The Hill Liz Peek: The biggest thing missing from the GOP debate? Joe Biden.
Joe Biden was the real winner of this week’s GOP debate.
While most of the post-debate commentary has focused on which Republicans outperformed expectations and who fell short, there has been little notice of the glaring omission in the two-hour confrontation: a tough critique of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Sure, Ron DeSantis and others took a couple of swipes at Hunter Biden. Some candidates brought up the open border and inflation; Vivek Ramaswamy made headlines talking about the “climate change agenda” being a hoax.
But not one of the eight candidates told the audience just how dangerous another four years of Biden tyranny could be for this country. How the weaponization of our law enforcement agencies will become a permanent stain on our justice system or how dictating policy through executive orders and growing the administrative state will corrode the Founders’ vision of three equal branches of government.
The wounds being inflicted by the Biden White House are in some cases permanent, such as the vast reordering of our energy industries and the admission of millions of illegal migrants. All these wrong-headed policies will impoverish Americans going forward; Biden needs to be beaten, full stop.
That is the case the GOP contenders need to make, and they need to force voters to focus on the single most important attribute any candidate can offer: electability.
If Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley or any other hopeful wants to displace Donald Trump, who currently leads the field by some 40 points, they must convince Republicans that the former president cannot win. At the end of the day, they have to persuade voters to pick a candidate who can trounce Joe Biden, and not just give Trump another shot because they are angry that he has been treated so unfairly.
This is a tough chore. Supporters remember 2016, when Trump was given low to zero odds of beating the “inevitable” Hillary Clinton. His astonishing victory in that race convinced his backers that the polls are worthless, the “experts” know nothing and that their man is invincible.
Trump’s loss in 2020 should have upended that conviction, but Trump convinced his followers that the election was rigged, so his reputation (and their loyalty) escaped unscathed. In 2022, as one Trump-backed candidate after another fell to defeat, Trump apologists cited even more election cheating — and the overturn of Roe v. Wade — as the problems, not that their man had only backed unqualified candidates who would go along with his stolen election narrative.
Trump’s supporters refused to admit that the former president’s appeal had dimmed because of the riots on January 6, and that the nation had tired of his insistence that he actually won in 2020.
After the midterms, Democrats seemed to realize that their favorite bogeyman was losing his zest. So they restoked the Trump fires, bringing one indictment after another against the one-time real estate developer. They knew full well that the flimsy charges would recharge the Trump batteries, as well as push aside increasingly unfavorable headlines about Joe Biden.
This is the Democrats’ 2024 strategy: deflect voter attention from Biden’s ghastly approval ratings, the illegal and costly influx of migrants into our country, rising violent crime in many of our cities, the high cost of everything, the insane energy policies that are harming the U.S., voters’ increasing concern about their children’s education and all the other issues that make Biden an historically unpopular president with a waterfall of legal attacks on Trump.
Perhaps most important, Democrats hope that drowning Trump in legal fights will smother increasing evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement with his son Hunter’s corrupt business dealings.
None of Biden’s failures or wrongdoing will matter if the media focuses day in and out on Trump. And they will, encouraged by the unending stream of indictments and lawsuits that will dominate the former president’s schedule between now and the election.
The only way the GOP candidates upend this game plan is by convincing Trump voters that they have a better shot of beating Joe Biden (or Gavin Newsome or whomever) than does the former president.
That case today is tough to make. Polling shows the race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump too close to call. That is a marked improvement over 2020, when Trump consistently lagged Biden in the polls. On Election Day 2020, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, Biden led Trump by 7.2 percent; he won the popular vote by 4.5 percent. Not once during the prior year did Trump gain the advantage; the polls were correct.
Today, the RCP average shows Biden up by 2 points, probably within the margin of error.
Biden’s favorability ratings have definitely taken a hit since Election Day 2020. An Economist poll just before the 2020 election showed the Democratic candidate barely in the black, with a net positive reading of 1. Today he is upside-down by 13 points, and more vulnerable.
But so is Trump, who had a negative rating going into the last election of -12 and today is at negative 17.
Perhaps more convincing — and worrisome — is a recent AP-NORC poll of 1,165 Americans in which 43 percent said they would “definitely not support” Biden and 53 percent said they would absolutely not vote for Trump. That makes it almost impossible for him to win.
Haley made the case in an interview on Wednesday that Trump’s mounting legal problems will be a huge distraction for the former president, saying “What I do believe is you’re going to have Donald Trump spend more time in a courtroom next year […] than he is campaigning.” The legal battles will also siphon off a boatload of Trump’s campaign funding.
This reality, and the distaste a large number of Americans have for Trump, should make Republican primary voters very, very nervous about making him their candidate. Could Trump win again? Maybe, but the risk is huge and the stakes are too high to take a chance.
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