AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Abbott
With Joe Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign off to a lackluster start and the president continuing to see a crash in his polling numbers amid a number of policy failures and personal scandals, it’s conceivable that Biden’s historically staunch allies in the mainstream media could look to force Biden out of the race in order to pave the way for a Democrat with a better chance of winning.
Here are five ways the corporate press could move to bench Biden in 2024.
Hammer Biden’s Dismal Polling
Historically, approval ratings have been one of the most reliable predictors of a president’s re-election prospects. With Biden’s approval hovering near 41 percent in the RealClearPolitics average – and having dipped as low as 36 percent last July – the odds are clearly stacked against a Biden second term.
Biden is so unpopular, in fact, that most Democrats don’t even want him to run for re-election. Even more alarmingly for the anti-Trump fanatics in the liberal media, Biden now trails former President Donald Trump (who has taken a commanding lead in the GOP primary) in most head-to-head 2024 polls.
In the most recent Harvard-Harris poll, Trump led Biden by 7 points. And keep in mind, opinion polls have historically underestimated Trump’s strength in the final returns.
Thus far, the media has either ignored or downplayed the stark implications of Biden’s nightmare polls, allowing the president to maintain the charade that he currently stands a good chance at a re-election.
However, if the media decides that Biden’s position has become untenable, they could use his poor polling performance, and particularly his poor match-ups against Trump, to pressure him to step aside for another Democrat without such a long record of failure.
Get Real About Biden’s Decline
One of Biden’s most alarming poll numbers is that just 33 percent of Americans say he is in good enough physical health to serve effectively as president – compared to 64 percent who say the same about Trump. Only 32 percent of Americans believe the 80-year-old Biden “has the mental sharpness to be effective in the White House.” Notably, these findings come after three years of the mainstream media desperately trying to dispel the narrative that Biden is in declining health while baselessly asserting that Trump is “unwell.” Clearly, the public just isn’t buying it.
Biden’s gaffes have only grown more numerous as his presidency has progressed, and he often appears lost and confused at the few public events he attends.
The mainstream media has so far simply refused to acknowledge the very serious questions about Biden’s physical and mental decline, insisting that it is not an issue in the 2024 race. However, if Biden’s health becomes a major storyline, it will add more pressure on the president to remove himself from the race – particularly if he has any medical incidents between now and next November.
Stop Ignoring the Border Crisis
There is perhaps no more shocking example of Biden’s failure as a leader than the videos and images of floods of migrants pouring over the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet aside from a few conservative outlets, there has been a virtual media blackout on the scale and severity of the problem.
Biden’s border crisis is so bad, in fact, that many border-state Democrats have openly broken with the president on the issue. Arizona Senate Democrat Mark Kelly called Biden’s border policies “dumb” during a re-election debate last year, signaling that even committed liberals who voted for those policies recognize how electorally toxic they are.
Particularly after so many other high-profile failures under the Biden administration, if the media begins showing the grim reality of how bad the border crisis has become, and drawing the link to Biden’s policies, they could very well drive him off the ticket.
Investigate the Biden Crime Family
House Oversight Chairman James Comer’s (R-KY) report earlier this month on the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes should have been one of the biggest media stories in recent memory. Yet as the depth of the First Family’s corruption continues to grow, the mainstream media has remained shamefully disinterested in what could erupt into the greatest scandal in American political history.
If the media decides they’re better off without Biden, they could easily amplify the story and push the narrative that the president has too much baggage to win next November.
Awaiting Another Foreign Policy Flop
One of the biggest selling points on Biden in 2020 was that he would restore American prestige on the world stage – a laughable concept to begin with given that Donald Trump had one of the most successful foreign policy tenures in American history.
That notion was quickly dispelled with Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, a failure that has been followed by repeated foreign policy defeats. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a diplomatic fiasco over a botched submarine deal with longtime allies France and Australia, and closer ties between China and Saudi Arabia are just a few examples of the many gut punches Biden has received in the foreign policy arena.
Another major foreign fiasco could provide an opportunity for the mainstream media to unleash a flood of negative coverage on all of Biden’s failures.
It’s worth remembering that, before Biden clinched the Democratic nomination in 2020, mainstream media outlets pilloried the former vice president. The New York Times laughingly dubbed him “the Jeb Bush of 2020.” Younger, more diverse candidates like Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, and Beto O’Rourke were considered far more desirable.
It was only once he had the nomination that the media suddenly became Biden apologists. It’s reasonable to believe that those early reservations did not vanish, and the media’s marriage to Biden is one of convenience, not genuine affection. If a viable alternative to Biden for 2024 emerges, a swift and brutal turn on the president may well ensue.
Andrew Abbott is the pen name of a writer and public affairs consultant with over a decade of experience in DC at the intersection of politics and culture.
