Joe Biden is confident about his party’s chances in the midterms. The Associated Press started a recent profile of “Biden’s optimism” heading into November by highlighting his claim that “Democrats are going to hold onto the House after November’s midterm elections. They will pick up as many as four seats in the Senate, expanding their majority and overcoming internal dissent that has helped stifle their agenda.”
The president says that it’s his job to be confident, but this type of optimism stands in contrast to the mood of a large swath of the electorate less than six months away from the midterms. Reporters Will Weissert and Zeke Miller acknowledge the Democrats’ uphill battle going into November even as Democrats cheerlead at every turn.
There’s a lot of talk about messaging in the AP piece, which is par for the course for Democrats. The left tends to assume that everyone is on board with the left-wing agenda, but people don’t vote for it because of “messaging.” This notion of informing voters with the right messaging appears throughout the article.
Former congressman and Biden aide Cedric Richmond, now with the Democratic National Committee, said, “We understand that you cannot govern if you can’t win. We are treating it with that sense of urgency.”
Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute took a similar tone when he told Weissert and Miller that “I don’t expect any president to go out and say, ’You know what, ‘We’re going to lose the next election,’” but that Biden needs to project “a sober sense of, ’Look, we’re probably in for a rough night in November and our strategy should be to remind the country what’s at stake.’”
Related: Red Wave Watch: CNN Says the GOP Is in Its Best Position Since 1938
Voters know what’s at stake, and it has more to do with the money in their bank accounts and the gas in their cars than climate change, gun violence, or abortion, although the Democrats are counting on those issues to fire up Democrat voters in the fall — at least with a sense of cautious optimism.
“Biden political advisers say a possible Supreme Court ruling overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, as well as recent mass shootings spurring renewed debate over gun violence, could give Democrats two issues that could energize voters,” Weissert and Miller write. “But they also acknowledge that one or both might help party candidates clinch already close races — not remake the political landscape nationwide.”
The best feature of the AP article is the sense that Biden is a fighter who will come from behind that permeates the piece.
“If I had a penny for every time Democrats counted Joe Biden or Kamala Harris out, I’d be independently wealthy,” Richmond said. (No, seriously. He really said it!)
“I welcome anyone willing to lift Georgia up, to come to Georgia and help me get it done,” said Georgia’s pretend governor Stacey Abrams, who admits that she’s willing to have the president or vice president come and campaign with her on her quest to ruin the Peach State.
DNC Chair Jaime Harrison hints that Biden and the Democrats have a secret formula “to make sure that, when those close elections happen November, we win them.”
“When you’re in the Super Bowl, do you think the coach puts all their plays up on Twitter, and says, ’Here’s what we’re going to run?” he told supporters at a fundraiser. “No. We don’t put all of our stuff out there.”
Bless their hearts. They really believe that the Democrats are going to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat this fall. We’ll just have to see what they blame their defeat on when all is said and done.
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