AMAC Exclusive – By Daniel Berman
One thing can be said for the announcement video for Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign, which runs to a little over three minutes. Biden and the Democrats are willing to defy historical conventional wisdom, which since the time of Harry Truman has said that when presidents run for reelection, “the buck stops here.”
The video opens with images of January 6, as Biden intones about threats to democracy, followed by images of protestors carrying banners declaring “Abortion is a right” and “Trans Rights are human rights.” Watching the video, one could be forgiven for wondering just who the president has been for the past two and a half years.
As ominous music plays, Biden intones that “they are banning books.” He warns of attacks on Social Security, and enjoins that “hate should have no place.” While the extraordinarily dark video brightens up slightly during the final minute, there should be no doubt about the tone of the campaign Americans should expect from the incumbent president next year: Joe Biden is all that stands between America and the ostensibly terrible things happening right now while he is in office.
It would be a mistake to disparage the potential effectiveness of this strategy. Elections over the past year, from last month’s Supreme Court race in Wisconsin to the 2022 midterms, stand as a testament to the ability of Democrats to run effective scare campaigns on abortion. The steady descent of a long-overdue stand for parental rights in Florida into an increasingly confused spat with Disney explains why Democrats might believe that an issue that has until recently been a liability might suddenly play favorably. Painting your opponents as caricatures is much simpler when they compliantly act like ones.
In fact, given the poor standing of Joe Biden in the polls, with numbers resembling those of Jimmy Carter, this may be not just the best strategy but the only one with a real chance of success. Biden can afford to lose Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia if he holds Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Democrats did well in all three of the latter in 2022. A large part of that was by using culture war issues to mobilize the liberal base.
Presidential campaigns are not mere matters of strategy. Voters, at the end of the day, are choosing someone who for the next four years will be responsible for the country, not a mid-level manager. Many journalists and academics who believe America would benefit from being governed by mid-level management types have correspondingly bemoaned our political system, including primaries and the electoral college. The question “who would you rather have a beer with?” has become a term of mockery when it is brought up every cycle, as if it is an unfair standard through which voters reject the stewardship of their betters merely because their betters have more important things to do than pretend to be tolerable human beings.
The question is in reality a proxy for trust. Do they have any sense of people like you? Could you trust this person with your life? After all, that is what we are doing by making them president of the most powerful country on earth. Our fight or flight instincts are finely honed to survival, and that includes being able to generate discomfort and distrust when confronted by individuals who we can sense are dangerous even if we cannot specify precisely why.
Napoleon once asked of one of his marshals when told he was skilled, “But is he lucky?” Voters want a winner, because they viscerally sense from their own experiences that for reasons we can’t explain, certain individuals go through life triumphing, even when the odds are against them and by rights they should fail. Others, meanwhile, bring misfortune in their wake, not necessarily through malice, but because they are simply missing certain traits.
One of Joe Biden’s problems, and a problem which is made worse by his message, is that he is a loser. He lost his bids for the presidency in 1988 and 2008. He lost most of the political fights he picked under Obama. He was pushed aside by Hillary. In office, he lost in Afghanistan, he has been mocked by the Saudis, Mexico, and even the new left-wing president of Brazil whom he did everything in his power to install in office. Supply chains collapsed into the same disorder as Biden’s legislative agenda in 2021, while parents of children with ADHD still cannot acquire medication six months into a national shortage.
Republicans may be apt to object to Biden as an extremist and a danger to the country, but it is Democrats and liberals who should be most concerned about his record of professional losses. Under Joe Biden, Roe v. Wade fell, nearly half the country restricted abortion, and the administration narrowly dodged having FDA approval of a major drug reversed. It was under Biden that states proceeded to restrict minors from changing genders, restrict women’s sports to biological women, and attack DEI investment. Biden bemoans mass shootings, but if they have gotten worse, alongside crime, he seems powerless to stop it.
The first minute and a half of Biden’s campaign video is a narrative of failure. On not one of the issues brought up has Biden triumphed. On most, from a liberal perspective, things have become worse. Even the achievements mentioned, such as student loan relief, are under threat, and given Biden’s record, it should be assumed they are doomed.
The problem with running a campaign strategy around saying “at least things aren’t worse” is that you concede that things are unlikely to get better. Biden has no second term agenda. In fact, he argues in the ad that the reason he is running for reelection is that things are bad, and would be worse without him, not because things are better with him, much less that they will improve in a second term. He can offer more of the same, and the same is not very popular.
Jimmy Carter ran this strategy in 1980. He conceded America was in the grip of “malaise” but argued this was still the “best of all possible worlds” and that the alternatives were too dangerous to attempt. This enabled him to overcome a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy and allowed him to remain tied with Ronald Reagan until the final week. It is conceivable that against a more generic Republican without Reagan’s vision or optimism Carter might well have been able to demoralize the electorate into reelecting him.
That only works if voters are convinced that all their options are losers. In that case, they might as well vote for the loser who will try to do things they like, even if ineffectively, over one who might do things they don’t like. But the moment they begin to doubt that their only options are losers, the strategy begins to collapse.
Joe Biden is betting on a very narrow path to reelection. He is betting that Americans will accept that this is the best things can get and settle for a comfortable failure and decline. He may be right. Voters have never liked the Chinese proverb, “May you live in interesting times.” It will be up to Republicans to convince voters they can aspire for something more.
Daniel Berman is a frequent commentator and lecturer on foreign policy and political affairs, both nationally and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He also writes as Daniel Roman.
