I was certain one of the few things keeping Joe Biden afloat was the press, but now I’m not so sure. After reading my colleague Nick Arama’s piece about one New York anchor confessing that Democrats were reaching out to news organizations to gin up counter-protesters for the Trump Brox rally, and subsequently failing, I paused.
This was New York. This was the Bronx. This is AOC’s district. This is the place where Nancy Pelosi said you could put a “D” on a glass of water and it would get elected.
Yet, as Arama reported in another piece, you had Democrats showing up to the Trump rally, not to protest, but to partake.
Not that Democrats didn’t show up to protest Trump. It was meager, to say the least.
Trump’s rally ultimately drew around 10,000 supporters while the Democrat protesters appeared to be somewhere in the few hundreds. If this was some red state where you couldn’t drive four blocks without seeing at least a dozen Trump yard signs, I wouldn’t be that excited.
But this is the Bronx. Even CNN is admitting this isn’t a great look for Democrats.
I’m trying not to picture this as being a microcosm of the current state of American politics, but it’s hard not to given the state of the Biden campaign as well. Biden’s approval rating dropped to 36 percent according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. His disapproval rating sits at 59 percent.
Even in blue havens like New Hampshire, Biden can’t get people to turn out to his events.
The only people who seem to dislike Trump are Democrat politicians. When even Democrat voters don’t agree with the politicians they put into office anymore, one has to ask what kind of election the Democrats are in for.
I’m reminded quite a bit of the 2016 election where Hillary Clinton was drawing in larger crowds at her rallies but not by much. One infamous moment involved Clinton’s campaign attempting to improve her bad attendance optics by closing off a large part of the expansive room by shutting off the lights in the parts of the room that weren’t occupied and then using a partition to make the room look smaller but more full.
But Biden can’t even fill small rooms. Something has shifted in the Democrat voting base.
Or rather, a lot of things have.
Americans are clearly not buying the idea that Biden is anywhere close to healthy or mentally capable according to Pew.
Then there’s the fact that Trump has increasing support among the black community, including the young black community. This brings his support from 8 percent in 2020 to 22 percent in 2024, a massive jump.
And few actually like Biden when it comes to the economy with only 36 percent having confidence in Biden’s ability to handle it.
Overall, only 21 percent of people believe the country is headed in the right direction.
If you’re Biden’s handlers, you’re panicking right now. The numbers don’t look good on paper. They especially don’t look good when they manifest in the Bronx on camera.
I’m not sure what the Democrats can do at this point to save 2024 with the exception of questionable voting practices. Even if they did resort to that, at this rate it almost seems like the vote for Trump would be so overwhelming that if Biden did have another vote jump incident, it’d be too far outside the realm of believability.
Not that it wasn’t odd enough already.
I don’t want to start shouting “red wave.” I think the 2022 midterms taught us that even when things are all in our favor, you can always rely on the GOP to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, but Democrats are facing one massive embarrassment after another, and not at the hands of the GOP, but at the hands of voters.