Matt Rourke/AP Photo
President Joe Biden walks off the stage after speaking at the Democratic National Committee winter meeting, February 3, 2023, in Philadelphia.
Tomorrow, Joe Biden will join striking UAW workers on a picket line, the first president ever to do so. I’m told the decision was controversial among Biden advisers—isn’t the president supposed to be a neutral broker?—but it was the right decision.
The auto companies, like most of corporate America, are awash in profits, while workers are losing jobs, wages, and economic security. Biden’s entire program aims at righting that imbalance. So why not display that class solidarity in the most vivid fashion possible?
It’s also smart and overdue politics. There are more workers than bosses. Biden is underwater in most polls, especially on the economy. This, despite the fact that inflation has been tamed, the economy is at full employment, and wages on average are up slightly. But for most voters, the basics haven’t changed for the better. The exception to that, however, is unionized workers.
Biden’s several public-investment laws serve as a full-employment act for the building trades, extending into much of the next decade. In Biden’s TV ads, how about a real-life construction worker, and a real-life autoworker, telling what Biden has done for them and why they support him. How about a stressed parent telling how much difference the Child Tax Credit made in their lives, and why a vote for Biden and a Democratic Congress is a vote to restore and extend it.
“Our House, Senate, and state legislative candidates are significantly outperforming Biden and make every branch competitive in 2024,” pollster Stan Greenberg told me. “The polling in the battleground states shows him running significantly better than 2020. Critically, he can run stronger if he stops talking about their accomplishments and makes the election a future choice with the Republicans, on the very same issues he has been speaking about.”
Getting this right is urgent. The most recent Washington Post/ABC poll, if accurate, suggests the risk of a catastrophe in 2024 for Democrats. Not only is Biden’s approval rating down to 37 percent favorable and 56 percent unfavorable. His rating on the economy is even worse, 30 percent positive to 64 percent negative.
The Post poll is something of an outlier. It shows Biden trailing Trump by ten points while other polls show the race as a dead heat. And it shows Trump as more popular now than when he left office. It even shows that more voters hold Democrats than Republicans responsible for the budget impasse.
But even if the Post poll overstates these trends because of sample error, there is a useful warning here. The Trump years are remembered by many voters as better than the Biden years—no inflation, low interest rates, no war in Ukraine, no pandemic until 2020. This is grossly unfair, but life is unfair; and Trump will work to maximize this perception.
The risk is that the public’s view of Biden gets hardened to the point where almost nothing can alter it. A great many Democrats wish that someone else were their candidate in 2024, someone younger and more vigorous who can make Trump look like the geezer in the race.
This pessimism feeds on itself and depresses organizing and fundraising. Biden has a few months to dramatically change that equation. If he doesn’t, the calls from within his own party will grow for him to stand aside before he is shunted aside in the 2024 election.
