- Jason L. Riley
- President Biden has less than a year to convince voters that they are better off than they realize, and he’s off to a horrible start.Mr. Biden could be seen this month bickering with reporters about the accuracy of a New York Times/Siena College survey that showed him trailing Donald Trump in five states that may decide the 2024 election. A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll has since been released showing the same results. Sunday brought more bad news for the president in the form of an NBC News poll that put his job approval rating at 40%, which is down from 46% in January—the lowest of his presidency. Even Mr. Biden’s base seems to be abandoning him. His once-comfortable lead among young people and Hispanics has diminished. The NBC poll found that 21% of all Democrats disapprove of his job performance, a lack of enthusiasm that could hamper turnout. As worrisome for the party is that 20% of black voters say they would consider voting for Mr. Trump. In 2020 the former president won just 12% of the black vote. Democrats know they can’t lose 1 in 5 black votes next year and expect to hold the White House. None of this means that Mr. Biden’s re-election bid is doomed. Twelve months is enough time for voters to change their minds, and the president’s most likely Republican opponent is facing 91 criminal charges in four separate cases. Some Trump backers will stand by him no matter what, but other supporters might respond to a guilty verdict by reconsidering the wisdom of electing a convicted felon to our nation’s highest office.If Mr. Biden wants to turn things around, he might try spending less time complaining about his press coverage and more time acknowledging his current dilemma. Face the fact that he has work to do to win back voters’ confidence. The president could have responded to a question about opinion polls by saying that November 2024 is still a ways off, and that he always knew the next election would be closely contested. Instead he came off as dismissive, someone in angry denial about his situation. It’s well documented that Mr. Biden is frustrated he hasn’t received more credit for the economy. On his watch, gross domestic product has expanded, hourly wages have increased and unemployment has remained low. Even inflation has come down in recent months. Still, just 38% of voters approve of the president’s economic stewardship. The White House says this is a messaging problem. Not quite. The real problem is that voters, to their credit, know when they’re being spun. Yes, GDP was up 4.9% in the third quarter on an annual basis, but prices for everything from housing to gas to groceries remain well above what they were three years ago. The White House has a similar challenge with crime, and that’s apart from the millions of people who have entered the country illegally with the administration’s tacit approval. Domestic crime has dipped in recent years but remains above pre-Covid levels. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that the White House had announced “new funding for state and local governments to hire additional law enforcement officers, as President Joe Biden looks to combat perceptions of growing violent crime in U.S. cities.” Perceptions? According to the FBI’s annual crime report, homicides fell by a little more than 6% nationally between 2021 and 2022 but remained 25% above the 2019 level. Meanwhile, carjackings and other property crimes have risen. In the nation’s capital, where murders are up 38% this year, the lone major supermarket in one of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods may be forced to close due to the increase in theft.In California, where smash-and-grab robberies have become commonplace, the latest crime trend involves using stolen cars to ram through a storefront and then loot the establishment. “Statistics aren’t compiled for ram-raiding cases,” the Journal reported this week, “but local and federal law-enforcement officials say they have seen a sharp uptick since the Covid-19 pandemic amid an overall rise in property crime.”As with the economy, there is a disconnect between the statistics that the administration brandishes and the everyday experience of Americans. A decline in average crime levels is cold comfort to the person who still hears nightly gunfire, whose local drugstore puts every item under lock and key, or whose only source of fresh produce went out of business because leftist prosecutors decriminalized shoplifting. Millions of voters are using these simple measures to determine whether they are better off today than they were under Donald Trump. Their verdict hides in plain sight in Joe Biden’s dismal job-approval ratings.
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1 年Sadly, Mr Biden is employing classic liberal-dem communications strategy…..”tell the lie loud enough and long enough” and hope that you can convince enough low-information voters to be able to retain power. Keep up your truthful, spot-on posts!