Joe Biden’s losing midterm message for Democrats

There’s little in Joe Biden’s message to lead swing voters to vote Democrat on November 8. Picture: AFP

Over the past week, US President Joe Biden laid out his party’s closing campaign message, providing Democratic Party candidates with a template to help them power through the election’s final days. It wasn’t pretty.

Biden began with a Democratic National Committee event at Washington’s Howard Theatre on October 18, telling the crowd, “The first bill that I will send to the congress will be to codify Roe v. Wade.” Abortion will be his top priority in 2023. “If you care about the right to choose,” he said, “then you got to vote.”

The second part of the president’s campaign message was that he and congressional Democrats have done a lot. Biden focused on the Inflation Reduction Act, telling a Pennsylvania rally last Thursday the new law will “fix the environment,” provide tax credits for “weatherising your home” and “cap the places — the — the old coal mines that are spewing methane,” whatever that means.

The President offered a third message plank on Friday, bragging that he’s working to rebuild the economy “stronger than it was before the pandemic”, with record job creation, low unemployment, new infrastructure investment and falling gasoline prices. He also claimed to be a fiscal hawk, saying the federal deficit fell $US1.4 trillion this year, “the largest-ever decline”.

Mixed into all of Biden’s remarks were attacks on Republicans as extremists. The GOP wants to “get rid of or fundamentally change Social Security and Medicare” and are threatening they “would not pay for the national debt,” meaning “our credit as a nation would be demolished”. The President warned that the “mega-MAGA trickle-down” policies of tax cuts and less government red tape “have failed the country before and will fail it again”.

If this is the best the president can do, he should stay off the campaign trail. It isn’t much help for his party.

Making abortion his top priority is a strange commitment, given how low it ranks among voters’ concerns. The biggest issue for voters in Gallup’s September 16 poll was “government/poor leadership.” Twenty-two per cent said it’s the country’s most important problem today, which is a problem if you’re president. This was followed by inflation at 17 per cent, the economy in general at 12 per cent, immigration at 6 per cent and race relations at 5 per cent. Abortion was at 4 pe cent, tied with crime, unifying the country, poverty/hunger/homelessness and elections/election reform/democracy. Another detail bodes poorly for the president: When asked which party can better handle the problem respondents thought was most important, 48 per cent answered Republicans and 37 per cent said Democrats.

Biden’s pumping the Inflation Reduction Act also doesn’t aid Democrats much. That hodgepodge of liberal spending can’t reduce inflation, and voters seem to know it. As Gallup’s Frank Newport observed, “there is evidence that Americans are open” to the GOP’s idea of “less government involvement and spending as a cure for inflation”. And the president’s claim to being a deficit cutter is ridiculous. The deficit’s decline came from the end of the temporary Covid programs, not from Biden’s balancing the nation’s books.

Most important, the president’s boasts about the economy are at odds with what Americans are experiencing. They feel inflation’s impact when they go to the store, fill up the car, pay their bills, look at their savings and see that their paychecks don’t go as far as they once did. Biden may be content with his economic leadership, but most Americans are not. In the RealClearPolitics average, 34 per cent approve and 62 per cent disapprove of his handling of inflation, while 39 per cent approve and 58 per cent disapprove of his handling of the economy in general.

Then there’s the final component of Biden’s message. Assailing Republicans as “mega-MAGA” extremists will work only if GOP candidates look, act and talk like extremists. Absent that, the message will fall flat with the swing voters who’ll decide many critical contests. Biden may also motivate GOP voters to turn out, angered by his unfair denunciations of all Republicans as fanatics.

Last week the President, in talking about the election, underscored the shifts in polling over the summer: “It’s been back and forth with them ahead, us ahead, them ahead. Back and forth. And the polls have been all over the place. I think that we’re going to see one more shift back to our side in the closing days.”

Could momentum swing back to the Democrats in a way that matters? It’s conceivable but highly unlikely. In past mid-terms, momentum at the finish has generally been on the side of the party out of the White House. It’s possible for the in-power party to reduce the damage, but there’s little in Biden’s uninspiring, misleading and out-of-touch closing message to lead swing voters to vote Democrat.

Karl Rove helped organise the political-action committee American Crossroads and is author of The Triumph of William McKinley (Simon & Schuster, 2015).

The Wall Street Journal