Waiting for Joe Biden’s speech to a joint session of Congress to begin this week, I observed at New York that Republicans were struggling to define him consistently, which felt like a familiar problem for them:
When Bill Clinton was at the pre-Lewinsky peak of his powers, he drove Republicans nuts. They alternated between accusing him of “stealing our issues” with his triangulating pitches on welfare reform and crime and the size of government, and of being “liberal, liberal, liberal!” — a sort of boomer love child of George McGovern and Janis Joplin in a deceptive deep-fried southern packaging. Eventually the opportunity to depict him as a lying sexual predator solved the conservative dilemma, though you could argue he never stopped throwing them off-balance.
Republicans are similarly having problems getting a clear focus on Joe Biden, as the Los Angeles Times’ Noah Bierman observes:
“Alex Conant, a Republican consultant who has advised Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, [says] that his party’s two main messages about Biden are at odds with each other, blunting their impact. ‘The thing you hear Republicans say most is that he’s too old for the job, which isn’t consistent with saying he’s doing too much,’ Conant said. ‘You can’t effectively argue that he’s incompetent and that he’s too effective.'”
This dual framing of Biden was evident during the 2020 campaign, when Trump called him “Sleepy Joe” and with his usual lack of subtlety suggested his opponent was senile, even as he assailed Biden’s party of radical socialist aims. The 45th president and his surrogates squared the circle by treating Biden as the half-there puppet of the real powers, particularly the “communist” Kamala Harris.
But now, 100 days into the Biden-Harris administration, even though the new president has kept an unusually low profile, there are no signs of Harris or anyone else manipulating him. Indeed, so far his White House has been remarkably free of the factionalism that often undermines clear presidential leadership. With Clinton as president you had a White House staff famously divided (ironically, given the later reputations of the First Lady and the veep) into progressive “Rodhams” and centrist “Gores” who jockeyed for position and placed their varying stamps on administration policies. George W. Bush’s presidency was also marked by competing power centers (e.g., his terrifying vice-president and the “Boy Genius” Karl Rove); to a lesser extent, so was Obama’s. As for Donald Trump, hardly a week passed without someone — particularly his rotating cast of chiefs-of-staff — being described by “insiders” as the real power behind the throne or perhaps as the wild man’s lion-tamer.
Trump, of course, created some of the same problems for Democrats that Clinton — and now Biden — posed for Republicans. Was he the “toddler president” who ran a hollowed-out administration with no real core of convictions or goals? Or was he a putative Il Duce craftily planning an authoritarian takeover of the country? Up until the day he left office there was evidence for both descriptions. Indeed, the coda of his presidency, the January 6 Capitol riot, was variously regarded as a fascist coup attempt and a clown show.
Trump’s successor will have an opportunity in his first address to a joint session of Congress to add to the impression that he is quietly but firmly in charge of the executive branch, and has imposed order on his fractious party as he unveils yet another massive proposal. Kamala Harris will be sitting (and often standing and applauding) behind him, likely looking more like an adoring protégée than any sort of puppet-master. But if he stumbles at all, or looks tired, or says things that supposedly centrist Democrats like him don’t believe, the knees of many elephants will jerk and out will come the mockery of the old man who is a reassuring front for the Marxists actually running the country.
Such confusion if it continues will be of great service to Biden, much like the current Republican tendency to focus on irrelevant culture-war themes while a mostly united Democratic Party enacts legislative initiatives of a magnitude we haven’t seen since Ronald Reagan’s first year in office. For all their political gifts, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — who, lest we forget, both had a much more firmly Democratic Senate and House the first two years of their presidencies — couldn’t come close to the mastery of Congress Biden has exhibited up until now. As Republicans watch Biden’s speech, they should soberly realize that before long it may not matter that much if they bust up the Democratic trifecta in 2022. The damage to GOP policies and priorities wrought by “Uncle Joe” and his “senile socialist regime” could be too large to reverse by then. While Republicans fret about Trump and rage about “cancel culture,” Biden is eating their lunch.
PEW and Andy Kohut had the race right on… with this pre-election prediction release…
check it out peoplepress.org
Not so much horse and buggy huh?
Mady..about Zogby, Kerry had a lead last week. Bush had a lead at the end of last week/ the beginning of this one. Now its tied. Indicates that the race is pretty stable right now in a tie.
