So I’m reading the amazing Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, referred by the incomparable Amanda Marcotte from Standing Room Only, and in these recent turbulent distressing months I feel what I’m sure we’ve all experienced far too many times over the last eight years, a vast incredulity that instantly yields a bewildered mouthing of w…t…f?
Lithwick is interviewing the very good Juliette Kayyem of The Atlantic, it’s terrific work I highly recommend, everything is rolling mentally along fine until the very end, where Kayyem states I know it’s hard for people to imagine, but Biden could very much win.
Where on earth did this absolute certainty that Biden will lose in 2024 come from? From what certain people, where? We saw this from Ezra Klein of the New York Times this year in an uncharacteristically clownish lunge at somehow replacing Biden as the 2024 nominee, and I recently jabbed Susan Glasser of The New Yorker on X as blithely stating Trump was ahead in the 2024 race.
I suppose a ridiculous, circular evolution from our east coast Beltway alleged political intellectuals has occurred, chattering themselves into a laughable position that of course, dearies, Biden’s going to lose, it is written in the amorphous, porous neurons of our lost, wandering minds.
[places palms together] For such great minds to be so totally lost…I am the tiniest of persons whose intelligence has been correctly classified as average, yet even so I hold precious keys and elements of the most very basic knowledge of politics, follow me, in no time your wandering cluelessness will cease the nasty bewilderment the rest of feel reading you.
Joe Biden is President of the United States, he’s the incumbent. You should know every incumbent faces a vast question from the American electorate: have you been a competent steward of the office and country? If that answer is yes–and it most assuredly is for Joe Biden–then good luck on any challenger trying to beat him, that’s very difficult to do.
But Joe Biden has a bad historical approval rating! Comes the answer. Maybe if the rancid New York Times east coast media hadn’t been so historically negative about everything President Biden does it wouldn’t be, but the point is laughably moot anyway, hello? Approval polling isn’t an election. I know this is hard, but you can do it, keep saying it, approval polling isn’t an election…approval polling isn’t an election…
But we’ve been running Biden-Trump polling and Trump is winning! Oh my god, why aren’t you aware any polling at this nascent stage of the race is somehow relevant? Michael Dukakis was polling way ahead after the convention, I remember, why doesn’t the east coast media?
All of this wandering farce rests upon the validity of polling, which has gone to hell from many factors that no valid political scientist would ever accept as useful truth. Just to rub your snotty east coast media noses in it, The New Yorker, polling averages now have swung to having Biden being ahead.
Likely because President Biden is campaigning while Trump has to show up every day at his first felony trial. I still would never accept this as any kind of certainty President Biden is going to win, it’s a small encouraging sign, that’s all.
Added to the money and energy of the Democratic base for an incumbent, the good-to-excellent economic news across a range of measurements, the roaring reproductive rights backlash that could easily hand over Florida and Arizona, and that little detail of the Republican nominee going on daily sensationalized trial for a felony next week, why, yes, in my tiny nobody-listens-to-me judgment President Biden could very well be re-elected, gosh golly gee, it could really happen.
As stated before my confidence at this very likely 2024 election outcome calmly builds a little more each day, but still when looking at the election I’m cranky, irritable and obstreperous. Because of what the great Heather Parton wrote at Hullabaloo yesterday, just the felonious, putrid, wallowing rapist presence of that orange blob on the 2024 ballot truly, seriously deeply omg dismays me.
I’m reading Aaron Blake of the Washington Post and he says that, well, if your State has a law no felon could ever be Governor if Trump gets convicted in New York he could still be your President because, well, nothing forbids it.
Again, w...t...f! Why is my crazy world and country set up like this!? Why do I even have to think of that kind of political scenario? Digby is correct, as long as the orange blob is with us we’ll all feel not-right, to one degree or another.
At least the vast blunt truth of reality that President Biden is likely to win will finally smash in to our journalism cousins, they simply can’t escape it. It’s something in these trying times.