When it comes to U.S. politics, there are two big phases in a campaign: the primary and the general election. During the primary season, a candidate has to prioritize appealing to the people in his or her own party. This means that most candidates will appear more extreme, because winning that primary means building a coalition of people in the party.
But, once the primary is over, the rules of the game change. Instead of appealing to their political parties, candidates instead need to appeal to all voters, with particular attention paid in swing states. Inability to shift gears and start appealing to voters between and across the aisle means certain defeat, but the candidate must also balance this without alienating voters on the fringes of their in-party coalition who might be tempted to stay home.
Normally, an incumbent president is in a great position to appeal to the broader public by July of an election year. Incumbents generally don’t have to face a grueling primary season the way a challenger does, so they even get the advantage of being able to start that shift earlier and more aggressively.
This is not a normal election year, and seems to be getting weirder by the minute. For one, it’s a race between two incumbents, as both major candidates have spent time in the Oval Office. We’re also seeing Trump almost completely ignore the usual playbook, working to appeal to and grow the Republican base instead of trying to appeal to moderates and Democrats. Now, we’re seeing Biden slip in serious ways.
If it weren’t for a very poor recent debate performance, Biden would probably be in the driver’s seat. With Trump and his followers working to build a more solid right-wing coalition and stamp out dissent among conservatives, Biden should have been able to use his incumbent primary advantage to pull in massive numbers of independents, moderates and even less committed conservatives who are skeptical of MAGA. So, the only softening Trump has had to throw in so far has been a slightly softened stance on abortion and gay marriage.
Instead of being able to press the advantage, Biden is shifting back into primary mode, fighting to keep the Democratic coalition together. Not only is he facing trouble from the left, as newly-minted Hamas supporters vow to not vote for him over Israel policy, but he’s also facing calls for him to step down due to age and a general inability to look and act presidential on the stage.
Worse for Biden and the Democrats, there’s no clear alternative candidate. Ask any Democrat, and instead of telling you who they think would beat Trump, most of them will tell you who their favorite alternative is. Among the stronger candidates would be Vice President Kamala Harris, but she was roundly rejected during the primaries in her own party, and would probably fail to keep the coalition together once everyone is reminded that she’s anything but a “progressive prosecutor.” So, there’s really no good alternative out there that Democrats can pull out of their collective butts.
While everyone has been focused on Biden’s overuse of “anyways” and confusing Zelenskyy for Putin, it’s his little quips on guns that really show the peril he’s now in as a presidential candidate. Any honest polling in recent years show that gun ownership and gun rights has gone mainstream. The days of appealing to moderates and centrists with gun control are over, and many segments of the communist far left are even skeptical of it now, as they know they’d need guns for a revolution.
The only crowd a candidate can impress with talk of gun control are hard-core big government progressives who want to continue the FDR revolution and put the United States back on the road to a collectivist utopia. Everyone else, even the communists, knows that it’s not a policy that would serve their interests in the long run.
Arguably, one of the biggest advantages Biden had going for him was distaste with red state abortion bans that didn’t have sufficient exceptions for rape, incest, etc. Seeing Biden tie this advantageous policy situation to gun control with a “Protect Girls Not Guns” slogan shows us that he’s so desperate to keep the big government progressive coalition together that he’s willing to even throw in his best card. What could have been used to save him in the general election is instead getting flushed down the toilet with gun control to impress the wrong people.
Obviously, we’re still months out from the big day in November, and a lot can happen, but if Biden can’t move out of primary mode and start appealing to the broader electorate while playing to his few big strengths that can reach across the aisle, he’s got no chance to survive as a candidate.
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