Voters want Dems to stand up to Trump, not self-flagellate
Sorry, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.
A note from Aaron: Today’s newsletter was all edited and ready for publication yesterday afternoon when the sad news broke that Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. As someone who has a great deal of admiration for Biden’s accomplishments, values, and the resilience he’s shown throughout his life, I wish him and his loved ones all the best. Cancer took my father a couple years ago, so I know how harrowing that diagnosis can be. My heart goes out to Joe and his family.
Coincidentally, as you’ll see below, the topic of this newsletter is the new Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson book about Biden’s presidency and the fallout from it. We argue that Democrats should resist the advice of pundits who are urging them to spend time relitigating 2024 instead of focusing on opposing Trump. In light of the news about Biden’s health, I debated changing plans for today’s edition, but ultimately I decided the piece you’re about to read still has important and timely things to say about the political moment we find ourselves in.
I did, however, decide to publish today’s newsletter as an exclusive for paid subscribers. So if you’re a free subscriber who enjoys Public Notice but haven’t yet signed up to support us, I hope you’ll take this opportunity to do so. I think you’ll enjoy this piece, and paid subscribers make our work possible. (Update: By popular demand I have made this piece free for everyone.)
Now, without further ado …
As you are probably aware, former president Joe Biden is old. If you were not aware of that fact, journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson have written a new book about how Joe Biden — who dropped out of the presidential race because of concerns that he was old — was, in fact, old.
This breaking news has led to much handwringing and scolding at high profile news outlets. Joe Biden, they have concluded, is old. Is this a scandal that will be a major issue in the 2026 midterms, and maybe even in the 2028 elections? Should Democrats spend time and energy focusing on the fact that Joe Biden is old?
I think you’ll agree, after some serious thought, that the answer here is NO, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!
Ahem.
This is fairly straightforward. Joe Biden is not running for president. Joe Biden wasn’t even the candidate in 2024. Joe Biden’s fitness for office is not the most pressing issue facing the country in 2026, or 2028.
This is trivially obvious. But the fact that the media, and some Democrats, continue to be obsessed with the last election points to some real problems going forward. The country has been transformed in terrifying and dangerous ways since November 2024. The electoral landscape has also changed drastically.
Learning lessons from the past is important. But freezing ourselves forever at the moment Donald Trump won the presidency does no one any good. Journalists and Democrats need to take into account where we are now if they want to face the challenges of the moment and the future. Those challenges do not — again, they do not — include Joe Biden’s age.
Biden is not president. I repeat, Biden is not president.
Thompson and Tapper’s book is not out yet, but it is being widely reviewed and discussed by media outlets. According to these reviews, the thesis of the book is that Biden’s aides hid his increasing frailty from the public, and that that is why the Democrats lost the election.
There are a range of problems with this argument, among them the fact that the Democrats took Biden’s age seriously enough to force him out of the race. Kamala Harris, not Biden, ended up as the party’s nominee. She ran a vigorous and by most accounts effective campaign — she crushed Trump in the debate, for example, and broke fundraising records.
The argument, then, is not that Biden should have dropped out. It’s that he should have dropped out earlier, that there should have been an open primary, and that the Democrats should have chosen a different candidate. This phantom candidate, supposedly, would have had no baggage, and would have defeated Trump easily, despite the lingering resentment of inflation and a terrible year globally for incumbents.
Would a different candidate have done better than Harris? Would an open primary have even resulted in a different candidate than Harris? We don’t know, and never will. Yet at least some Democrats, egged on by the media, are acting like the answers are obvious — and like endlessly relitigating them is the party’s highest priority.
California Rep. Ro Khanna, for example, insisted in a statement to the Washington Post that “we should have had an open primary,” and then went on to assert that, “we must acknowledge this truth to regain trust with the American people.”
Former Rep. Joe Cunningham took a similar line in an interview with Politico, asking rhetorically, “How are some of these national frontrunners or people who are already barnstorming states like South Carolina or Iowa expected to look voters in the eyes with a straight face and say, ‘Trust me, even though I got the 2024 election so terribly wrong?’” He added that none of the prospective 2028 candidates are showing “courage” on the issue.
Comments like these led Politico to declare that denouncing Biden and Harris and the party’s choices in 2024 is the “first real litmus test of the 2028 campaign.”
So, is there actually evidence that the electorate remains enraged at the fact that Biden failed to drop out soon enough? Are voters demanding that Democrats denounce Biden in order to earn their trust? Will they only cast ballots for Democrats who spend their campaigns focused on 2024?
There are really clear answers to these questions. They are, in order, no, no, and wtf? No.
