This was recorded before President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign on Sunday.
Democrats in tough races this year are asking the incumbent president and presumptive nominee Joe Biden to step aside. This is unprecedented, so political analyst Cliston Brown joins me to unpack why the Biden re-election campaign resembles the Hindenburg after the explosion. Can the president turn this around and why is he struggling against a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist? Does it really just come down to Biden’s age and the price of eggs?
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Edited excerpts from our discussion:
Why is Biden so unpopular?
SER: I like the president. I’ve liked what he’s done. But he’s been profoundly unpopular by any objective measure. And people have disagreed with me about this. But he’s been underwater since 2021.
CLISTON BROWN: Yeah, he has.
SER: And this year he is under 40 percent. So people talk about, [Mitt] Romney was ahead in some polls and what about [John] Kerry? But around this time [in 2004] George W. Bush was heading towards 50 percent approval, which can help with the fundamentals and so forth. Barack Obama, also, was on an upward trajectory [in 2012]. Biden’s still below 40 percent, in the 30s.
Generally speaking, if you’re doing poorly in a political campaign, your kind of Hail Mary is, well, maybe my opponent will get indicted on major felonies, but that seems to have already happened. I don’t know what other October surprise there is, [beyond revealing Trump’s] a lizard. Everyone’s like, “We love the lizard!”
CLISTON: One of the things that we have seen consistently, even though inflation has stabilized, prices are still very high. This is something I hear from people all the time. I’m on X or Twitter, whatever you prefer to call it, quite a bit, but I’m out in the real world more. I give a lot of talks on politics at corporate events, and I talk to a lot of what we call in the political Twitter world “normies.” What I hear from them generally comes down to two things: God, Biden’s old, isn’t he? And, you know, prices are so high. It’s like my paycheck isn’t going as far as it used to go.
We hear all these people saying, “Yeah, but studies show that things are going better and people aren’t really understanding it.“ It’s never a good idea to go to your average voter and say, “Oh, what are you talking about? You’re not struggling. Things are going great. What’s wrong with you? You’re an idiot.” Yeah, that’s a winning political strategy.
SER: Unemployment is much lower than it was in 2004, when it was five percent. It’s four percent now, and eight percent with Obama in 2012. Many have argued that it’s [a credit] to Obama’s amazing skill as a politician. One of the reasons the Romney campaign was confident that he could win was that the fundamentals, generally speaking, were against Obama. Unemployment was high. The Affordable Care Act was pretty unpopular at the time. Obama’s ability to overcome that was impressive.
Unemployment might be low now, but even with eight percent unemployment, that’s eight percent of Americans, opposed to every American feeling inflation.
Why it was more than just a ‘bad’ debate
SER: I want to ask you about that historic train wreck debate, because as I facetiously put it, this was like in 1992, Bill Clinton coming on stage and making out with Gennifer Flowers for 90 minutes in front of 51 million people.
This is like in 2008, Barack Obama coming on stage in a Daishiki and giving a Jeremiah Wright-style rant about “whitey” for 90 minutes in front of 51 million people.
I have never seen a candidate reinforce their greatest liability to more people than were going to watch a Lester Holt interview or anything else at this point.
CLISTON: Until that debate, I had arrived at the conclusion a long time ago that debates don’t matter. What was different about this was, as you pointed out, Joe Biden went on screen and reinforced his main liability, which is that he is old and that people have suspected for some time that he might not be totally with it. And he went out on stage and he looked old and he looked like he wasn’t totally with it.
That was very, very damaging. And you know what? If you and I are bedwetters, then Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester and Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi are all bedwetters too.
And I don’t believe that for a minute. These are some of the most stalwart members of the party who have their finger on the pulse of where the country is. You know, we talk about all these people who are coming out, all these members of Congress who are coming out saying that President Biden should step aside. The reason that these people got to Congress is because they have their finger on the pulse of their constituents.
They know what’s going on out there. And what they are seeing is he’s going to lose and he’s going to drag us all down with it. There were a lot of things that were going in Joe Biden’s direction in 2020 that he doesn’t have going for him today. And one that is not talked about by anybody so far as I can tell is the fact that because of the COVID pandemic in 2020, there was much wider access to mail balloting.
A number of states that expanded their access to mail balloting including Pennsylvania and Michigan have pulled back on that quite a bit so Joe Biden got 81 million votes but that was unprecedented turnout, partly driven by the fact that people didn’t have to go stand in line at a polling place, they could just mail in a ballot and that option is not available everywhere anymore.
I think we’re going to see a lot of rescission in terms of that. I think we’re going to see lower turnout. I think that we are going to see a lot of the swing voters who were disgusted with Trump now say, “You know what? I didn’t like Trump. He does some things that bothered me. But I don’t think Biden can actually be president anymore. I don’t think he can run the country effectively.” And so if I’m not an ideological person, and I don’t pay attention like the average voter generally doesn’t to all the nuances of what the Republican Party stands for and what the Democratic Party stands for, and I just see Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, and I see Joe Biden falling off of a bicycle, and I see this happening, and I don’t know anything else, I don’t pay attention to anything else, and then I look back and think, well, the economy was going gangbusters. You know, gas didn’t cost so much. Eggs didn’t cost so much.
There are reasons for that, some of which have to do with the fact that Trump completely screwed up on the COVID pandemic. But people just look at what they see on the surface. And a lot of voters vote based on those surface type things.
So, you’re telling us there’s a chance?
SER: What would you say is the best chance the Democrats have of keeping the White House and perhaps flipping the House?
CLISTON: I think that the best chance at this point the Democrats have would be for President Biden to step aside and for the Democratic Party to immediately close ranks behind Vice President Harris. I think that doing anything else would be very, very divisive. I think that it would tear the party apart at a time when we don’t need to be torn apart. We need to come together and get behind Vice President Harris and get her out there to take the fight to Donald Trump in a way that Joe Biden is no longer capable of doing if he ever was.
Sounds like a plan. As of Sunday evening, Harris had already secured at least a third of the delegates she needs for the nomination and had gained the endorsements of elected Democrats from across the ideological spectrum. Democrats are united.
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