President Joe Biden is currently losing the 2024 presidential election to former President Donald Trump. If the election were held tomorrow, Trump would win, likely in a landslide victory. That this is becoming increasingly clear, and the fact that Biden is already struggling to extend his stale political career, has sparked epic anguish on MSNBC and five-alarm rallying at the Democratic National Committee.
The big polling news last week was that The New York Times/Siena College, one of the most accurate polling organizations in the country, projected Trump to be leading in five of the six most important battleground states, including a staggering 13-point lead in light blue Nevada and a nine-point lead in purple Georgia. This week, the big polling update came from another highly respected polling organization, the Cook Political Report. The Cook Political Report poll has Trump leading or tied in all seven states surveyed, both in head-to-head matchups and in three-way races that also take into account independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The fact that the Cook Political Report confirmed the surprising findings of a Times/Siena poll from the previous week prompted polling guru Nate Silver to post the following warning on Thursday: “If Biden continues to struggle in August[,] He needs to consider resigning. Not a good situation for the D's.[emocrat]”Either way, that question needs to be asked with great care. This is obviously an important election. It shouldn't be something that's taboo to talk about.” Indeed, cross-tabulations of polls consistently show majorities or majorities of Democrats want Biden to do just that: stand down and step back from the national stage.
The basic conundrum for Democrats is this: They claim to see Trump as an existential threat to “our democracy,” but they're being led to political genocide by a party leader in his 80s. So maybe they're just going to start over the old-fashioned way, deposing Biden at their nominating convention this summer in Chicago, a spectacle of massive protests by pro-Hamas militants who will call the man “Genocide Joe.”
That's not going to happen. The Democrats, like it or not, have no choice but to field an old fool from Delaware as their 2024 presidential candidate.
Biden first came to Washington, DC, as a senator in January 1973. He first ran for president in 1988, the year before this columnist was born. It will be difficult to convince him to voluntarily withdraw after finally succeeding in the presidential election on his third try. Moreover, the fact that Biden is weak and frail makes it difficult to convince him to voluntarily withdraw. few He will likely be seriously advised by those around him to step down. In his weakened state, he is little more than a puppet used by aides and confidants — and none more cynical and self-serving than his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, a 21st-century Lady Macbeth.
But the reason Democrats have no choice but to gamble with Biden this fall is even clearer and more obvious: Strangely, the Democratic Party now finds itself mired in a self-defeating intersectionality quagmire of its own making.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is the Democrat most often cited as someone who could swoop in and save the donkeys at the August convention in Chicago, although other contenders thought to be in the running include Vice President Kamala Harris, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
There is a clear structural problem here. If Democrats skip over a black woman, Harris, and pick these white men, especially the Hollywood bad boy Newsom, then according to their own woke dogma and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” philosophy, they will be committing a terrible sin. Expressly “You selected Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer on the US Supreme Court because she is a black woman, and now you're going to throw the first black woman to serve as President or Vice President out the window? And you're going to do that for a horrible white man? Totally scandalous!”
Democrats can't do that, and doubly so at a time when their presidential candidate is desperate to retain black support, especially young black men who are leaning Republican by historic margins. So there's no world in which Biden gets dumped for anyone other than Harris. But Harris might be the only Democrat in Washington DC who is less popular than Uncle Joe himself. That stupid laughing stock is about as popular as a venereal disease these days.
So Democrats have no choice but to take a deep breath, pray to a God they probably don't believe in, and take a gamble on a weak incumbent. And Republicans couldn't be happier about it.
Photo by Joshua Woroniecki (Unsplash)
