If Biden Is the Best Democrats Can Do, They Are in Deep Trouble - WhoWhatWhy If Biden Is the Best Democrats Can Do, They Are in Deep Trouble - WhoWhatWhy

Politics

Joe Biden, Philadelphia, PA
President Joe Biden attends a small business event at South Restaurant and Jazz Club in Philadelphia, PA, May 29, 2024. Photo credit: Joe Biden / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED)

Claiming that only Joe Biden can defeat Donald Trump, or that he is best-positioned to do so after last week’s debate, is not just ridiculous but also sells short the entire Democratic Party.

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In order to curb the fallout from Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week, and to end all talk of whether he should drop out of the race, his campaign is rushing to assure Democrats that the president is their best bet to keep his Republican opponent out of the White House.

“I think he’s the only Democrat who can beat Donald Trump,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D), who represents the president’s home state of Delaware, on ABC’s This Week.

Really???

What the national co-chair of the Biden campaign is saying here is that, out of millions of Democrats, there is precisely one who can defeat a lying, mentally unstable convicted felon.

Let that sink in.

If that’s truly the case, then they deserve to lose.

But it is not, of course.

There are loads of Democrats who would be in a much better position to beat Trump than Debate Joe.

The president’s campaign tried to pretend otherwise by including a bunch of polls in an email that can best be described as damage control, including this one.

Sure, at first glance it shows that Biden has the greatest share of the vote among all Democratic candidates (the same as Vice President Kamala Harris).

But that means absolutely nothing because he is still losing by 3 points (while others are losing by less), and Trump performs better against him than Democrats Americans haven’t even gotten to know yet.

For Biden’s chances, that poll is an accurate snapshot of where the race stands right now… and things will probably get worse for a while unless he proves, if he can, that he is not too frail to serve another four years. And that seems highly unlikely.

And, for the other candidates, things will change for sure (for better or worse) once Americans get to know them.

Google searches for Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan (a swing state), and Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania (another swing state), spiked right after the debate.

And those are just two of the candidates included in that poll. There are plenty of others who were not.

For example, watch this clip of Andy Beshear and ask yourself how anyone could believe that Biden is a better candidate than the governor of deep-red Kentucky.

https://twitter.com/ameinersWLKY/status/1807807713339961636

If he had the support of the party behind him (and the money of Biden’s war chest), and the primary goal is to defeat Trump (and not meet some idiotic litmus tests on far-left policies), how would Beshear not crush the former president?

Remember the tens of thousands of GOP voters who cast their primary ballots for Nikki Haley long after the former South Carolina governor had dropped out?

Moderate Republicans like them, who are disgusted by Trump but can’t get themselves to vote for Biden, are just waiting for a guy like this. Beshear exemplifies many of their values, has a record of bipartisan accomplishments, and is not 81 years old.

Let people watch that clip and then do some polling (the same is true for others like Whitmer, Shapiro, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, or Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker).

In addition, none of the other Democrats are as encumbered as Biden (and Harris) by the real pain many American families felt from high post-pandemic inflation, as well as a largely made-up border crisis.

Sure, Democrats would have to scramble to get the party rallied behind somebody new. However, Republicans and the entire right-wing propaganda machine would have to scramble even more to find some new lines of attack that don’t include Hunter Biden.

Good luck with that.

The point is that it’s ridiculous to claim that only Joe Biden can defeat Trump… and the fact that the campaign is trying to pretend that it is shows just how much trouble the president is in.

Author

  • Klaus Marre

    Klaus Marre is a senior editor for Politics and director of the Mentor Apprentice Program at WhoWhatWhy. Follow him on Twitter @KlausMarre.

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