No, Your Pet Issue Is Not Making Biden Lose

It’s inflation, not Israel or class warfare.

The American political landscape in 2024 seems like a very simple story that people continue to overcomplicate. There was a large, global surge in prices in 2021 and 2022 as the economy restarted following the COVID-19 pandemic. That inflation surge left Joe Biden, like leaders in almost every major democracy, deeply unpopular. Biden, like his global peers, has yet to recover.

Is it possible that Biden’s standing can recover as the economy returns to health and the inflation surge recedes further into the past? Sure. But as every month goes by, that prospect gets a bit less likely, and it grows increasingly probable that we will look back and conclude that Biden’s defeat was preordained.

Numerous data points are converging on this explanation. The most recent New York Times polling again finds Biden trailing in all the swing states (except in Michigan, and only if you count likely voters as opposed to all registered voters). Those states find Democrats winning every Senate race.

The point here is that Democrats have a Joe Biden problem, not a partywide problem. Regular, mainstream Democratic candidates are holding up just fine in the purple states.

The story is being overcomplicated in the public’s mind in large part because various ax-grinders want to use Biden’s struggles to push the party toward their positions. Critics of Israel have fixated on the problems created by encampments at elite universities. And it is true that the news media’s intense coverage of an issue that splits the Democratic coalition and unites the Republican coalition hurts Biden and helps Trump.

But that does not accurately reflect the nature of Biden’s polling deficit. The Harvard youth poll found Israel-Palestine at the bottom of young voters’ concerns. Even polls of college students (who are a minority of young people) find low levels of concern about the issue.

The Times poll confirms this again. It finds that of those voters who supported Biden in 2020 but aren’t planning to support him in 2024, just 10 percent call foreign policy their most important issue and don’t sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians. Overall, the public continues to sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 41 percent to 22 percent.

There are serious humanitarian concerns created by Israel’s war in Gaza. And there are also serious messaging problems caused by the war (and unpopular domestic war protests) dominating news coverage. But, despite the desire by a tiny number of left-wing activists to leverage the issue, siding with the unpopular protesters would not address the source of Biden’s unpopularity.

Another, more traditional form of ax-grinding came recently from Mark Penn in a Times op-ed. Penn was a key strategist for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, during which he repeatedly insisted that Barack Obama was too left-wing to be elected president. Penn has since been sidelined from mainstream Democratic politics, and his polling was the basis for an unsuccessful scheme to run a “No Labels” centrist candidacy.

Penn’s long-standing fixation is that Democrats should move to the center across the board. Some of his beliefs about this are correct: The party has moved to the left of the electorate on immigration, climate, and many social issues.

But Penn has always been insistent that the Democrats’ biggest weakness is their desire to tax the rich, and he returns to this claim again in the Times.

“Instead of pivoting to the center when talking to 32 million people tuned in to his State of the Union address,” he writes, “Mr. Biden doubled down on his base strategy with hits like class warfare attacks on the rich and big corporations.”

In reality, taxing the rich and corporations is Biden’s most popular issue. One recent poll found that Biden’s plan to raise taxes on people making more than $400,000 a year commands support from 69 percent of registered voters. Nice. Even a majority of Republicans approve of the idea.

If Biden could get the electorate to focus on taxes, he would have a much more favorable environment. That isn’t easy. The campaign media is inherently averse to covering policy. (Indeed, policy coverage is generally a completely separate area than campaign coverage). And Republicans are habitually disciplined about keeping their unpopular issue positions quiet. Progressive interest groups are obsessed with the fear of being sold out and tend to force Democrats make unpopular promises onstage. Conservative issue groups are content to get their unpopular promises behind closed doors, which is why Republican promises to lavish tax cuts on the rich tend to come out in leaked videos to donors rather than public-facing remarks.

Penn isn’t telling Biden to stop talking about taxing the rich because he wants Biden to win. He’s doing it because he hates taxing the rich and sees an opportunity to use Biden’s travails to advance his agenda.

There’s time for the campaign dynamic to change. The economy is still healthy, and the anti-Israel protests might — might — die down. But the trajectory remains grim, and one effect of a losing campaign is that various factions start caring less about helping you win and more about exploiting your expected defeat for their own purposes.