Category: Elections (Page 9 of 18)

Liberals and progressives rejoiced as Barack Obama won in 2008. They preferred Obama from the start of the primaries, and he trounced John McCain in the general election. Finally, they’d get all the things they wanted: universal health insurance, card-check for unions, an end to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the closing of detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay, a full review of NAFTA and switch to fair trade policies, and an indexing of the minimum wage to inflation.

Oops. Obama, of course, got none of these things done. Some of them he even could’ve done on his own without Congress. In turn, liberals and progressives offered excuse after excuse for Obama’s shift to the right. And then they campaigned for Obama again as they declared 2012 to be the ‘most important election of our lifetimes.’

Now the same liberals and progressives say they’ll hold Joe Biden accountable if he wins. They think they can push Biden to adopt policies well to Obama’s left. Will they?

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Joe Biden’s supporters point to his winning strategy: attracting older voters and moderates to the Democratic Party while trying to minimize losses among younger voters who often don’t vote anyway. Biden mostly ignores higher-income progressives, who don’t have anywhere else to turn and will therefore stay in line and vote a straight Democratic ticket.

And it’s working rather nicely for Biden. He’s way ahead in the polls and will likely defeat Trump handily. But I think a closer look at the evidence shows two ways to beat Trump. Biden took one path.

I’m more interested in the other.

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Going into the first debate between Biden and Trump, it wasn’t clear how the debate could even impact the race. Why? Because the polls have been consistent for months. Most Americans see the election as a referendum on Trump. Most of Trump’s voters love Trump. And most of Biden’s voters hate Trump. Few in either camp hold many strong opinions on Biden.

Americans mostly settled into these opinions months ago – even years ago. Since March 2019, Trump’s approval ratings have never deviated below 41% or higher than 47%. And they almost always move between 43% and 45%. This means about 43-45% of the country loves him, and just about everyone else hates him. The polls proceed accordingly. Presidents rarely overperform their approval rating, and Trump is no exception. And so, we see the polls against Biden put him at around…43%. Big surprise. Biden wins most of the voters who don’t like him. Again…big surprise.

The New York Times tax stories certainly did no favors for Trump, either. As a result of these things, it seemed unlikely the first debate would change anything.

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