Following Joe Biden’s dismal performance during the Democrat debate on Thursday night, his once-insurmountable double-digit lead melted away. A CNN poll taken afterward showed Biden’s lead shrank from 32 percent in May to 22 percent, while Harris’s support jumped nine points, from eight percent in May to 17 percent. Elizabeth Warren enjoyed a gain at Biden’s expense as well, doubling from 7 percent in May to 15 percent following Thursday night’s debate.
More telling was Biden’s performance among young voters (under age 45), with just 13 percent of them picking him to be the Democrat Party’s presidential nominee. This reflects a Democrat Party that, according to CNN’s editor-at-large Chris Cillizza, “is younger, less white, more female, more liberal and far more skeptical of establishment politicians [like Biden] that it was even five years ago.”
Liberal commentators are close to writing off Biden altogether based upon Thursday night’s performance. Said Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist for the New York Times, “On Thursday [Biden] seemed uncertain, unprepared and, well, feeble. [His performance] undermines the core promise of his candidacy, which is that he’s the guy who can beat Trump. Another performance like this one and I think he’s done.”
David Brooks, another opinion columnist for the Times, anticipated Biden’s lackluster showing by asking, “Will there be [another] candidate I can vote for?” With roughly a third of American voters calling themselves conservative, another third calling themselves moderate and a quarter calling themselves liberal, Brooks (a self-described moderate who said, “I could never in a million years vote for Donald Trump”) pointed to the Democrats’ conundrum: The Democrat Party “seems to think it can win [in 2020] without any of the 35 percent of us in the moderate camp, the ones who actually delivered the 2018 midterm win.… The party is moving toward all sorts of positions that drive away moderates and make it more likely the nominee will be unelectable.”
Those positions include “single payer” healthcare (i.e., socialized medicine) that is supported by just 13 percent of the electorate. Wrote Brooks: “Warren and Sanders pin themselves, and perhaps the Democratic Party, to a 13-percent policy idea. Trump is smiling.”
It includes the economy, which nearly every Democrat on stage has declared to be “completely broken” and only benefitting a tiny minority at the very top. But according to another CNN poll, 71 percent of Americans say exactly the opposite, that the economy is either “very good” or “somewhat good.” Not only are wages rising ahead of inflation for the first time in years, wage gains in the lowest quartile are over four percent, the highest of any group.
The third issue that puts Democrats outside the mainstream is their position on immigration. With demands for open borders and free healthcare benefits for illegals, such positions are, according to Brooks, causing “progressive parties all over the world [to be] decimated because they have fallen into this pattern.”
Add in free college tuition, the Green New Deal, and other far-left demands, and there simply won’t be enough moderate voters to elect a Democrat next November.
If Biden continues to crater — the next Democrat debate is four weeks away — and Harris or Warren become the Democrat Party’s choice, it just might turn out that the biggest winner of the debates last week wasn’t even on stage: President Donald Trump.
Image of Joe Biden: joebiden.com
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
