Democrats’ Panic Over Biden Candidacy Hits High Gear

Ward Clark reporting for RedState 

I've written before - several times - about President Joe Biden's sad and obvious deterioration, and how Democrats are increasingly wanting to see someone other than him or his life insurance policy, Kamala Harris, as the 2024 candidate. This is a bad situation for the Democrats, and it may be past the time when they can do anything about it; increasingly, the Democrats and their water-bearers in the legacy media are becoming very, very worried. As we enter into the last month of the year, that panic seems to have shifted into high gear.

Prominent Democratic operative and analyst David Axelrod, who remains close to former President Barack Obama and is reflective of Obamaworld thinking, has warned that Biden has no better than a 50-50 shot at reelection.

“But no better than that, maybe a little worse,” Axelrod told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “He thinks he can cheat nature here, and it’s really risky. They’ve got a real problem if they’re counting on Trump to win it for them. I remember Hillary doing that, too.”

Axelrod previously mused on X, formerly Twitter, about Biden giving serious thought to whether he should continue to pursue a reelection campaign.

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman went a step further than Axelrod.

“I think Biden’s done a lot of good things. But I think his legacy will not be a good one if he is the nominee,” Ackman told Bloomberg Television. “I do think the right thing for Biden to do is to step aside and to say he’s not going to run and create the opportunity for some competition.”

There's a fair amount of cognitive dissonance in those statements. Mr. Ackman claims that President Biden has "...done a lot of good things," but it's difficult in the extreme to point out what any of those good things are, unless one is inexplicably in favor of inflation, skyrocketing gas and grocery prices, the disintegration of our major cities, and an Administration headed by the most deeply and fundamentally corrupt political figure since Huey Long - maybe since Caligula.

The one hope Democrats seem to be holding out for is Donald Trump being the Republican nominee, and that may be a forlorn hope after all.

Part of what is driving this sentiment is that Trump is, in their view, so manifestly unfit to serve that no viable Democratic nominee should ever trail him.

Yet Biden is 1.9 points behind Trump in the RealClearPolitics polling average. The sitting president also trails Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) by 0.8 points and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley by 4.

“In 2016, Trump led Hillary Clinton for all of five days in the national RealClearPolitics average, each of those days in the immediate aftermath of the Republican convention,” election analyst Sean Trende wrote. “He led in 29 polls taken over the course of the entire campaign, 10 of which are recorded in the RCP averages as Los Angeles Times/USC tracking polls.”

How much are these polls telling us? Well, an individual poll may or may not mean anything (Opt-in polls and Twitter surveys are egregiously bad and should be ignored,) but trends are interesting to watch, and that's where the RealClearPolitics average is of interest, as averaging a range of polls can remove some of the noise, and following them over time can reveal trends; if you look at the history of the RCP average over the last few months, the trend is distinctly towards the GOP.

It's unlikely, as well, that the choice of running mates could make a difference. It's unclear at this point what Democrats can do to push aside the execrable Kamala Harris, while Trump has a large and anxious field to choose from.

We've had some bad Presidents in the history of the Republic. Andrew Johnson comes to mind, as does Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama. However, history may well view Joe Biden as the worst to date, and mind you he's up against some pretty stiff competition; the fact that he is losing ground in polls against a man who the legacy media and leftist prosecutors and judges have been desperately trying to take down since the day he announced his candidacy in 2015, speaks volumes. 

I will here repeat my standard disclaimer: The general election is a long way away, not one primary vote has yet been cast, and a lot can happen between now and then. But it sure looks like that, if the general election were to be held today, Donald Trump would be sending Joe Biden off to whatever retirement he retains the capacity to enjoy.

Joe Biden's administration has been marked with and characterized by one thing: Incompetence. His 2024 re-election campaign is no exception. The Biden campaign, with just a tad over eleven months to go until the 2024 election, is already crashing to earth like the National Christmas tree. That's a bad thing for them - but it may be a good thing for America.

One more thing: Could last night's California/Florida debate have given us a preview of 2028? That, folks, will be a very interesting discussion - for another time.