AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Abbott
In a sea of bad polls, a new national poll was released last week that prompted at least one outlet to ask if it was President Joe Biden’s “worst poll yet.” According to this new report, Biden’s approval rating is below 43% in 46 states, topping that number in only Hawaii, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maryland – and even then, Biden didn’t top 50% in any state. Worse, the President is at just 23% with independents. These numbers are so bad that many Democrats are distancing themselves from Biden ahead of the midterms. But as Biden’s White House scrambles to do damage control, several top Democrats who warned of this very outcome are likely shaking their heads and saying, “I told you so.”
Last year, veteran Democrat campaign operative James Carville went viral with his assessment of Biden’s first 100 days in office during an interview with Vox. Rather than joining with the media and most other Democrats in acting as a cheerleader for the President, Carville warned that “wokeness is a problem, and everyone knows it.” He asserted that, despite Biden’s apparent obsession with appeasing hardcore progressives, “the only way Democrats can hold power is to build on their coalition, and that will have to include more rural white voters from across the country.”
Carville also cautioned Democrats to reject policies like “abolishing the police” and running as “out-and-out socialists.” Instead, he recommended the party shift toward the center. If the Democratic Party could maintain its coalition and make more substantial inroads with white rural voters and moderates by focusing on issues that mattered to them, Carville argued, Democrats could hold power long-term.
While Carville’s statements were reported extensively, his most overlooked line turned out to be his most prophetic. When the interviewer asked him about advocates who say, “Democrats should pass everything they possibly can, no matter the costs, and trust that the voters will reward them on the back end,” Carville replied that “the Democratic Party can’t be more liberal than Senator Joe Manchin. That’s the fact. We don’t have the votes.”
Ironically, at the time, mainstream media proclaimed the exact opposite. Article after article asserted that Senator Bernie Sanders was the true power center in D.C., not Senator Manchin. Following the passage of the $1.9 trillion American rescue plan, the media celebrated Bernie’s essential work, praising Sanders as “the longtime outsider, irritant of the Democratic and Republican establishments, and cantankerous gadfly” who was “proving shrewd at playing the inside game from his powerful new perch atop the Senate Budget Committee.”
With a majority that hinges on a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris, the notion that this leftward lunge could last was always a fantasy, but the media ran with it nonetheless.
Many dismissed Carville’s criticism as another “establishment,” “white,” “boomer” who was out of touch with the new direction of the Democratic Party. But even Democrat data scientist David Shor, an avowed and proud socialist, echoed Carville’s concerns. As AMAC Newsline reported in April of last year, Shor said that Democrats had “ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left-wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue… So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us.”
Like Carville’s analysis, Shor’s concerns proved prescient. Since his election, Biden has hemorrhaged support with every racial demographic. In 2020, Biden won the presidency with 92% of the black vote. In April of last year, 83% of black voters approved of the job he was doing. A recent poll found this support has dropped to 64%. The loss among blacks has been so severe that some outlets are musing if this failure will lead to Democrats losing black support for the first time since the 1960s. Biden’s numbers with Hispanics are even worse, and he now sits below 50% approval.
Perhaps most frustrating of all for Democrats like Carville and Shor, they seem to recognize that there is something fundamental about the psychology of the radical left that won’t allow the Democratic Party to take their advice. As Carville said in another interview earlier this month, “there’s a significant part of the Democratic Party that doesn’t mind losing if it allows them to be pure. We’re obsessed with purity. That has got to stop.”
But Democrats, and President Biden in particular, show no signs of stopping or even slowing down on their path to defeat this fall. While some individual Democrats have desperately attempted to make a hard turn toward the center, the ideological inertia of the party appears to be set in concrete. And that may just seal the party’s fate, in this election and many more to come.
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.