CNN
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If Joe Biden wins a second term later this year, he will face one of the most complex political environments in years for a president seeking reelection.
At home and abroad, he faces headwinds that would normally cast serious doubt on his chances of convincing voters that he should return to the White House.
In an exclusive interview with CNN this week, Biden’s difficult dynamic was revealed, but he won the battleground state of Wisconsin by only about 20,000 votes in 2020, and the winner will be determined again in November. There is a possibility that it will become a target.
The president faces wars in the Middle East and Ukraine that constantly threaten to escalate and repeatedly challenge his credibility as a leader. Domestically, Mr. Biden has been beset by campus protests sparked by Israeli military attacks in the Gaza Strip and a revolt by some progressive and young voters integral to his coalition. More broadly, voters have yet to buy into his “American morning” vibe. They are struggling with high prices and interest rates, disrupting his reassurances that the economy is in great shape and overshadowing a strong legislative record comparable to that of recent presidents. He also has the challenge of becoming the oldest president in history to run for a second term, which ends at age 86.
But Biden’s saving grace is that Donald Trump, his opponent in a 2020 election rematch that Americans have repeatedly told pollsters they don’t want, may have even greater vulnerabilities than he does. Maybe. President Trump this week heard embarrassing testimony in a Manhattan courtroom about his alleged affair with an adult film star in 2006, which is currently at the center of his hush money trial. New York prosecutors allege that he falsified his business records to hide payments to Stormy Daniels in an early act of 2016 election meddling. He denies having an affair and maintains his innocence in the case.
President Trump also has a habit of alienating key suburban voters who will decide which of the two one-term presidents wins a second term in November. His recent warning that he cannot rule out the possibility of post-election violence in 2024, and his refusal to say he would accept the results, revives dark memories of the attempted steal of the 2020 election and threatens democracy. highlighted the fundamental threat to Trump’s base of voters has no problem with either his criminal trial or his false claims that he was tricked from office. But the recent midterm and presidential elections suggest he has scared off a large portion of the general electorate.
Mr. Trump also finds himself in a difficult predicament on abortion, one of the few issues on which Mr. Biden outperforms Mr. Trump in polls, and Democrats say the issue excites voters and 11 He believes he has the potential to generate voter turnout that would surpass that of the former president in May. Trump’s role in building a generational conservative majority on the Supreme Court has come back to haunt him after the justices overturned the constitutional right to abortion. President Trump has said the issue should be left to the states, but each time Republican Congresses and conservative courts issue radical new anti-abortion measures or decisions, they create an opening for Democrats.
Polls consistently show that voters care most about the economy. And the president’s assessment of this issue is mixed.
A CNN poll in April showed Biden’s economic rating at 34% and his inflation rating at 29%. That’s because voters say economic concerns are more important when choosing his candidate than in the past two presidential elections. Voters who said the economy was very important to their vote also favored Trump over Biden, 62% to 30%.
The president’s deficit comes despite three years of solid growth and job creation numbers. But inflation could ruin his political career, a corrosive political force that only voters who remember the early 1980s have experienced, and the era of high interest rates. I left behind. This has proven to be disadvantageous for home and car buyers, for example. And many Americans are still shocked every time they go to the grocery store.
In an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, the president expressed some understanding of the pain caused by high prices, but pushed back on the idea that the economy is in bad shape. But he remained defensive on the issue — recalling some past presidents who seemed angry that voters didn’t value their efforts.
Mr. Burnett asked when consumer confidence would recover, and Mr. Biden replied, “We’ve already turned it around,” adding, “The polling data has been wrong all along. You guys did the polls on CNN. How many people do you have to call to get one response? The idea that we are in such dire straits has created more jobs. We created a situation where people had access to well-paying jobs.”
Biden also balked at President Trump’s efforts to evoke nostalgia for the economy during his first term, before a once-in-a-century pandemic sent jobs and growth plummeting. “Let me say this, when I started this administration, people said the economy was going to collapse. We have the strongest economy in the world. Let me say it again. , around the world,” the president said.
