With a little over half a year until the 2024 election, the Democratic Party faces a major problem in keeping the White House: Joe Biden.
While his approval ratings have been on a steady decline since 2021, according to Reuters, they’ve become even worse since Oct. 7 and currently sit at 56% disapproval with no sign of getting better any time soon.
His staunch support of Israel, both in rhetoric and monetary aid, has catastrophically cratered his popularity, especially among young voters.
The danger the Democratic Party faces isn’t people switching their vote to Donald Trump.
It’s people not voting at all.
Regardless of how you may feel about Biden, this is the situation.
The threat of Donald Trump simply isn’t enough to scare people into voting for the “lesser evil” this time around.
Especially when the lesser evil is 81 years old and failed to codify Roe v. Wade in the years he’s already been in office.
Unless a major shift happens in the Democratic Party, we face the threat of a second Trump term.
It is highly unlikely Biden will change his stance on Israel — considering pro-Israel groups have given him a little over $5.7 million since 1990, according to OpenSecrets, more than any other American politician — and his only challengers to get even a minuscule fraction of primary votes have been political grifters with no real chance like Dean Philips and RFK Jr.
The only real hope the Democrats have is to throw their weight behind a different candidate before it’s too late.
However, this is another unlikely scenario, and Democrats are notorious for failing to learn from past mistakes.
This is the third presidential election in a row where they have forced a largely unpopular candidate upon voters and expected people to turn out and vote because it’s a Democrat.
It didn’t work in 2016, and it barely worked in 2020.
Unless the party responds to voters and drastically changes its strategy and quickly, the 2024 election seems likely to be a repeat of 2016 rather than 2020.
A challenger to the left of Biden — a Rashida Tlaib, a Cori Bush or an Ayanna Pressley — would immediately be more popular.
And about seven months of campaigning with the support of the Democrats would give them a far better chance in the general election than Biden currently has.
People respond to a candidate they can get excited about, someone who can offer real material change to the average American.
We saw this in 2016 and 2020 — Bernie Sanders was extremely popular. His pro-labor, left-wing campaigns drew in voters from across the political spectrum, and he did well in polling, but the Democratic Party never supported him.
Regardless, Biden and the Democrats seem to be set on this course with no signs of deviating, ignoring the grave reality they face.
If Donald Trump wins a second term in November, it won’t be the fault of people who didn’t vote for Biden.
It will be the fault of Biden and the party that propped him up.