Joe Biden must have thought it was a dream rematch with Donald Trump. He saw Trump as eminently beatable. After all, he thinks he beat him in 2020, so it stands to reason with a roaring economy, he should make short work of Trump.
It isn't working out like that, and Biden, as Matt Margolis tells us, is "beginning to panic." All along, Biden has played this election as if turnout were the end-all and be-all of the race. He is gambling that for every voter he loses over his Israel stance, he gains more from the hard left. That's why he's engineered this sharp turn to the left.
He has also gambled that he can smear Trump badly enough that it will drive votes away from him. There are so few people who haven't made up their minds about what kind of person Trump is that any strategy that relies on changing people's minds is a monumental failure.
In his State of the Union address, Biden went "all in" on left-wing radicalism. He doubled down on his high turnout by hitting issues like class warfare attacks on the rich and corporations, tax increases, student loan debt relief, and massive expansions of social programs despite a deficit of more than $1 trillion.
Perhaps Biden is thinking of "pivoting" to the center by the time the convention rolls around. That's a failed strategy given his current standing with the center.
Biden has been ignoring the main issues of the campaign that swing voters in battleground states want him to talk about: inflation, immigration, and other issues that ordinary Americans care about. Obviously, they're not his strengths. But rejigging his messaging on those issues may give people who don't much like Donald Trump a reason to vote for Biden.
Democratic pollster and former Clinton aide Mark Penn:
The reality is that swing voters in battleground states who are upset about immigration, inflation and what they see as extreme climate policies and weakness in foreign affairs are likely to put Mr. Trump back in office if they are not blunted.
How to "blunt" them is a puzzle. On some of these issues, Biden is so far out of step that he can't alter his position or he'd look like a hypocrite.
The balanced budget remains one of the single strongest measures that swing and other voters want. Mr. Clinton’s efforts to balance the budget set off the revolution that resulted in an eight-point win, even with third-party candidates in 1996, and catapulted his job approval ratings to above 70 percent. Instead of pivoting to the center when talking to 32 million people tuned in to his State of the Union address, Mr. Biden doubled down on his base strategy with hits like class warfare attacks on the rich and big corporations, big tax increases, student loan giveaways and further expansions of social programs despite a deficit of more than $1.1 trillion. The results quickly dissipated.
There are a lot of special interest groups in Biden's coalition, and they all want their goodies or they're not going to turn out for the president. The auto workers held up the car companies, egged on by "Union Joe" who cheered their victory.
Put simply, Detroit is going to have to sell a lot of cars — a lot of electric cars — to make the contract worthwhile.
About the only "persuadable" voters left are voters who pulled the lever for Nikki Haley. In truth, there aren't a lot of them. But the one thing they are likely to vote for is a strong America. Biden is seen as a weak sister, especially when it comes to Israel, where his arms embargo won't damage the Jewish state militarily but has sent shockwaves all across the region.
It was an epic error in judgment. I would love to have seen the polls that said denying arms to our staunchest ally in the Middle East was a great idea.
Penn writes, "The more Mr. Biden has pandered to the left by softening his support of Israel, the weaker he looks, and the more his foreign policy ratings have declined."
He can't get those voters back, He is not stuck pandering even more to his base to energize them and get them to turn out on election day.
Maybe he'll offer a reparations bill to goose the black vote.
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