The Runback: Joe Biden's Second Term Is Inevitable. Unless....
The way out of Biden’s second term is staring Republican voters in the face. Whether they take that offramp, however, remains to be seen.
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News and Politics
Marylanders Voting with Their Feet: Baltimore City, MoCo & Prince George’s Lose Population: Does County Executive Elrich Realize MoCo is Now Losing Residents?
White Leftists Protest Black Speaker: A group of left-wing white suburbanites did not take kindly to an African-American Man disagreeing with them.
We Don’t Need to Keep Repeating Anti-Vax Junk Science: We Don’t Need RFK, Jr. and His Anti-Vax Rhetoric. We Can and MUST Remember The Pertussis Vaccine Chaos
The Mouse That Litigated: Ron DeSantis thought he was going to take on Disney and beat them without taking any political hits for it. Whoops.
Defending the Indefensible: Dan Rodricks Jumps In to Defend Child Abuse
May 2023 Republican Presidential Power Rankings: “We’re just going to have to go into the basement, ride out the tornado and come back up when it’s over to rebuild the neighborhood.”
Media
What's going on at Fox News? It seems we're not getting a real explanation for the Tucker Carlson dismissal.
The Monday Thought
Joe Biden’s reelection is starting to look inevitable. At Saturday's White House Correspondents Dinner, Biden made reference to the existence of the “Dark Brandon” meme and did it in a hilarious way.
As political science professor John Deide noted, it is a classic use of humor in the same way Ronald Reagan did in 1984.
Now you may be asking yourself, how can Joe Biden’s re-election be inevitable when is favorable/unfavorable number looks like this.
Yes, Biden’s disapproval ratings are pretty high. But, on the flip side, take a look at this numbers.
As I wrote in our just-released Republican Presidential Primary rankings, Donald Trump looks like the inevitable Republican nominee right now. And the Biden Campaign knows it:
Now it’s official: President Joe Biden is running for reëlection. In his opening argument of a campaign that will span the next eighteen months, he portrayed himself as a bulwark against right-wing assaults on freedom, democracy, and social rights. “That’s been the work of my first term, to fight for our democracy,” Biden said, in a three-minute campaign video posted online Tuesday that opens with footage of Trump supporters storming the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.
Biden cast the entire Republican Party as an extremist, Trump-dominated organization that is attacking basic American values. Around the country, he said, “maga extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms, cutting Social Security that you paid for your entire life . . . dictating what health-care decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love.”…
….One person whom Biden doesn’t explicitly name in the video is his likely opponent, Donald Trump. He doesn’t need to. Everyone knows that his campaign is predicated on the looming threat of a Trump second term.
Biden’s unpopular. But Donald Trump is even more unpopular and is looking at his third consecutive loss in the popular vote and his second straight loss to Joe Biden. Biden knows it. Republican strategists know it. Republican elected officials know it. Hell, Donald Trump probably knows it.
So what it the one way that Republicans can beat Biden.
Nominate literally anybody else.
Biden, for example, already trails Ron DeSantis in head-to-head polling:
But that doesn’t mean Biden will skate into a second term unscathed — far from it. In fact, there’s plenty of reason to believe that Biden’s age could be a liability in a general election, especially if he faces someone like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (currently polling second after Trump in FiveThirtyEight’s 2024 Republican primary polling average) who, at 44, is just over half Biden’s age, making for an easy generational contrast. And the imperfect, hypothetical head-to-head polling we have for the 2024 general election suggest that Biden would face an uphill climb against both Trump and DeSantis. A Wall Street Journal poll fielded in mid-to-late April, for instance, found Biden (45 percent) trailing DeSantis (48 percent) among registered voters in a hypothetical head-to-head contest, while the president narrowly led Trump by just 3 percentage points. (Both leads, however, were within the poll’s margin of error). This lines up with past polling, which also suggested that Biden would be essentially tied with both men.
Biden also has a lead within the margin of error over Nikki Haley as well. A candidate like DeSantis or Haley would serve as a stark contrast with Biden just based on their age alone, before getting to comparisons of their respective records.
The problem? Haley has stumbled out of the gate and DeSantis is floundering before he even got his campaign started. Republican voters look like they are hellbent on sticking with Trump, the consequences be damned.
But can a Republican effectively make the case that nominating Trump is handing the election to the Democrats and win over the voters with that argument. It is a similar discussion that was had here in Maryland before the 2022 gubernatorial primary. And reason and imminent defeat could not overcome the suicidal instincts of Republican primary voters.
The way out of Biden’s second term is staring Republican voters in the face. Whether they take that offramp, however, remains to be seen.