Joe Biden has been struggling in the polls this year, which isn't all that surprising. What exactly does he have to run on? Voters overwhelmingly trust Donald Trump on the most important issues of the election, which leaves Biden little wiggle room to make a case for his reelection. Two issues he thinks give him a huge advantage are abortion and "defending democracy."
Abortion has been a big issue for the Democrats for decades, but ever since the Capitol riot, they've tried to brand themselves as the party defending democracy, hence the reason they held the blatantly partisan January 6 investigation that relied upon cherrypicked and doctored evidence. You can't blame the Democrats for trying to make this a winning issue for them, but the real question is whether it's working.
It's not. An Associated Press-NORC poll from December found that 62% of adults say that democracy in the United States could be at risk depending on who wins in November, but, when it comes to which candidate is the bigger threat, voters are divided on partisan lines on that issue. Little has changed since.
According to a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist survey released last week, voters are still split on partisan lines on this issue. It found that 46% of respondents believe a second term for Biden would "weaken" democracy, while 48% express the same concern regarding Trump's potential return to the White House.
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But this isn't the worst part of the poll for the left. The same poll found that a majority of independents, 53%, believe that Biden is the candidate who will weaken democracy, while only 42% say the same about Trump.
The talking heads at MSNBC couldn't believe what they were seeing.
“I find it shocking, honestly. I can’t make sense of that number. I wish I could,” Susan Del Percio, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, told MSNBC on Wednesday. “I wish I could have some really great insight to it, but I don’t know if it’s an outlier or not, because the other numbers of independents are going in the right direction. So, that may be it.”
She also suggested that since Trump's criminal trial in New York isn't being televised, people have lost interest in the story.
“This trial is not on TV. You guys do a great job reporting what’s happening, but if there aren’t those images coming out of the courthouse, people feel like they know this story,” she claimed. “We’ve heard about it for a long time.”
Is it that hard for the left and the anti-Trump right to understand why independents would favor Trump by a double-digit margin on the issue of protecting democracy? Have they not been paying attention? Not only has Joe Biden used his Justice Department to go after Trump, but his allies have also sought to remove Trump from the ballot in states nationwide. Democrats in Congress are even entertaining the idea of not certifying the election results if he wins in November.
The only democracy that Democrats want to defend is when they win. That's why they've challenged every presidential election they've lost in the last quarter century. That's why they constantly seek to change election laws to make it easier for them to cheat. They don't care about defending democracy; they care about defending their own power.
