Like many Democrats, I’m stuck on a doomsday merry-go-round: Joe Biden shouldn’t be running for president. Joe Biden is running for president. Donald Trump shouldn’t be running for president. Donald Trump is running for president.
But this isn’t 2020. Biden cannot run the same campaign he did last time, when all he had to do was appear normal. Back then he still had some of the Obama sheen; today, he and his vice president are both unpopular. Little in his first term seems to be serving him well. Though he’s done a good job as president and the economy is thriving, few give him credit. And multiple polls show him running behind Donald Trump.
Most troubling, he’s too old and he looks tired. My brain wants to delete everything it’s heard from people who have spent time in his presence in the last year. (It’s not encouraging.) Only 23 percent of voters, according to a January NBC poll, say Biden is better than Trump on “having the necessary mental and physical health to be president,” a statistic that, no matter which way you bend it, doesn’t mean anything good.
If Biden is going to convince America that he has the drive to fight for their interests for the next four years, he has to show that he has four years of ideas and the wherewithal to carry them out left in him.
So how on earth can Biden energize an electorate that tunes out the moment he starts speaking?
What must Biden do to win?
He needs to go against his own political instincts — both in terms of how he’s run in the past and in how he governs. Forget nuance, forget reasonableness, forget complicated facts, forget humility and homilies and old-timey yarns. He should retire the unfortunate phrase “finish the job,” which sounds dispiritingly like tidying up loose ends before keeling over. Keeping it simple will not only help prevent him from mussing things up, it will also help voters absorb the stakes.
Instead, he should take a page from what’s worked for Republicans — going for the gut rather than the mind. Or, as Rachel Bitecofer, a political strategist and co-author of a new book, “Hit ’Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game,” put it when I spoke to her last week, instead of Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high,” the Biden campaign should think, “When they go low, we hit them where it hurts.”
“We should be focused on a counteroffensive rather than on explaining the facts, which is what Democrats like to do,” Bitecofer said.
That shouldn’t mean ad hominem attacks and childish insults; leave the gutter to Trump. But it should mean pushing hard on the issues in plain, here’s-what-we’ll-do language. It means telling voters exactly how and in what concrete ways a second Biden administration will help them. And it means relentlessly warning people precisely how a Trump administration will hurt them.
First, the issues that matter to voters. The border remains Biden’s biggest weak spot — then again, Trump didn’t fix the border, either. But rather than simply blame Republicans for the failed border deal or more of the same dithering and pandering to the progressive wing, Biden needs to take concrete measures, through executive orders, to address the crisis now. He needs to articulate a longer-term plan to put before Congress in his second term. He needs, at long last, to say: Here is what my administration will do to secure the border and prevent uncontrolled migration.
He has a much easier job on abortion. But still, Biden should hammer it home: He is the candidate who will fight to protect women’s rights.
Americans need to hear that he will continue to ensure the affordable medical care and prescription drugs that their lives and wallets depend on. Because not enough people are feeling the effects of a rebounded economy and slowed inflation, he needs to emphasize what he will do to make sure those benefits extend to working- and middle-class Americans.
And he needs to say that Trump will jeopardize all of that. Trump will push for a federal abortion ban. He will likely do little to push back as Republicans try to chip away at Social Security — no matter what he claims to the contrary. He will eliminate job protections and weaken unions further. He will make jobs less secure. He will amp up his policies of rewarding the rich and penalizing the poor.
There is already plenty of well-justified animus against Trump, but it won’t be enough. Polls consistently show that while Republicans hate Biden and Democrats hate Trump, Democrats do not love Biden nearly as much as Republicans love Trump. If this becomes a personality contest — as hideous and inconceivable as that may sound to steadfast Trump loathers — Biden may well lose.
Early polls are unreliable, and a lot can change in nine months. Once Trump quashes Nikki Haley and secures his party’s nomination, the reality of Trump will set in. With four criminal trials coming up, and as Trump’s increasingly batty assertions reach beyond the ears of his disciples, he will surely set off alarms among those voters who favor sanity.
But Biden can’t wait for that to happen. Trump is running like he’s already president. Biden needs to act with similar urgency. He needs to talk about the future. He needs to start making the threat of a second Trump term — in all its unbridled terror — real now. Lord help us, we’re relying on him to prevent that from happening.