Democrats seem to have lost one of the most basic of all political skills: asking those who are not already committed supporters for their votes. It is an elementary thing, but, as with many other elementary things,
Joe Biden does not seem quite up to it. If he wants to win, he should figure that out. I am not sure that there is such a thing as a “Nikki Haley Republican,” but the former South Carolina governor beat
Donald Trump in the Vermont and DC
Republican primaries, took about 40% of the vote in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and finished up her campaign having won more than 20% of the vote in the races she contested. That’s not nothing. True, that support wasn’t nearly enough for
Nikki Haley to beat Donald Trump in a Republican primary. But it would be more than enough for Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump in a general election. The share of alienated
Republicans who don’t want to vote for Trump isn’t 40% — it isn’t even 20%. And it doesn’t have to be. Well less than half that would do it for Biden — if he would lift a pinky finger to try to win those votes. Transferring only a few percentage points worth of unenthusiastic Republicans out of Trump’s column to his own would be enough to win Biden virtually every swing state. Never mind
Pennsylvania or Michigan— just over 5% wins
Democrats Texas , where Trump won only 52% of the vote in 2020. The fact that Biden didn’t have to reach out much to win in 2020 doesn’t mean that he can ignore winnable Republican moderates in 2024. Like a dinner party or a traffic jam, you can never really have the same
election twice. There are scads of voters who are dissatisfied with the two choices before them. When comedian
Jimmy Fallon asked the only politician in world history incompetent enough to have lost an election to Donald Trump what she’d say to such voters,
Hillary Clinton answered: “ Get over yourselves .” Perhaps that wasn’t the very best answer. The sneering was bad enough for a has-been such as Mrs. Clinton, but the same thing has basically been the Biden campaign’s message, too . The most he has said of those Haley voters is: “There is a place for them in my campaign.” Which is to say, he has graciously agreed to accept their votes should they be laid at his feet. And then there was this campaign ad : “If you voted for Nikki Haley, Donald Trump doesn’t want your vote.” Even if that were true (of course it isn’t) it would leave unanswered the question: Why should these Republicans vote for Biden? The Democrats seem to believe that Trump is going to do the work for them, that he is such a grotesque and contemptible figure that the incumbent president doesn’t have to make any positive case for himself to Republicans. That’s partly the bitter fruit of the highly moralized politics of the
Democratic Party: “the right side of history” and all that pious garbage. But Biden’s partisan immobility is also the result of his peculiar sense of political positioning as a supposed centrist who is, in reality, almost entirely dominated by the shifting winds of internal Democratic politics, with very little responsiveness to the overall direction or center of the political mainstream. That home-crowd fixation is how Biden has managed to wrong-foot himself on, to take one important issue, Israel and Hamas. Whoever decides the 2024 election, it isn’t going to be the ladies and gentlemen of Queers for Palestine. But it might be Jewish voters in the suburbs of Philadelphia or Atlanta, or moderate Republicans who are much more pro-Israel than are left-wing Democrats. It also might be decided by sensible Republicans and independents who don’t really want to punch Trump’s ticket but who also don’t think caring about the chaos at the border or persistent inflation or race-neutral college admissions makes them the moral equivalent of Klansmen. It wouldn’t take much to reach out to those voters. Find a convenient bus and throw
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ed Markey under it — a low-cost proposition in either case. During his first term in office,
Bill Clinton famously complained that he was serving out the third term of the Eisenhower administration, painfully hemmed in by the conservatism of the time. But the bipartisan collaboration that shaped Clinton’s first term was the reason Clinton had a second term. Coalition-building works. Ask anybody under 90 who Michael Dukakis is and you’ll get a blank stare. Unlike President Clinton, President Biden is either unwilling or unable to break ranks with his party on any significant issue and accommodate the other party, even on one of those meaty issues where there is a great deal of consensus such as illegal
immigration. This would be especially easy to do in 2024 because the Republican nominee himself is at odds with long-standing Republican beliefs toward spending, business regulation and foreign policy. Some Republicans still care about that stuff, and who also dread the chaos and depravity of Trump and his allies. Biden could win handily in 2024 with a handful of those disaffected Republican votes. Would it kill him to ask? Get over yourself, Mr. President.