In the days following the debate that will live in infamy, many panicking Democrats appeared to be satisfying themselves with the notion that, if they dump Joe Biden, everything will be just fine for the 468 Democrats running for the Senate and House. They have used as evidence the fact that down-ballot Senate candidates in key battleground states have been running well ahead of the beleaguered incumbent at the top of the ballot.
But what about all the Democrats who have been claiming for months or years that Biden is just fine? How about leftists, including those running for office, who have defended – either willingly or by force – this president in the dark days since the debate, as Democrats see their lives flashing before their eyes? What about those stone-faced governors who followed up from their emergency meeting with Biden – Wes Moore of Maryland and Kathy Hochul of New York, we’re looking at you – by toeing the company line that Biden is in it to win it and has no plans to step aside, so there’s nothing to see here. What happens when their constituents press these governors and their colleagues on the matter of why they participated in a cover-up of Joe Biden's condition for months or years, or were even willing to be paraded out recently to testify with a straight face that the addled president was sharp as a tack?
What happens when the depths of the scandalous coverup that took place across the party are fully exposed, a process now just beginning? How could this not indict and have a potentially seismic impact on the entire Democratic Party that was in on the con?
Cold Comfort for Democrats
Democrats are taking solace in the fact that the debate took place four months before Election Day – likely due to their fear of the very disaster that happened – allowing them time to make one of the most crucial political decisions of the modern age: whether to uphold or abandon an enfeebled but defiant incumbent president in the throes of all but handing the presidency back to Donald Trump, a prospect that represents the sum of all fears for Democrats everywhere.
But what if – and it’s still a big if, given his utter defiance – Biden finally accepts the inevitability of defeat and stands down in favor of Kamala Harris, who is now being resurrected as a legitimate option by Democrats and their friends in the media? How will all the supplicants who swore that Biden was just fine be viewed when their statements are exposed as nothing more than lies designed to save the sinking fortunes of a single man at the cost of the country’s national security? How many barrels of popcorn do you think are being enjoyed by Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jung Un, and the mullahs of Iran as they watch this president and his administration disintegrate before the world’s eyes? How will they not up the ante accordingly on their threats to the civilized world?
The desperate president decided to try and limit the damage in a one-on-one interview last Friday with longtime Democrat operative turned host of ABC’s Sunday show, George Stephanopoulos, and delivered a performance that was the worst of all worlds for his party and the nation. Demonstrating uncompromising defiance amid calls for his withdrawal from the race from a small but growing number of elected Democrats, and sinking like a rock in the polls, he performed just well enough to justify remaining in the fight – but he was still visibly shaky, looking lost at times, and in complete denial about the fix he is in, and in which he has placed his party.
Biden refused to commit to a neurological test and said only “the Lord almighty” could force him to leave the race. His calendar is stuck in 2020, as he declares that because he beat Trump once, he is the one – the only one – who can do it again this time around. He kept coming back to the existential threat posed by Trump. Yet, when asked how he’ll feel if he loses a crucial election, he offered a strikingly tepid, self-focused response that infuriated many Democrats: “I'll feel, as long as I gave it my all, and I did as good a job as I know I can do, that's what this is about."
A textbook career politician who has been reading and responding to polling for the last five decades is hardly credible in dismissing the results of voluminous polling showing him in deep trouble. He is losing in every swing state, but if that were not bad enough, at least four light- to medium-blue states where Biden won big four years ago – Virginia, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and New Mexico – have been thrown into play, and the possibility of a Trump landslide cannot be discounted.
That is how serious it is for Democrats who made a deal with the devil to beat Donald Trump in 2020 and are now seeing their chariot slowly turn back into a pumpkin. They picked a man they could control despite his evident cognitive decline and got away with hiding him in the basement, content that his surrogates would prosecute the case – and that he would surely follow orders, do the obvious, and step aside after one term, as he all but promised to do.
Then he/they selected an unqualified candidate as his running mate simply because of her race and gender – a woman so unpopular that her own heavily funded presidential campaign did not even make it to the starting line of the first contest and who is widely considered unelectable. But, of course, they will not dump her in favor of anyone else – except perhaps Michelle Obama – for the very reason she was picked in the first place: her race and gender. The White House has been running her out recently for the easiest job she has yet to be assigned: whipping left-wing crowds into a frenzy over abortion. It has raised her profile enough to make some high-ranking Democrats believe she would stand a better chance than Biden of defeating Trump.
Joe Biden Running on Empty
Polls conducted since the debate all point in one direction. Trump’s average lead in national surveys, according to Real Clear Politics (RCP), has risen from as low as 0.5% in the weeks before the debate to 3.3%. And that lead increases all the way to 4.9% when the three independent or fringe candidates are added to the mix – that is beyond the margin of error. Trump is leading in every national poll since the debate, except one that is tied, including a trio of six-point leads in surveys by CNN, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. For perspective, remember that Biden won the popular vote in 2020 by 4.4% and that Trump lost the popular vote decisively in both 2016 and 2020.
If that weren’t bad enough, polls in one particular swing state that Biden absolutely must win have yielded even more worrisome results for the incumbent’s campaign. It has long been thought that whichever candidate captures Pennsylvania will win the election. And the three polls since the debate in the Keystone State, including one by Bloomberg which shows Trump leading by seven points, have left Trump with an average lead of 4.5% in Pennsylvania – enough reason by itself for Democrats to do something, anything, to reverse their fortunes before it’s too late. More battleground state polling will be necessary before definitive conclusions can be reached about the two other must-win states for Biden: Michigan and Wisconsin.
But in other states once thought to be battlegrounds, the outlook remains dismal for the Dems. In the wake of a small number of polls following the debate, Trump has an average lead in a two-way race with Biden of 5.4% in Arizona, 4.6% in Nevada, 5.8% in North Carolina, and 3.7% in Georgia. The results are even more favorable for Trump in a five-way race. It seems unlikely at best that Biden’s futility will not endanger every down-ballot Democrat facing a competitive race. The party can try and pin its hopes on ticket-splitting, but when you have to disavow or explain away the man at the top of the ballot, that is a last-gasp strategy for a party deep in crisis.
Consider the irony in all this. The ultimate political careerist, a good soldier who has dutifully embraced his party establishment’s position and policies over the years and who was selected specifically for the purpose of returning power to that very establishment, i.e. the Swamp, because of his insistence on clinging to power, stands to die by the same sword with which he lived. The man whose outsized ambition led to a decades-long quest for the presidency and who finally succeeded on a pandemic-fueled wave of good fortune now appears intent on trashing his own legacy and the long-term fortunes of his party due to the very same thing that has characterized his entire career: an addiction to power.
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