Joe Biden’s got this. Not that you’d know it.
If you ask me, there’s something particularly insidious about Fox News’ willingness to periodically put one honest panelist on the air such as Jessica Tarlov. It seems pretty obvious to me that Fox’s strategy is to goad the mainstream media outlets and liberal pundits into saying things like “Even Fox News is admitting…” which merely ends up giving publicity and credibility to Fox News. As with everything on television news, the whole thing is a ratings game.
That’s not a knock on Tarlov. Her analysis is good. As was the analysis of my late pal Alan Colmes, whenever he would pop up on Fox News and speak the truth. It’s just that, in the larger view, it’s all a game. Every TV news channel plays games of some kind or another in order to maximize ratings. Take, for instance, the fact that basically no one on television is willing to admit that Joe Biden is in a far better position than Donald Trump for 2024, and that Biden’s position is incrementally getting even better.
What’s particularly surreal is that Fox News is now letting Tarlov admit this truth on the air more readily than almost anyone on MSNBC or CNN is willing to admit it. For as thoroughly as most MSNBC and CNN hosts come at politics from the point of view of the center-left, they almost never seem to want to admit that anything is ever going well for the center-left.
For instance, for the past year, Biden and Trump have been roughly statistically tied in the polls. But you’d never know that by watching any cable news station, because every channel always hypes the most Trump-favorable polls of the week, while ignoring the most Biden-favorable polls of the week. The entire political media falsely portrays Trump as being well ahead when the polls on the whole say that the race is roughly tied. The political media falsely portrays Biden’s approval rating as being in the low thirties when the polls on the whole say it’s in the forties. These kinds of numbers have their own serious accuracy issues. But then the media makes it infinitely worse by severely and intentionally misrepresenting what the numbers are even saying to begin with.
In reality, not only are Biden and Trump roughly tied, the polls are now trending incrementally in Biden’s direction. This is a trend that was always obviously going to happen, once voters closer to the middle saw that the Republican Party really was inclined to nominate Trump, and that Trump is going senile, and that Trump is going on criminal trial.
That’s why Biden, by virtue of being roughly tied with Trump, has been in a much better position all along than Trump. Trump was always going to take a fall once we got into the general election timeframe. We’re starting to see it now. We’ll continue to see it.
The polls are about to become less a product of the public’s mixed view of Biden’s presidency, and more a function of the public’s largely negative view of the prospect of Trump ever returning to power. Then you throw in the fact that Biden is massively out-fundraising Trump, the DNC is massively out-fundraising the RNC, and you see that voters are sharply favoring Biden over Trump with their dollars.
That’s before getting to the fact that Trump’s own people just pulled him off the campaign trail because he’s now too senile to be out there without harming his prospects. And that’s before the start of Trump’s first criminal trial in two and a half weeks. These are all things that should shift the polls further in Biden’s favor.
And of course that’s all factoring in the fact that during the Biden era, the Democrats have consistently outperformed their poll numbers in every midterm, off year, and special election. Are we really supposed to believe that Biden is the only Democrat who isn’t going to outperform his poll numbers?
None of this is to say that Biden has already won the 2024 election. Nothing is ever that easy – especially in Presidential elections, where a three to five point margin of victory is considered a blowout win, and where the Electoral College can skew the math as well.
But the point is that Joe Biden has spent his entire presidency on track to get reelected. When you look at the numbers and the real world circumstances, there has never been a single point where you’d say the odds of Biden getting reelected were less than 50-50. And it’s been fairly easy to foresee that as we got into 2024, those numbers would start trending more in Biden’s favor, which they have.
The real question is why, in spite of this obvious trend, the only place on TV where it’s allowed to be pointed out is the contrarian’s chair on Fox News. Why is Jessica Tarlov admitting that Biden is on a winning track, even as the mainstream media continues to pretend that Trump has a magic wand and is in the driver’s seat?
I suppose this is why Palmer Report has to exist. But it’s exasperating. I often get unfairly pegged as an “optimist” just for pointing out basic, obvious, factually supported truths, even as the industry at large is too busy taking things out of context to try to convince you that you’re doomed. It’s all just so odd.
But the bottom line is that President Biden and the Democrats are in about as good of shape for 2024 as one could reasonably hope, while Trump and the Republicans are in remarkably bad shape. Trump and the GOP need things to start trending in their direction if they want any hope of competing in November. But throughout the first three months of 2024, things have been quietly trending further in Biden’s direction instead.
Let’s keep this fact in mind as a baseline, as we enter these final seven months of the election. If Biden and the Democrats are your side, then your side is in pretty good shape, and the other side is in pretty bad shape. Your job is to put in the work and help make sure Biden and the Democrats get over the finish line – and to ignore the talking heads who consider it their job to convince you that all hope is lost so you’ll just stare at your screen all day in despair instead of going out and putting the work in.
