Joe Biden regrets having pulled out of this year’s presidential race and believes he would have defeated Donald Trump in last month’s election – despite negative poll indications, White House sources have said.
The US president has reportedly also said he made a mistake in choosing Merrick Garland as attorney general – reflecting that Garland, a former US appeals court judge, was slow to prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January 2021 insurrection while presiding over a justice department that aggressively prosecuted Biden’s son Hunter.
With just more than three weeks of his single-term presidency remaining, Biden’s reported rueful reflections are revealed in a Washington Post profile that contains the clearest signs yet that he thinks he erred in withdrawing his candidacy in July after a woeful debate performance against his rival for the White House, Trump, the previous month.
You can go back and look at Pew polling or Gallup polling. The top concern for people who voted Trump was the economy. Within that, the aspect that they were most concerned about was prices. That is, people were very unhappy about inflation. There was a lot of inflation relative to normal US levels under Biden.
The Trump administration also adopted inflationary policy. And doing so was generally considered desirable by economists; having inflation is preferable to recession in terms of the impact on a country, and COVID-19 was going to produce some level of economic disruption. But that doesn’t change the fact that the public doesn’t view inflation in that way; it’s very unpopular with the public, and past polling has shown that the public, in the US and elsewhere, is more upset about having inflation than a recession.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c8881/c8881.pdf
In general, the American public also attributes short-term aspects of the economy directly to the President.
The Trump campaign also worked to drive those concerns and associate them with the Biden administration.
Benefitting from mis-attribution of economic behavior and policy is not unique to the Republicans. Clinton benefited from it; the “it’s the economy, stupid” slogan played off public concern about economic policy where there probably wasn’t much to blame Bush for, but the public was still upset about it. To some extent, it winds up being luck of the draw; if the economy is growing when you’re President, people tend to credit you for it, whether you really deserve credit or not, and if it’s contracting, people tend to blame you for it, again whether you really deserve blame or not. They don’t go digging through data or reading much about where policy originated.
That’s been a property of American elections for some time.
If you want to change that, you have a hard communications problem.
My guess is that neither Biden nor Harris was going to solve that communication problem, fundamentally change that aspect of electoral politics, and I think that unless they managed to pull some very large rabbit out of the hat, that was going to dominate the election.
Technically, Inflation peaked in Biden’s first year. That means it rose under Trump and declined under Biden. I’m sure people really did think what you said, but I think it needs to be clarified that the economy actually did improve, from how it was in the Covid 2020 Era, after Biden took office.
No Democrat will in our lifetime. It’s to late for that. The wealthy own all major social media outlets, all major traditional media outlets, and are turning them to disinformation and AI slop. Even as they spin up thousands of AI slop and misinformation farms masquerading as small independent outlets to keep the fools that stray corralled.
Liberal or economic liberal politics will never solve it either. As this is a feature of them. It’s working as intended, in the interests of the worst possible people.
To me, there are a couple problems of perception that gave Biden/Harris a huge uphill battle in the election that they didn’t need to have.
Biden actually did a ton to address problems of inequality and income in America. He worked harder on it than any president since Johnson at least, and scored some huge successes driving up low-income wages and strengthening unions. But, he didn’t do it in ways that were visible to the average American, I think because he’s so far removed from the present-day average American that he genuinely didn’t realize how invisible a lot of his reforms would turn out to be.
His two huge mistakes were:
And then, also, letting Merrick Garland twiddle his thumbs for four years like the cowardly lump that he is. I think history will look back on this past few years of slow-walking the Trump prosecutions as a massive error that led to untold misery and bloodshed. Honestly, even if he fucked up everything else and lost the 2024 election, if he had simply taken the fire on the roof as an urgent problem that needs all hands on deck, instead of one more renovation project that needs to wait its turn until it comes up in the agenda, it would have been better.
Garland is easily this day and age’s Chamberlain. Except Chamberlain sacrificed the Sudetenland to buy time for rearmament, what’s Garland’s excuse?
Yeah. Chamberlain came in with effectively no military at all, saw that a war with Germany would be like a child trying to fight an adult, oversaw a lot of rearmament, and then declared war on Germany when the situation became more clear, at a point when they still barely had a functional military. He gets a lot of heat for appeasement but the situation he came into was totally hopeless, and he was taking concrete steps to get things moved in the right direction.
Biden and Garland did fuck-all for 4 years, and then when the situation started showing signs of genuine threat, started talking about pardons for them and their friends as the solution.
Do people not in the W-2 economy turn out to vote? (Undocumented people clearly don’t.) This isn’t a rhetorical question.
Edit: a quick search found this from 2016, but it would need to adjusted by the number of people in each segment. (And “W-2 economy” isn’t synonymous with income, but they are correlated.)
Now how do those income blocks compare as proportions of the total voting-eligible population?
If people not in the W-2 economy had gotten jobs working in the modern-day WPA, paying $75k a year, they sure as fuck would have started turning out to vote. Probably forever, as long as it kept going. There’s a reason FDR won 4 terms.