Both the president and his reelection campaign are going after his coup-attempting predecessor even before the first GOP primary ballots are cast.
A full year out from the 2024 presidential election and nearly two months before Republicans cast their first primary ballots, President Joe Biden and his campaign are assuming that Donald Trump will be his opponent and have already started reminding voters why they threw him out of office in the first place.
Biden personally has stepped up criticism of his coup-attempting predecessor and is framing the likely rematch as one that will determine the survival of American democracy.
“The same man who said we should terminate the rules and regulations and articles of the Constitution — these are things he said — is now running on a plan to end democracy as we know it,” he said last week at a fundraiser in Chicago.
“This next election is different. It’s more important. There’s more at stake. And we all know why: Because our very democracy is at stake,” he told a San Francisco audience on Wednesday.
Firstly, that’s untrue. Over the last decade Democrats have demonstrably moved left, and even academic analyses have observed it. Second, as I said, Democrats become more conservative when conservatives win. There’s a reason why Bill Clinton was more conservative than other Democrats and why his approach actually worked. The Third Way, as they called it, was their answer to Republican dominance from Reagan onwards.
Like it or not, Republicans kept winning, and Clinton saw that as an indication that voters were conservative and Democrats were too liberal for what voters wanted. Since then however, the country has shifted leftwards, and Third Way has become unsuccessful because of it. If you don’t vote and Republicans win, and they keep winning, don’t be surprised when Democrats shift to the right because they think voters are conservative. Your actions are perpetuating rightward movement, not stopping it.
Voting for someone isn’t the same as supporting them. That isn’t what a vote indicates. Your vote for someone simply means that you think they’ll do better than the other person or that person is more closely aligned to your beliefs. It’s not like you’re sending a love letter. You’re picking leadership based on who’ll perform better to achieve the goals you want. Voting is a calculated move, not an act of passion.