ABC WaPo is easy. Look at their registered voter data. A huge change 3 days ago from a pretty even split to about a 6 point spread that is fairly stable over 3 days. Indicates to me a pretty big Bush outlier came on 3 days ago, and since then we’ve had 48-47 or so splits. When that big day rolls off, it’ll move closer to tied again. It’s a 4 day moving average, so I expect one more bad spread for us and then, bam, back to normal.
Mady –
One clear difference between the Washington Post/ABC poll and all other polls whose methods I’ve seen described in sufficient detail is that the Post/ABC poll does not weight respondents for Hispanic origin. Hispanics are, as far as I can tell, lumped in with whites.
I would expect that Hispanics with high school education or less would have an extremely low rate of participation in a poll, because of long working hours and language barrier. (Even if you speak a non-native language reasonably well, do you speak it well enough to feel like doing a 20-minutes telephone interview?) The non-participating low-education Hispanics are replaced, due to the weighting process, with low-education whites who (at least in the income-biased sample produced by polling methods) tend slightly toward Bush.
(Note that the ABC weighting method — I haven’t seen the details of the Post’s — is different from most other polls. I called it “cell-weighting” in an earlier post. The more usual weighting method, which I called “parameter weighting,” will also underrepresent low-education Hispanics in the final results, but they will be replaced by a mixture of low-education whites and blacks and more educated Hispanics. This, I would guess, will also bias results against Kerry, but to a substantially lesser degree.)
I think this will be remembered as the year when polls were shown to be living in the horse and buggy world, while the US had moved on to autos.
The polls are measuring a universe that cannot be measured by phone polls pressed into 2-3 day chunks of time in samples that total 1000 and don’t look remotely like the electorate.
Two items:
1. I was going to ask the same question as a previous post: why is the WP/ABC poll so different? Even on registereds, it showed a 7-point Bush lead today, I think…
2. Any idea how many new folks might come out in FLA on the minimum wage referendum? That’s a huge potential swing for Kerry, it seems to me…
Keep up the good work — love this site!!
eg
Yes.
What’s different is the intensity around the election – it’s so high. We Dems want the polls to reassure us, to give us a moment of hope, a moment of reprieve from this crushing Republican control of the Executive, the Legislative and seemingly the Judiciary.
We fear we will lose in Florida again. We fear that the Supreme Court will decide it all again. We fear that we’ll lose because we didn’t get that one more vote out in Minnesota or Ohio or New Mexico. The closeness of the 2000 election, the division in the country, the obsessive news coverage of the coverage of the coverage of the election and the pundits talking about the polls and the insane number of little instant polls and the blogs and the emails and the talk radio and and and . . . It’s hard to keep positive and to think all of our little-door-knocks and small contributions will add up to getting rid of a horrible, horrible president.
I mean – if Kerry wins, it will be the first time since Paul Wellstone won in Minnesota that I can say it was the work of all of us ordinary people doing what we can in the crevices of our work-a-day lives. That would be a pretty big wish come true –
It’s not that no one cared about Gore or Bush as candidates, no one really cared about the election – until, of course, that final day in Florida when it all blew up and then there was Kyoto and ABM and September 11 and Iraq and we all realized how wrong we had been not to work as hard as we could in Fall 2000.
Kerry in a landslide –
Two things:
First of all, I find it alarming that Kerry has not led at all in any recent Zogby polls. Yes, they do waver, but never to Kerry getting a majority percentage.
Also, could anyone explain the methodology of the Washington Post/ABC tracking poll, and why, in a time when very few polls show results that favor Kerry, but most show a quite close race, the Post has been showing Bush consistently at 50% or over. Today it shows, I think, 51 Bush, 45 Kerry.
Thanks,
Mady
Polling is definitely going through growing pains. You cite a number of reasons why polls vary (clearly, on election day most or all will have been wrong–if by wrong we mean to understand predicting the outcome).
I think the polls themselves may be part of the problem. We have respondent fatigue–not on an individual level, but as a nation. Look at those so-called “undecideds.” I find it odd that their numbers have not declined significantly since June. My guess is that they’re not measuring conviction so much as fatigue. It seems like something between 5-10% of every poll are undecided. Wouldn’t we expect to see that decline as the electorate gets to know the candidates? But it hasn’t. My guess is that this group has just had it with pollsters. They’re decided, but they ain’t tellin’ us.
Also, it’s odd that Andy would make the argument about voter volatility when he himself has measured how strongly convinced so much of the electorate is.