WHY BIDEN AND TRUMP ARE TIED

Like so much wind and rain, hurricane-strength squalls of bad news have battered the leaky old boat SS Trump all year. He’s been indicted four times, on 91 separate felony charges - that’s compared with zero counts for all of his presidential predecessors. Trump likes to claim that anything he does is the most spectacular, the best, the biggest, even when it’s not (which is usually the case), but here - when it comes to accumulating criminal charges - he’s the undisputed champ.

By contrast, President Joe Biden,has been basking in mostly good news since his inauguration. In the last three years, the COVID vaccines were rolled out and distributed; since 2022, job growth has been spectacular, with monthly job reports regularly outperforming predictions; inflation has moderated to the point there’s a good argument for the Fed not to push for more; the stock market has recovered; Biden’s legislative record compares favorably with FDR and LBJ. Almost every week, Biden cuts a ribbon for an ambitious infrastructure project (unlike his predecessor, who accomplished nothing with his many “infrastructure weeks”); new clean- energy plant made possible by the sweeping laws he signed now have the likes of Marjorie Traitor Goon complaining about the new companies in her congressional district “stealing employees” from existing companies there. The chaos everyone predicted at the southern border when Biden ended the pandemic-era Trump policy Title 42 hasn’t happened. Crime rates are declining in most major cities.

And with all of that, national polls, and surveys in the key swing states, consistently show Biden and Trump locked in a dead heat for the 2024 election.

The worst, most criminal, most corrupt, most incompetent president in the entire history of the republic stands a good chance of returning to office in 2024, according to polling.

Most knowledgeable observers agree that the main reason Biden and Trump are so closely competitive in a potential rematch is that in this polarized political era, there are very few voters in either party open to switching sides for any reason.

Democrats have benefitted since the 2020 election from Trump’s conspiratorial efforts to overturn his electoral loss, and his continuing claim that he was the victim of massive fraud that has become his main campaign point in the 2024 campaign. The result of his activities, and the criminal indictments that have come from them, is that a narrow majority of the country see Trump as the main threat to American democracy. In at CBS/YouGov national poll conducted in early August following Trump’s first federal indictment over his illegal taking and retention of classified documents, 52% of Americans agreed that he attempted to stay in office after the 2020 election “through illegal and unconstitutional activities.”

Other voters appear exhausted by his constant stirring of controversy. These are people who may like his political agenda, but are turned off by the potential for turmoil returning him to the presidency might unleash. These people are potentially persuadable by the Biden campaign to vote against Trump.

The other big change in the polarized electoral environment is the decision in June 2022 by the GOP-appointed conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade and end the constitutional right to abortion. Polls consistently show that two thirds of Americans oppose the Dobbs ruling and want to keep abortion legal in all or most circumstances. This has been repeatedly shown by pro-choice votes in red states to support abortion and the defeat of anti-abortion candidates in the 2022 election. Swing state voters in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were responsible for these defeats and potentially hold the power to turn these states from red to purple or even blue in 2024, since the GOP continues to refuse to see this widespread opposition to their policies and to modify their position on the issue.

The two parties have mostly completely sorted themselves over the issue of Donald Trump. The previously-Republican suburban voters, particularly the movement of college-educated white women away from the GOP toward Democrats, has the potential to be permanent with the 2024 election. These voters are now more concerned about the social stigma from being associated with a party that overturned Roe, supports Confederate monuments, and attacks gay marriage. The same dynamic has peeled off a substantial number of college-educated white men who have traditionally been the Republican electoral backbone.

However, despite the electoral moves in reaction to the imposition of Republican policies that voters dislike, and despite the continuing good economic news, Biden and the Democrats are not pulling away from the GOP. In fact, a surprisingly-large number of voters tell pollsters that they remember the first years of Trump’s presidency as being “good economic times,” despite the actual facts that Trump consistently did not follow through with most of his 2016 campaign promises regarding the economy, and the lack of success of those steps he did take with regard to the economy. For too many voters, discontent over inflation and higher prices in the past few years overshadow the consistent job growth and pace of new plant openings the Biden campaign now campaigns on under the label “Bidenomics.”

