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Eleven months into his term, and a year from a midterm election that appears likely to end his legislative majority, the cold reality for Biden is that his presidency is on the brink of failure. Business lobbyists swarmed over Washington, ripping chunks out of his Build Back Better program. The scope of his agenda kept shrinking in tandem with his poll numbers. Initially, the drop seemed attributable to temporary factors. Maybe the cause was the Delta wave that crested this past summer.
So many of the Democratic Party’s woes can be traced back to a statistical error. After Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, exit polls showed he had prevailed despite losing the white vote by 20 points. The implications were enormous for both parties. Racial minorities were casting a rising share of the vote, reshaping the electorate in ways that seemed to doom the Republican Party and its heavily white coalition.
Sanders’s strong, if ultimately unsuccessful, challenge to Clinton appeared to validate the theory that the electorate was quickly moving left. That premise was one reason so few political strategists in either party took Trump’s chances seriously. How could he win when he was alienating such a huge share of the voters he needed?
The assumption that the left had gained control of the party became so self-evident that the very idea that a retrograde figure like Biden could win its nomination seemed like a sad joke. A whole genre of columns literally begged Biden not to run for president, to spare himself the embarrassment of the inevitable rejection by a party that had moved on. Even the insider-y publication Politico deemed Biden “a deeply flawed candidate who’s out of step with the mood of his party.
The grim irony is that, in attempting to court non-white voters, Democrats ended up turning them off. It was not only that they got the data wrong — they were also courting these “marginalized communities” in ways that didn’t appeal to them. For the reality is that the Democratic Party’s most moderate voters are disproportionately Latino and Black.
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