With his party struggling in the midterms, his economic stewardship under fire and his overall job approval under 40%, a clear majority of Democrats in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say the party should replace Joe Biden as its nominee for president in 2024. In the November midterm election ahead, registered voters divide 47%-46% between the Republican and the Democratic candidate in their House district, historically not enough to prevent typical first-midterm losses. And one likely voter model has a 51%-46% Republican-Democratic split. Looking two years off, just 35% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents favor Biden for the 2024 nomination; 56% want the party to pick someone else. Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, for their part, split 47%-46% on whether Donald Trump should be their 2024 nominee -- a 20-point drop for Trump compared with his 2020 nomination. The unpopularity of both figures may encourage third-party hopefuls, though they rarely do well.
CAMPAIGN 2022 Democrats are losing because liberalism has become cruel The ‘stop hate’ party embraces vicious identity politics, and voters have noticed October 27, 2022 | 10:41 pm (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) Written by: Matt Purple Share Text Welp, so much for the blue wave. That towering electoral tsunami, which was to deluge the midterm races in a soggy detritus of worn masks and Planned Parenthood pamphlets, has given way to a stark reality: 2022 is a Republican year. It was always a Republican year, as some of us have been pointing out. Voters simply weren’t about to prioritize third-trimester abortions over rising crime and the price of beef. So it was that Jill Biden this week was dispatched to campaign in Rhode Island. Rhode Island. And while she no doubt made a pitstop at Brown to hobnob with her fellow doctorates, she was mainly there to campaign for endangered Democrats. In Rhode Island. A Democratic congressional PAC, meanwhile, is dumping money into deep-blue New Jersey. And New York’s unelected dowager Kathy Hochul has just seen a massive lead over her GOP gubernatorial opponent Lee Zeldin evaporate. In swing states across the country, panicked Democrats are sliding down fireman’s poles. On Friday, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will appear jointly to campaign for Senate candidate John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. For those not in the know: Biden and Kamala never appear together. Ever. In fact, it’s possible that Biden and Kamala appearing together will open a black hole that will destroy the universe in a crescendo of awkward cackles and come on mans. Yet the Pennsylvania race is seen as the key to a divided Senate. Desperate times and all that. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has been hauled out of cryo to barnstorm across the marginal districts. The logic here is understandable: Obama may be the last popular asset the Democrats have left. The problem is that the subtext of every Obama appearance is: man, the current guy sure blows, doesn’t he? It’s the opposition party that’s supposed to harken back to a better time, not the crew currently in charge. Yet such a mess is the country right now that Democrats apparently think voters will be waxing nostalgic for the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression. Or maybe it’s more than that. Maybe Democrats are suffering — and nostalgia for the recent past is growing — for other reasons. Join me now in the DeLorean, darling, as we turn back the revolutionary calendar all the way to 2009. Obama has just been elected president, seemingly putting a pin in centuries of American racial strife. He opposes gay marriage and no one seems to care. Wokeness is not yet a thing. Neither is intersectionality. Suggesting children be given puberty blockers on demand can and will get you chucked off of a moving train. Crime is low; unity is high. Now splinter back to today, when liberalism no longer seems idealistic or even woke so much as cruel. Consider as an example the recent debate between John Fetterman and Dr. Oz. Those who pointed out that Fetterman might be an unfit candidate due to his clear cognitive impairment — a reasonable enough observation a decade ago — were this year derided as ableist. The full shield of identity politics was brought to bear around Fetterman, with any criticism of his acuity ruled out of bounds. And then, when it came time to debate, when that shield had to come down, Fetterman was left pausing and stumbling and flip-flopping while the rest of us sank into our sofas. This wasn’t empowering; it was just…mean. The same goes for Joe Biden’s recent trip to the mall in a Members Only jacket with trans TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney. Biden in that interview surrendered completely to trans ideology. He even went so far as to say states shouldn’t pass any laws against children receiving puberty-blocking hormones or sex-change surgeries. The policy is barbaric, of course, but the spectacle itself was also vicious. Here was this self-anointed cipher of the blue-collar Dems, this haunt of Irish-Catholic villages, being shanghaied into thumbs-upping child abuse by a preening man transitioning into — not a woman, mind you — but a girl. I might even feel sorry for Biden had he not implied that I’m a domestic terrorist last month. And the list of cruelties rolls on: Covid lockdowns stunting children’s educational growth; soft-on-crime urban policies leaving addicts to die in sidewalk tents; feral Twitter hoards lying in wait for anyone who utters wrongthink. Remember: it’s the GOP that’s supposed to be the nasty party. The Democrats are all about equality and empathy and love. Yet this year has made the reality perfectly plain: liberalism doesn’t care about the disenfranchised so much as it fetishizes them in the abstract. And once they fall stray of the ideology, as actual people so often do, well, we’ve finished that story before, haven’t we? The question now is whether liberals will ever correct for this, or whether they’re about to enter a “you’ve got to crack a few eggs to make an omelette” phase. I’m especially curious to see what they do if Hispanics start voting en masse for the GOP. Either way, this great leap forward is seeing victims fall into its gap. Don’t think voters haven’t noticed — and aren’t planning a little Election Day ritual humiliation of their own.
ah, yes, the party of christian nationalist straight white men is not cruel in their identity politics
Seems to be quite normal for the ruling party to lose midterm elections. Throw in the timing of Fed policy and it's even more natural. I suspect by 2024 the economy will look really good again, inflation will be tamed and whomever runs the Democrats will be in a lot better shape to win.
