Scaros: Think Biden Has No Chance in 2024? Don't Forget Jimmy Carter in 1980
I’ve predicted every presidential election correctly since 1976, several months in advance. All except the one in 2020: I picked Trump to win.
Yes, I know, plenty of readers will say, “You were right about that one, too! Trump did win! It’s just that the ‘Commiecrats’ cheated!”
Yes, the Democrats did cheat. Not by falsifying votes and dumping ballots into the river. Maybe some of that did happen — and both parties have their share of cheating, by the way — but not enough to sway the election.
What did it for the Democrats was ballot harvesting. Outhustling the Republicans, often by circumventing the law, tapping into unlikely voters, placing drop boxes in heavily Democratic neighborhoods, doing mail-in ballot dumps, etc.
Republicans seem more focused this time, and they’ve vowed to do their own ballot harvesting where it is legal.
Donald Trump, the GOP front-runner, says he’d like to see voting done only in person and only on Election Day (with exceptions for military personnel serving abroad and those demonstrably unable to leave their homes). But until that happens, he encourages Republicans to fight fire with fire and do their own harvesting and voting by mail.
So, let’s turn to 2024. (If you say, “It doesn’t matter, the Democrats will cheat anyway,” then you probably won’t want to read any further.)
There are two very different stories about President Joe Biden being told in America.
Version 1 is that his cognitive skills have rapidly deteriorated, as evidenced by clips in conservative news media of the president looking very slow and confused onstage, as if he doesn’t know where he is, or in any case doesn’t feel very comfortable being there.
To make things worse, that bumbling, stumbling Biden — according to Version 1 — is also having a disastrous presidency.
Inflation is through the roof and people are going broke shopping for groceries or trying to put gas in their cars. We have an unprecedented border crisis. Biden’s exit from Afghanistan was another Vietnam, and now he’s pumping billions of dollars into a corrupt Ukrainian government. He’s letting men compete in women’s sports and share bathrooms and locker rooms with them. And China is eating our lunch.
With that type of assessment of the Biden presidency, it’s no wonder so many people are convinced that there’s no way in the world he could’ve gained more votes than Trump in 2020, and there’s no point in analyzing 2024 because the only way he can possibly win is if Democrats cheat.
Or is there? On we proceed to Version 2.
The other side of the Biden story — Version 2 — goes something like this: American democracy came within an inch of being destroyed by Donald Trump, who was the most unqualified, corrupt, racist, sexist, homophobic person ever to be president.
Trump — say the Version 2 believers — kept innocent children in cages, separated from their parents; endorsed neo-Nazis, calling them “very fine people”; called Mexicans “rapists and criminals”; bragged about committing sexual assault; and tried to overthrow the government by encouraging his followers to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (By the way, I thoroughly debunked the 10 most commonly told untruths about Trump in my book “Trumped-Up Charges!“)
Therefore, they continue, democracy was saved when Americans came to their senses and voted for Biden in 2020. No more mean tweets. No more being the laughingstock of the world.
Inflation is down. Unemployment is almost nonexistent. Our allies respect us again. We rebuilt America’s infrastructure. We are turning to green energy, which will save our planet from extinction. Biden is quietly effective as he has pushed through lots of bipartisan legislation during very divisive times. Yeah, he’s getting old, but that’s what’s great about him. He has so much experience, and it shows. He gets things done! He’s another FDR!
The two versions are obviously as different as can be. Each is brought to us on a daily basis from our favorite comfort food feeding troughs, a.k.a media outlets. But there’s a tremendous imbalance in viewership among the sources.
Version 1 is being conveyed by Newsmax, conservative talk radio (and podcasts), and by the very few conservatives remaining on Fox News.
Version 2 is being delivered by ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today (yes, they’ve veered leftward!), a growing number of pundits on Fox News, academia (our children’s teachers and professors), and Hollywood.
Guess which version has more viewers and listeners.
Very importantly, there are few people who actually consider both versions. Human beings are naturally averse to challenging themselves to think outside the box. They are comfortable in having made up their minds that their side is correct and the other side is wrong, and the news presented from their point of view is all they want to hear.
But let’s turn back to 1980.
Under President Jimmy Carter, the country was in a state of “malaise.” The Iran hostage crisis was frustrating and humiliating. Inflation and unemployment combined (call it stagflation or the “misery index” — either way, it wasn’t pretty) were staggering. There were gas lines around the block amid an energy crisis, and all the president could do was shrug his shoulders and tell us to turn down the thermostat.
Yet in January 1980, six months closer to that year’s election than we are now to the one in 2024, the hapless Carter held a whopping 23-point lead over Ronald Reagan in the polls.
Granted, Reagan won the election, and by a wide margin, but many things accounted for that: liberal John Anderson’s independent run, Carter pulling out of one debate and looking awful in another, and the country discovering Reagan and falling in love with his words of inspiration and reassurance.
The point is that even as the nation wallowed in malaise after three years of Carter, most were willing to vote for him again.
That means that a horrible economy and trouble around the world are by themselves not enough to ensure that a president won’t win re-election. On top of that, Biden’s likely general election rival is Trump, who never made it past the low 40s in approval ratings and who is facing multiple indictments.
Bottom line: Whoever wants to take the presidency away from Joe Biden needs to take him seriously. Scoffing that he has dementia isn’t going to do it. Remember, Version 2 has a much bigger audience, and they’ve never been exposed to Version 1.
It’s an uphill battle to beat Biden, even with all his shortcomings. Of course, if someone runs third-party and challenges Biden from the left, that would be a real game-changer.
Time will tell.
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