Since 2020, the Democratic Party, from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris to their handlers and staffers and campaign strategists to Capitol Hill, have operated on the assumption that a majority of the public agreed with them and that victory in 2024 just required reminding Americans of everything they didn’t like about Donald Trump. And who knows, if illegal immigration hadn’t surged, if prices hadn’t spiked and inflation hadn’t been the worst it’s been in four decades, if the world weren’t on fire from Lebanon to Ukraine, maybe that would have been enough. But Democrats refused to do any serious “self-scouting” — a hard, unsparing assessment of their own strengths and weaknesses — and now they’re left hoping that the early vote lead for Republicans is a mirage and that their own get-out-the-vote operations will be just enough to keep the blue wall in place.
Democrats’ Faulty Assumptions
Disgraced former North Carolina senator John Edwards was wrong about a lot of things, but for now let’s focus on the fact that there are really three types of Americans: Republicans, Democrats, and independents. And independents perceive the world considerably closer to the Republican view than the Democratic one.
In July, before Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, Gallup found just 4 percent of Republicans approved of the job Biden was doing, and just 31 percent of independents approved of the job he was doing.
But 81 percent of Democrats approved of the job Biden was doing. And that had been the story of Biden’s approval rating throughout his presidency. Republicans never liked him; he started with an 11 percent approval rating among self-identified Republicans. Independents gave him a shot — he started with 61 percent of independents approving of the job he was doing in the opening days of his term — until his approval rating among this demographic took a tumble in the summer of 2021 (hello, Afghanistan withdrawal) and never recovered, lingering in the 31 percent to 41 percent range.
But Democrats always cut Biden an enormous amount of slack. Biden started with 98 percent of Democrats approving of the job he was doing.
You find the same dynamic at work in almost every issue before the public.
In September, Gallup asked Americans, “Would you say you and your family are better off now than you were four years ago, or are you worse off now?” Just 7 percent of Republicans said they were better off than they were four years ago, and among independents, just 35 percent said they were better off. But among Democrats, 72 percent told the pollster they were better off now than they were four years ago.
In October, Gallup asked Americans, “Do you consider the amount of federal income tax you have to pay as too high, about right or too low?” Unsurprisingly, 68 percent of Republicans and 60 percent of independents said “too high.” But just 37 percent of Democrats said the same.
In August, Gallup asked Americans, “Do you think businesses, in general, should take a public stance on current events?” Just 22 percent of Republicans answered yes, and just 34 percent of independents answered yes. But 53 percent of Democrats agreed (and that’s down from 75 percent in 2022.)
The most recent Suffolk/USA Today poll asked respondents how Kamala Harris was performing her duties as vice president. Unsurprisingly, just 4 percent of Republicans said they either strongly approved or approved of her job performance, and 93 percent said they disapproved, with 72 percent saying they strongly disapproved. Among independents, Harris’s numbers were better but not great: 40 percent approved — with just 6 percent strongly approving — and 49 percent disapproved, with 26 percent strongly disapproving.
But it’s almost impossible to find a Democrat who doesn’t approve of the job Harris is doing; 89 percent of Democrats approve, with 37 percent strongly approving, and just 6 percent disapprove, with only 2 percent strongly disapproving.
In the most recent ABC News poll, registered voters were asked to identify which issues were “highly important” to them. Ninety percent of Republicans and 68 percent of independents rated “the immigration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border” as highly important, but just half of Democrats did so. On abortion, 84 percent of Democrats rated the issue as “highly important,” but that dropped to just 55 percent among independents and 46 percent among Republicans.
On issue after issue, a majority of independents are closer to the Republican position than the Democratic one. A whole lot of Democrats walk around believing that those who disagree with them are “extreme” or on “the fringe,” when in fact they themselves are considerably further from the American center than the typical Republican is.
I suspect this is what people mean when they say America is “a center-right country.” It certainly isn’t a conservative paradise. But a majority of the public wants public policies steered in a slightly or somewhat rightward direction from the status quo. (I also suspect that in the Trump era, a certain segment of traditionalist Reaganite right-leaning individuals left the GOP and started identifying as independents — so the pool of self-identified independents in polls and the electorate is more instinctively conservative than in, say, the Obama years.)
Sports coaches often talk about the vital skill of “self-scouting” — looking at a team’s performance with a gimlet eye and being brutally honest in assessing what’s going well and what isn’t. For much of the past year, Democrats convinced themselves that Biden was doing fine both in terms of health and performance, that the economy was and is doing fine, and that the electorate approved of how Harris is performing her duties as vice president.
Instead of self-scouting, Democrats walked around in a fog of optimistic happy talk — or they believed that the revulsion Donald Trump inspired was so intense and widespread that it could overcome any weakness on their side.
A week ago, the New York Times reported, “Harris is moving aggressively to make sure voters in the battlegrounds remember precisely why they rejected Donald J. Trump four years ago.” Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota — the lone Democratic officeholder willing to challenge Biden in the Democratic presidential primary — doubted the strategy to close with a negative and very familiar message: “A billion dollars will have been wasted on losing voters by condemnation versus winning them by invitation. She just needed to be clear about what she believes, what she will do differently than Biden, and offer common sense solutions to our problems.”
Beating Trump the third time around — or at least beating him handily — required a record that Biden, Harris, and their teams just couldn’t produce.
If the border were secure and the Biden administration had not released an estimated 5 million additional migrants and asylum seekers into the country for future court dates as far off as 2033, would Trump be as competitive as he is? I mean, if you’re the Biden administration, and you know there’s a chance you’ll be up against Trump again, wouldn’t illegal immigration be the one issue you’d want to have absolutely squared away?
If consumer prices weren’t up 20 percent and gasoline prices weren’t up 33 percent from when Biden took office, would Trump be as competitive as he is? Unlikely.
Are you feeling better about the Middle East lately? Feeling great about Ukraine’s chances of fighting off the Russians? Feel confident that we’ve got enough in the tank to deter China from any dreams of reacquiring Taiwan? The Russian missiles slamming into a Kyiv children’s hospital, the rapes and mutilation of women and the execution of prisoners by Hamas — it’s been observed, “Everyone fights like ISIS now.” It’s a more dangerous, bloodier, more brutal and barbaric world out there compared to four years ago.
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