While many economists didn’t believe Biden’s legislative remedies would work on the economy as hoped, and expected that inflation would only be brought under control with several years of high unemployment as happened 40 years ago when the inflation of the 70s was finally stamped out, the economy has defied those dire predictions and inflation has come way down despite continuing strength in employment. Real wages of the average worker - average hourly earnings divided by consumer prices - is higher now than before the pandemic; prices are higher, but they have been outpaced by wages. There’s no question that public perceptions of the economy are vastly worse than the economic reality, but hopefully the reality of those facts will become more apparent in voters’ everyday lives over coming months. The percentage of businesses reporting price increases is markedly down, which is reason for optimism on this point.

The problem here is that it takes several years for voters to feel they have restored their financial stability after an extended period of inflation. When that is coupled with problems like the housing crisis, which has locked out a majority of Americans from the dream of home ownership, and made the efforts of those who do own their homes more difficult, sunny campaign ads that seem to be at odds with the reality a voter is actually experiencing make them resistant to the optimistic Biden message. This is particularly true with regard to younger voters and voters of color, because both groups have limited incomes, and are thus especially frustrated by higher prices which squeeze them economically even if their wages have risen. These are the voters most likely to say that the economy seemed to be better under Trump. Amazingly, an ABD/Washington post poll this past spring found an 18-percentage-point margin in favor of Trump pver Biden on the question of who managed the economy better those polled who were under 30 gave Trump a 2-to-1 advantage on the question. A Wall Street Journal poll found 58% of voters say the economy has gotten worse during the past two years, with only 28% saying it has gotten better.

One reason for this lack of awareness by the public is that the mainstream media does not give the Biden Administration’s clear accomplishments the recognition they deserve. Last week, the Administration announced the first ten drugs for which it will negotiate new, lower prices for Medicare under the authority granted in the Inflation Adjustment Act. This is something both Democratic and Republican administrations have sought to do in the past, but it wasn’t until Biden’s IRA that the government could negotiate lower prices on both Medicare Part D and Part B drugs. This is, as Biden said about the passage of Obamacare - which didn’t achieve this particular goal - a Big Fucking Deal. It will save consumers close to $100 billion over the ten years after those lower prices go into effect in 2026. That delay in price reduction is likely as important a reason for this not being given the recognition it deserves as was Obamacare’s two year delay in implementation after its passage in 2010. The administration’s move to cap annual out-of-pocket costs to Medicare recipients at $2,000/year is also a Big Fucking Deal. If it works, this will be one of the very few times in American history where the government has won against the lobbyists - the DC “swamp” Biden’s predecessor is always complaining about.

Team Biden’s problem is that its greatest strength, its ability to operate under the radar while getting a lot done for the American people, may also be its greatest weakness, since they are not getting public notice of their accomplishments. Negotiating drug prices with Big Pharma, funding construction of semiconductor factories in red states, investing in clean energy, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on broadband for rural communities, thee re all important things no administration has done before. But the news today is all about Republicans threatening to shut down the government in a bit over three weeks, or idiots like Marjorie Traitor Goon calling to impeach Biden for reasons unknown, unfounded and unproven.

One can hope that the effect of Biden’s legislative victories will become more widely apparent over the next 14 months.

Will anything invalidate the rationalizations of Donald Trump supporters that keep them in his cult? Do his violations really bind them to him more tightly than ever? Since 2016, despite every revelation of his complete unfitness to participate in civilized company, the answer has been yes. Trump’s grievances have become theirs; they have adopted his will-to-power ethic. The past eight years since he came down his golden escalator has witnessed an extraordinary psychological and moral accommodation.

At present, for Trump supporters to call him out as the moral threat he is would be to call out themselves, something that is too painful for too many people. The greater the ethical compromises one makes, the fiercer the justifications for those acts become. And if Trump is dethroned as the leader of the Republican Party, whoever succeeds him will have done so by modeling themselves after him. Trumpism will outlive Trump.

Unfortunately, regardless of the outcome next year and particularly if Trump is defeated, I fear that Mike Madrid, a serious critic of Trump and Trumpism who understands Republican politics well, is right: “Anybody who thinks this is not going to be very competitive … they are not paying attention to American politics. It’s going to be close. It’s going to be close for the next 20 years.”

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