Popular Joe is Going Down on Big Wednesday In 2020, US President Joe Biden scored more than 81 million votes – a record. Some 12 million more than were racked up twelve years earlier by Barack Obama, in fact, despite Biden’s minimal campaigning. Tim Blair @RobotTimBlair 5 min read November 7, 2022 - 12:21AM 185 comments You've gotta hand it to him, Joe Biden is one of the few people on earth capable of falling up a staircase Just two years later, however, Biden’s Democrats face a historic rebuke of hilarious proportions. Podcaster Joe Rogan believes that the red Republican wave that’s coming on Wednesday, Sydney time, “is going to be like the elevator doors opening up in The Shining". So what went wrong? How did the most popular US presidential candidate in history, backed by an almost completely compliant and supportive media, convert 81 million votes into what will likely be a massive Democrat disaster? Well, that media support didn’t help. Trust in the US press has collapsed as voters realised just how much they were duped two years ago by the media’s anti-Trump obsession. They’ve turned away from cable network CNN, a ratings high-flyer during Donald Trump’s reign. Multiple bosses and on-air stars – Jeff Zucker, John Harwood, Brian Stelter and Chris Cuomo, among others – have been fired or quit. CNN’s fortunes pancaked in parallel with Biden’s Democrats, for whom CNN acts as a blatant promotional agency. So, too, do US free-to-air networks. The other night, CBS’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert – a comedy program under previous hosts – featured sucky interviews with Democrat fake native American Elizabeth Warren and Obama-era energy official Ernest Moniz. No wonder Colbert is beaten in the ratings by Fox New’s irreverent conservative Greg Gutfeld. Colbert and other late-night hosts are on board with the Democrats, so they avoid taking shots at Biden – even when he’s offering comedy gold. Gutfeld therefore has all that material for himself. It’s like being the only non-vegan at an all-you-can-eat wagyu steak buffet. During just the past week or so, while Warren was whining to Colbert about nothing anybody cared about, Biden claimed there was a war in Iraq rather than Ukraine, that his son Beau died in Iraq instead of a US hospital and GM is “committed to going all electric by 3035”. Then came a line reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election vow to “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”, a ruinous blunder Clinton later said was her greatest campaign regret. “No one is building new coal plants because they can’t rely on it. Even if they have all the coal guaranteed for the rest of the existence of the plant,” Biden told an audience in California on Friday. “We’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America and having wind and solar power.” With only a few days to go before the midterms, that wasn’t exactly a vote-winning promise – especially not in coal mining states such as Pennsylvania, where the only Democrat less lucid than Biden (Lurch-like stroke victim John Fetterman) is running for senate. So, as usual, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was forced to mop up. “President Biden knows that the men and women of coal country built this nation,” diversity hire Jean-Pierre said in a statement that expressed “regret” if anyone hearing Biden’s remarks “took offense”. Biden, she said, “came to the White House to end years of big words but little action to help the coal-producing parts of our country”. He’s going to help them by shutting them down. Great plan. When Biden isn’t stomping on the economy, he’s railing against sinister “MAGA Republicans” who, he says, are somehow able to destroy democracy by questioning a previous election’s outcome – in much the same way Democrats denied the outcomes of the 2000, 2004 and 2016 elections, all won by Republicans. “American democracy is under attack because the defeated former president of the United States refuses to accept the results of the 2020 election,” Biden said last week. “Make no mistake. Democracy is on the ballot for all of us.” When Democrats say democracy is in danger, they mean Democrats are in danger. And they are, which is why Biden has been campaigning in Democrat strongholds California, Washington DC and New York. Sadly for Democrats, they don’t have the same social media assistance they were granted in 2020. Twitter banned the New York Post’s accurate Hunter Biden story two years ago, but now the Twitter executive who made that decision is gone – along with about half the company’s 7500-strong workforce. New owner Elon Musk turfed them after noting that for every Twitter engineer there were ten managers, many of whom suppressed certain accounts and elevated others in order to push leftist narratives. Democrats are now scared that actual truth – always kryptonite to the left – may dominate the platform. As one conservative mockingly observed: “What will we do without overpaid 25-year-old left wingers contextualising our news for us?” Twitter might be a fun place on Wednesday. Besides following The Daily Telegraph’s James Morrow at our site, also enjoy his Twitter reports direct from the US – along with coverage from Sky’s Rita Panahi and conservatives Ben Shapiro, Jim Treacher, Jesse Kelly, Libs of TikTok, Jack Posobiec and Dana Loesch. And also Oilfield Rando, an anonymous oil worker who is a more acute political observer than anyone on staff at the New York Times. Long live democracy. UPDATE. Could New York possibly be in play? Michael Goodwin believes so: A friend writes to say that his wife and “some of her staunchly D” female friends, all pro-choice suburbanites, are voting for Republican Lee Zeldin for governor. A former colleague working in real estate volunteers that he’s backing Zeldin “because this isn’t the Democratic Party I signed up for.” Another Dem, a former top New York official, writes: “For the first time in my life, I just voted the straight Republican ticket for New York state. The Democratic Party has lost touch with the people they are supposed to represent.” These are the voices of a potential earthquake. The last Republican governor of New York left office 16 years ago. UPDATE II. Biden’s media friends are turning against him. Even the New York Times: And that crazy old lady from the Washington Post: UPDATE III. Ex-SBS presenter turned Australian Twitter executive Katherine Gallo mourns the loss of her staff: “Today, my entire team was laid off from Twitter,” Ms Gallo wrote on LinkedIn. “I’m heartbroken because when I left my previous job at SBS I thought I wasn’t going to find another place I loved so much so quickly. “My brilliant curation colleagues tackled misinformation, contextualised topics of interest, including breaking news, politics, health, social justice, sports and entertainment, summarising complex conversations unfolding in real-time on Twitter.” They were a bunch of bossy leftists and now they’re sacked. UPDATE IV: Tim BlairJournalist