But telling voters that things are great when they don’t feel great is a dubious political strategy.
Whenever it appears that a president does not fully understand the realities of life for his constituents, he is in a dangerous position. For example, in 1992, President George H.W. Bush was running for re-election. He was asked in an election debate, “How can you find a cure for the economic problems of the common people if you have not experienced what is afflicting them?” Mr. Bush got off to a bad start, looking at his watch and making him think he was better off elsewhere in the world. He then offered a haltingly confusing answer that ended with, “Of course you feel that way when you’re president of the United States. That’s why I’m trying to do something about it.”
Then rival Bill Clinton stood up and gave a national audience a taste of his fiery “Feel the Pain” political genius. He addressed the questioner directly, saying he knew by name many of the people who lost his job as governor of Arkansas, and told the nation: It’s not just people who say I want to fix it. ”
A few months later, Mr. Clinton was in the White House.
Mr. Biden has more time than Mr. Bush to convince voters that better economic times are ahead, and he could be helped considerably if the Federal Reserve begins lowering interest rates in the summer. In recent weeks, he has contrasted his poor background with Trump’s billionaire lifestyle, trying to dispel the idea that the former president cares more about working Americans than he does about himself. Trump’s predecessor warned that if he returned, he would destroy the Affordable Care Act. President’s office. “I look at this from a standpoint, from a Scranton perspective, not as a joke,” Biden told Barnett. “He’s looking at it from a Mar-a-Lago perspective. He wants to give even bigger tax cuts to the super-wealthy.”
And Mr. Biden is lucky in that he faces a rival with a huge debt burden of his own, rather than a young rising star with a talent for creating a middle-class economic story like Mr. Clinton.
But if anything, the president’s path to re-election has become even more complicated. He is currently locked in a showdown with the Israeli prime minister, always a risky proposition for a US leader. The crisis risks undermining President Trump’s claims that the world and the nation are spiraling out of control and that powerful people are needed to fix it.
The rift with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came after Netanyahu warned in a CNN interview that he would halt some arms transfers if Israel presses ahead with a major attack on the Gaza city of Rafah. In the wake of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, in which Israel’s war with Hamas left thousands of Palestinian civilians dead, Biden has spoken to progressive activists, supporters on Capitol Hill and the key battleground state of Michigan. Netanyahu is under tremendous pressure from Arab American voters to rein in his government. Killed 1,200 people. Meanwhile, campus protests have left Mr. Biden torn between young progressive voters outraged by his support for Israel during the war and moderates more susceptible to his predecessor’s chaotic narrative.
It’s unclear whether Thursday’s fierce Republican attacks on Biden over Israel will seriously hurt his voters. But the tone of the criticism reinforced the broader view among Republicans that Mr. Biden is weak and incapable of stabilizing an increasingly restless world. “It’s a failure of leadership,” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said. “Trying to make a political calculation here that it’s going to help get us out of the water is cowardly and is an answer.” . Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri’s North Carolina colleague, added: Your own. “
Biden has sought to protect himself from the protests’ political impact on centrist voters, arguing that while the right to demonstrate is guaranteed by the Constitution, property damage caused by students occupying university buildings is unacceptable. It is said that And in a speech at the Capitol commemorating Holocaust victims earlier this week, he condemned instances of anti-Semitism reported at some protests. He warned that too many people “deny, downplay, justify and ignore the Holocaust and the horrors of October 7th.”
Still, polls show that the conflict between Israel and Hamas ranks well down the list of issues that voters are most concerned about, including those most often cited as defecting en masse from Mr. Biden because of the conflict. This includes young voters who are eligible to vote. But in an election where the number of votes in some states could be in the thousands, the possibility of angry Democratic voters leaving the party or absenting themselves is worrying to the president.
