Joe Biden is the Problem

A takedown the alternative explanations for Biden's continued polling woes.

Essayist Elaine Scarry once noted that when Americans think of the presidency, they think of the colossus. They think of the photograph of Kennedy, amid the Cuban Missile Crisis, in silhouette, looking out a large White House window, contemplating the gravity of his decisions. They talk in hushed, reverent tones about the "awful responsibilities" of being president, thrilled by this "most powerful office in the world" and the man at its center who is "alone" and ultimately not accountable to any other man.

The real problem for Biden is that his seeming frailty turns what Americans love about the presidency on its head. Instead of a colossus, they see a deteriorated husk. Instead of Kennedy's Atlas-like posture, they see a hunched man, stumbling and confused about global problems. The romance of the president as the "ultimate decision-maker" in the world's most powerful office is replaced by a sense that Biden cannot fill it, that he cannot reach the levers of power, and that when he does, his actions are incoherent or spasmodic. His power feels inadequate.

— Anonymous

With less than five months remaining until Election Day 2024, reality is finally starting to set in for some of the liberal set. After more than a year of dismissing the polls as too early, too uncertain, or otherwise irrelevant, it has now become impossible to deny one simple fact: Joe Biden is down. More than a year after his predecessors who went on to win second terms began their post-midterm comebacks, his approval rating is still hitting new record lows. He has trailed Donald Trump in the national polling averages for eight months straight, with nothing so far proving to be capable of putting him back in the lead. Even his opponent receiving 34 felony convictions so far appears to have barely moved the needle, putting his path for a comeback in jeopardy.

If the election were held today, with the results being at least passingly similar to the polls we have seen for well over half a year, Joe Biden would be the first Democrat in two decades to lose the popular vote. In the electoral college, he would lose by the largest margin of any Democratic candidate since the end of the Reagan administration. In the best-case scenario for him, where he benefits from a polling error in his favor, he would barely limp over the finish line with the smallest Democratic electoral college victory in more than 100 years. Even if the stars align and everything goes according to plan over the next five months, the best he could realistically do would be a slight improvement on his 2020 map. Absent a scenario where Trump is in a jail cell on Election Day, the decisive defeat of Trumpism that Biden was elected to secure appears to be out of the cards.

In the face of this possible humiliation, the undemocratic wing of the Democratic Party has begun to engage in contingency planning. After having spent years presenting the Biden administration and the politics that it represents as God’s gift to Earth, they are now working overtime to pretend that the potential disaster we face is the fault of everyone other than the President and the establishment. They want to set themselves up to survive the most profound failure possible completely unscathed, and they don’t deserve to. In this article, I will address all of the major alternative explanations for Biden’s continued struggles, point by point, to prove that they are the fault of him and him alone.

Argument #1: That Biden is losing because of “wokeness”