All posts tagged: Democratic voters

Biden Is Still the Democrats’ Best Bet for November

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Let’s start with the obvious. The concerns about Joe Biden are valid: He’s old. He talks slowly. He occasionally bumbles the basics in public appearances. Biden’s age is so concerning that many Biden supporters now believe he should step aside and let some other candidate become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. The New York Times journalist Ezra Klein made the best-available case for this view recently in a 4,000-word piece that garnered intense attention by arguing that Biden is no longer up to the task of campaign life. “He is not the campaigner he was, even five years ago,” Klein writes. “The way he moves, the energy in his voice. The Democrats denying decline are only fooling themselves.” In one sense Klein is correct. As the political strategist Mike Murphy said many moons ago, Biden’s age is like a gigantic pair of antlers he wears on his head, all day every day. Even when he does something exceptional—like visit a war zone in Ukraine, or whip inflation—the people applauding him are thinking, Can’t. Stop. …

What Tom Suozzi’s Win Means for Democrats

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Tom Suozzi’s victory in yesterday’s special House election on Long Island brings Democrats one seat closer to recapturing the majority they lost two years ago. But in the run-up to Election Day, party leaders were leery about making too much of the closely watched contest—win or lose. “This is a local race,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told me when I asked what a Suozzi win would say about the Democrats’ chances in November. Jeffries had just finished rallying a crowd of a few hundred health-care workers on the first day of early voting. The Brooklyn Democrat stands to become House speaker if the party can pick up another four seats later this year. His very presence in Suozzi’s district belied his attempt to downplay its significance. This was as national as a contest for a single House seat gets. Democrats poured millions of dollars into the compressed campaign brought about by the expulsion in December of Representative George Santos, the Republican who’d won this swing seat after selling voters on an invented life …

Nothing Can Stop a Biden-Trump Rematch

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[ad_1] Well, here it is. With Donald Trump’s victory in tonight’s New Hampshire primary, the die is cast. Or rather, the public can no longer ignore that the die is cast. Really, it was cast months, even years, ago and it has landed on what most Americans consider a bad roll: a rematch of the 2020 election between Trump and President Joe Biden. Dread of this outcome is perhaps the most unifying issue in an otherwise polarized political moment. For years, Americans have been telling pollsters—and reporters and friends and family and neighbors—that they don’t want to see the two men running for president in 2024. Polls have shown that Democratic voters have wanted an alternative to Biden since well before the 2022 midterm elections (elections in which, it’s worth noting, his party outperformed expectations and historical norms). Many of those voters cite his advanced age—he’ll turn 82 shortly after the election in November. Despite this, a long roster of rising Democrats has declined to run against the sitting president, ceding the challenge to Robert …

Quiet Competence Could Cost Joe Biden the Election

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The Power of Magical Thinking I realize that to note that Joe Biden is boring is not exactly breaking news. Michael Schaffer of Politico wrote more than a year ago that Biden not only kept his promise to be unexciting but also “over-delivered.” My friend Molly Jong-Fast this fall noted for Vanity Fair that “[Team Biden’s] superpower, its ability to slide under the radar while getting a lot done for the American people, may also be its Achilles heel, holding back the administration from getting the credit it deserves.” She places much of the blame on the media—a fair cop—but I think a lot else is going on that has less to do with Biden and more to do with the voters themselves. The deeper problem is that America years ago entered a “post-policy” era, in which the …

Dean Phillips Is Primarying Joe Biden

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[ad_1] To spend time around Dean Phillips, as I have since his first campaign for Congress in 2018, is to encounter someone so earnest as to be utterly suspicious. He speaks constantly of joy and beauty and inspiration, beaming at the prospect of entertaining some new perspective. He allows himself to be interrupted often—by friends, family, staffers—but rarely interrupts them, listening patiently with a politeness that almost feels aggravating. With the practiced manners of one raised with great privilege—boasting a net worth he estimates at $50 million—the gentleman from Minnesota is exactly that. But that courtly disposition cracks, I’ve noticed, when he’s convinced that someone is lying. Maybe it’s because at six months old he lost his father in a helicopter crash that his family believes the military covered up, in a Vietnam War that was sold to the public with tricks and subterfuge. I can hear the anger in his voice as he talks about the treachery that led to January 6, recalling his frantic search for some sort of weapon—he found only a …

Why Republicans Would Welcome a Biden Challenger

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[ad_1] This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Some Democrats, echoing GOP narratives about Joe Biden’s age, are invested in the idea of challenging the president’s renomination. But how would that actually work? First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: An Invitation to Chaos You may have heard the news recently that President Joe Biden is old. This has been a rumor whispered in the hallways of power for some time now, but apparently it’s true. Some Democrats, including Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, think this means Biden should step aside. “We’re at grave risk of another Trump presidency,” Phillips said recently. “I’m doing this to prevent a return of Donald Trump to the White House.” And by “this,” Phillips means going public with his concerns, and even possibly running against Biden—which isn’t much of a threat, given that Phillips is not exactly a …

The British Left Makes a Sharp Turn on Gender

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[ad_1] When Keir Starmer wanted to change the Labour Party’s stance on sex and gender, he didn’t give a set-piece speech or hold a press conference. Instead, the leader of Britain’s main opposition party stayed in the background, leaving Anneliese Dodds, a shadow minister with a low public profile, to announce the shift in a short opinion column in The Guardian. In just over 800 words, she made three big declarations. One was that “sex and gender are different.” Another was that, although Labour continues to believe in the right to change one’s legal gender, safeguards are needed to “protect women and girls from predators who might abuse the system.” Finally, Labour was therefore dropping its commitment to self-ID—the idea that a simple online declaration is enough to change someone’s legal gender for all purposes—and would retain the current requirement of a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Dodds supplemented her article with a few explanatory tweets, but didn’t go on television to reiterate the message. The next day, Labour declined to provide a spokesperson for …