, and the CHIPs act, we would have never heard the end of it. “I passed the greatest legislative agenda of any president in history.” Republican governors would be naming roads and airports for him. The victory tour would have lasted a year.

Democrats slap themselves on the back, check the accomplishment off the list, and start working on the next one. The only people who know what they’ve done are the people paying attention. Now, Democrats need to educate the public about their record and hope they believe it.

More importantly, though, Democrats need to remind America what the country was like under Trump. His crazy speeches should be running nonstop on TikTok and YouTube. The kids need to see what he wants to do. They need to understand that Trump threatened our democracy and will almost certainly do it again. They need to know that Republicans, in general, want to make voting more difficult for them and that one GOP presidential candidate even wants to raise the voting age to 25. It’s their future that is most at risk.

Democrats need to make the 2024 about the stakes of the election as much as it’s between Biden and Trump. Do we want democracy or autocracy? Do we want a leader threatening to lock up and “destroy” his political enemies or do we want live under the rule of law? Do we want decency and compassion or do want resentment and personal vendettas? The choice should be clear and stark. I have faith that if they do that, then the American experiment will continue.