Joe Biden just can’t win. I refer not to the presidential election, which is still 11 months away, but to his supporters’ predisposition for dissatisfaction.
Consider the president’s student-loan forgiveness plan, which – regardless of its merits, or lack thereof – is at least in part intended to help him appeal to younger Americans. Yet according to the latest Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll, a plurality of Gen Z voters in swing states says he is doing too little. A plurality of all voters in swing states, meanwhile, says he is doing too much.
This is representative of the larger dynamic that has currently marooned the president with historically bad approval ratings. On many issues, he has made meaningful policy change in a progressive direction – often at the cost of alienating more moderate voters. At the same time, he is beset by progressive advocacy groups and media voices complaining that he hasn’t done enough.
To an extent, that’s just how it goes in a pluralistic democracy. There are 335 million Americans, and it’s hard to imagine any president taking any position on any issue that wasn’t too right-wing for millions of people and too left-wing for millions of others. Winning an election necessarily means winning the votes of lots of people who don’t fully agree with you.
Yet what’s striking about this political moment is that Biden’s presumptive opponent, former President Donald Trump, is widely described as an existential threat to American democracy. Under those circumstances, you might think liberal voters would take a more forgiving attitude.
It’s not just Zoomers who seem bafflingly ungrateful to an administration that’s had their back.
The Biden administration signed into law the most ambitious climate legislation in the history of the U.S., arguably of the world. That’s pretty good! And he did it at a time of high inflation, when most voters would probably have preferred he focus on making energy as cheap as possible. His reward from environmentalists? Calls for the COP 28 gathering to be more ambitious, demands that the US be less friendly to natural gas, complaints that he’s approving too many oil and gas leases.
As Trump tours the country, one of his key arguments is that he’ll be friendlier to the domestic fossil-fuel industry, and that this will help reduce prices. An obvious Biden response is that U.S. oil and gas production are currently at all-time highs.
When I’ve asked White House sources why they don’t talk this up, they tell me they are trying to fight the perception among climate-focused voters that they haven’t done enough on this issue. I disagree with that political calculus, but it’s not totally crazy. What is crazy is the behavior of groups unwilling to cut the president some slack even though he’s delivered more for them than for anyone else.
Or consider the Muslim and Arab-American groups upset that the administration has been too supportive of Israel in its war with Hamas. That is a perfectly legitimate criticism – but at the same time, at no point in the 2020 campaign did Biden suggest he was planning to abandon America’s longstanding alliance with Israel.
So the sense of betrayal in many of these complaints seems misplaced. And the Biden administration has stood squarely and publicly against Islamophobia and racism at home, which Trump certainly has not. Immigration groups, similarly, can legitimately see Biden as not doing all that much for them while also acknowledging that Trump would be worse.
In both cases, it’s not irrational for these groups to prioritize increasing their clout within the Democratic Party coalition by threatening to withhold their support for Biden. But this view is inconsistent with the belief that Trump is a major threat to U.S. democracy.
To be clear: I think that Trump is, in fact, a major threat to US democracy. During his previous term in office, he incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol in an effort to coerce members of Congress into overturning the results of the presidential election. Now, as a candidate for 2024, he’s promising to pardon them. America’s three branches of government are located within the borders of Washington, where all “normal” criminal law is a federal matter and subject to presidential pardons. A rogue president could, in theory, use the pardon power to enact all kinds of violence to resolve interbranch conflict and subvert the constitutional order. Many of Trump’s former closest collaborators have denounced one or the other of his many wildly inappropriate actions.
These issues will undoubtedly be front and center in next year’s campaign. But it’s also clear that a significant segment of the public – possibly a majority – doesn’t really care about them, or doesn’t believe the worst will happen.
That’s unfortunate. Even more unfortunate is that Trump’s opponents are playing politics as usual, putting constant pressure on Biden to enact more of the progressive agenda. In the short term, the demands complicate the White House’s political calculations. In the long term, they undermine the message that Trump is an existential threat. He can’t be that bad, swing voters might reason, if members of Biden’s coalition are more worried about their own issues than a second Trump term.
As it happens, I know a lot of progressives – I’m one myself – and I think most of them do mean what they say about Trump. They just need to start acting like it.
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