Joe Biden’s “shocking” comeback is more or less what was always going to happen
President Joe Biden has racked up too many major victories over the past week to even list. In fact he’s been quietly racking up victories for quite awhile; it was just getting drowned out by the mainstream media’s constant negative coverage of him. Now the media is painting his turnaround as an “unlikely” or “shocking comeback, when in reality the media is just trying to cover its backside for having intentionally gotten Biden so wrong over the past year while it was trying to manufacture ratings. This isn’t even the first time.
I remember back in the 2020 presidential election cycle, when Biden was losing the early primary states that never tell us anything about who’s going to be the nominee, and everyone in the media said he was toast. This was never the case. Even after he lost in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Biden’s South Carolina and Super Tuesday poll numbers made clear that he was the frontrunner. In fact it made clear that within a week or two, everyone would be able to see he was the frontrunner. But the media likes to chase ratings by pretending those early states are indicators of anything, and it likes to chase ratings by pretending the frontrunner is losing, so it was a perfect storm.
Even before James Clyburn endorsed Biden in South Carolina, Biden was already ahead in the polling averages by fifteen points in South Carolina, meaning he was already going to win the state in a blowout. And when the South Carolina Democratic primary has a clear winner, it’s generally an indication that the same candidate is going to clean up days later on Super Tuesday.
But narratives like “Biden is toast” and “Let’s all obsessively pay attention to these early states” make for better ratings than simply admitting that the earliest states tell us nothing and that Biden was statistically on track for the nomination the entire time. And so the media insisted Biden was toast, and then pretended that the Clyburn endorsement somehow single handedly saved Biden from the failed trajectory that he was on. This was outright fiction, easily disproven by the numbers, but it’s how the media pretended it happened.
Of course, while the media’s ratings-driven dishonesty never really did put Biden’s nomination at risk, the media’s dishonesty did far more substantial damage to Biden after he got into office. After Biden had been in office for about six months without controversy, and the media’s ratings had fallen through the floor, the media decided to dishonestly scandalize his Afghanistan withdrawal. When that boosted ratings, the media continued dishonestly scandalizing everything around Biden. And so a broadly beloved President, who had an approval rating near 60% for his first six months in office, now has an approval rating closer to 40% – because the media obsessively told the public to turn against Biden.
Yet Biden kept scoring wins anyway, even as the media (left, right, and center) gave him no credit for any of it – until a number of things culminated at once this past month, and suddenly Biden’s wins were too big for the media to continue ignoring. So now the media is forced to cover its backside by pretending that no one could have seen this obvious thing coming.
Of course in reality, gas prices were always going to come down, because Biden put so many things in motion on that front, some of them were going to have to work. Manchin and Sinema were always going to cave on at least one big thing at some point during this term, because even they knew they were going to have to do one thing to try to distract voters from all the things they refused to do. And so on. Not all of Biden’s recent victories were predictable or inevitable, but a substantial portion of them were.
But hey, who cares about the facts? What matters is that the media managed to hit its ratings marks over the past year, even if it did dishonestly turn 20% of the country against a beloved President. Come to think of it, that year of hyperbolic Biden-bashing didn’t actually improve the media’s ratings all that much. So the media sold its soul for nothing.
The question now is how the news of Biden’s “improbable comeback,” and the positive coverage that the Democratic Party is now getting, will impact Biden’s approval rating and the Democrats’ midterm polling numbers. If the media hadn’t dishonestly targeted Biden to begin with, these midterms could be a cakewalk for his party. But as is so often the case, it now becomes our job to help the Democrats overcome the damage that the media dishonestly does to the Democrats. Biden and the Democrats have done their part. It’s in our hands now. We are the messaging. Go help these Democrats running in highly competitive House races and let’s go win the midterms:
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