The old president that voters are concerned about is Trump
The Democratic Party is currently very unpopular. In March, a CNN poll found that Democrats had 20 percent favorability, the lowest since pollsters began asking that question in 1992. Their numbers haven’t gotten much better in the months since.
Obviously, Republicans will always say in these surveys that they dislike Democrats. The dismal approval is the result of Democratic voters who are angry with their own party. That frustration is not because leading Democrats have failed to oppose Joe Biden. It’s because they are perceived as failing to oppose Donald Trump.
In 2017, 59 percent of Democratic voters said they wanted their representatives to compromise with Trump to get things done, according to NBC. Now, that number has flipped; 65 percent of Democrats say they want their party to oppose Trump even if that means abandoning bipartisan legislation.
The frustration with Democrats was inflamed when minority leader Chuck Schumer led Senate Democrats to help Republicans pass a continuing funding resolution, breaking his own party’s filibuster.
But it continues to simmer; data analyst Lakshya Jain argues that “Democrats are on the verge of a Tea Party-style, intra-party revolt.” He also identifies the anger as directed at Trump, not Biden.
“The numbers suggest that the fury is at least partly fueled by the Democratic base’s dissatisfaction with congressional leadership’s relatively conciliatory approach to Trump this time around, and their inability to stop him,” Jain writes.
You can see this pretty clearly in election results since November. Democrats are angry at their own party, but that has not led them to vote for Republicans. On the contrary, Trump’s policies — like speedrunning a recession — are very unpopular. In part as a result, Republicans are getting hammered in special elections across the country.
In April, Democrats won a key Supreme Court race in Wisconsin 54 percent to 45 percent — a resounding win in a state Harris lost by one. Down in Texas, right-wing school board candidates got crushed in election earlier this month, even in red areas. And last week, the Democratic candidate defeated a three-term incumbent Republican mayor in Omaha.
In part, these recent Democratic successes are due to turnout differences. Democrats in the Trump era are more educated and tend to be more engaged and informed than Republicans, which means that they are more likely to vote in off-year elections. But analyst G. Elliott Morris conducted a poll suggesting there’s more to it than just that.
Morris wanted to try to find out what would happen if the 2024 election were re-held today. He found that slightly more Trump than Harris voters said they regretted their choices. But the real difference was in non-voters who say they would now participate if the election were redone. They who support Harris by 14 points. Based on that data, Harris would easily win if the election was re-held now.
If you think that spells trouble for the GOP in midterms, you’d be right — Elliott’s polling suggests Democrats are up by six points in the congressional ballot. That would mean a massive electoral wipeout for the GOP in the House.
Stay focused
Elections past can tell you important information about elections future. But there’s a fine line between learning from your mistakes on one hand, and fighting the last battle rather than the battle that’s in front of you on the other.
Donald Trump has spent four months taking a blowtorch to the economy and reminding people that he is ignorant, chaotic, self-absorbed, and lawless. The situation now is completely different than it was back in November, when the main issue was blaming Democrats for inflation — not least because Trump’s tariffs are now raising prices that Biden had mostly gotten under control.
Most Democratic Party leaders, and most 2028 presidential candidates, are not spending their days denouncing Joe Biden. That’s not because they lack “courage.” It’s because the 2024 election is over, and their voters are mostly focused on the horrific, terrifying depredations of the Trump presidency.
Democratic voters want their representatives to fight; they want them to oppose Trump. They want them to stop curling into the fetal position whenever the media scolds them, or when they are asked to support impeachment.
Trump is much more unpopular than he was in 2024; Democrats have been winning striking election victories left and right, in blue areas and red. We don’t need endless mea culpas. We need a commitment to fight — and a commitment to hold fascists accountable for their assault on the Constitution.
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson want to be the center of the conversation because it will help them sell books. But with daily assaults on our constitution by the current inhabitant of the White House, the rest of us have, or should have, more important things to focus on.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. Thanks as always for your support.
With the trump regime imploding, the only way corp media can save him is by making it about Biden. The dem response must be NO, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!
Republicans are rejoicing that Dems continue to let mainstream media make this a story. As a registered Dem, I DON'T CARE! Dems need to stop this stupid narrative and redirect EVERY conversation back to the current administration. If they shut down this line of questioning, it will go away. It's not like the Dems / Biden created some type of massive fraud or grift on the country or used his office for personal monetary gain....🤔 Let's focus on the things in front of us. Jake Tapper is despicable and just trying to make $$. Trying to find scandal in an administration that didn't have any. It's like when the media couldn't shut up about Obama's tan colored suit