“Why are Biden’s poll numbers so bad?”

This is the question too many ~serious political analysts~ ask themselves in very serious think pieces, as the terrible race to the 2024 U.S. general election gets underway.

I posted most of this rant to mastodon yesterday morning, and while there are many things about mastodon as social media that I prefer to twitter, social media is inherently more transient than blogs for me; I wanted this in essay form, and to expand on some things I barely touched on before typing ‘finis’ over there.

Reader, beware: political rant ahead; if you come to this blog for genre reading or crafting, avert your eyes for now, and return tomorrow for something more to your taste.

It all started with this Vanity Fair piece on Biden’s “low poll numbers”, and I was off:

“Serious political analysts” don’t understand that “the economy” doesn’t mean jackshit for people living in poverty while working full time; living in terror of losing their job; facing utility hikes of over 100% in one year; facing ruinous medical bills *while paying for “good” insurance*, and so on. We don’t fawn over Biden because we are struggling as much if not more.

I’m sure Biden has done a lot of good stuff that has not been given a tenth of the press inches they give Trump’s fuckery, DeSantis’ fascism, etc.; but lets get real: he could have had a very significant advantage already if he had fulfilled at least some of his major campaign promises.

Most people who voted for Biden in 2020 didn’t vote for him so much as for democracy, and the hope that a president with actual government experience at several levels (ergo, understanding of both how things are supposed to work and how they actually work), could help right the course of a nation fast-diving into Christofascism.

But like all Democrat presidents before him, Biden buckled under big money pressure in some extremely popular key issues.

Biden the “union man” stepped in when railroad workers wanted to strike. That alone fucked over almost 200,000 workers *directly* and all their families indirectly. How many votes is that? What message did that send to other unions if they are deemed too essential to strike, not essential enough for decent pay and livable working conditions?

Over the last year, the labor movement has been gaining steam as corporations rake in the billions and more people fall below the poverty line–even while working full-time for those same big corporations. Biden siding with the billionaires over the workers, in the face of truly inhuman working conditions, signals that a lot of his “union man” cred is bullshit.

This is the same mistake Obama made in saving banks over account holders, and car makers over their workers, and it shows that once politicians reach a certain level, they truly lose sight of the people who live with the consequences of their decisions: they only hear what the lobbyists have to say about any given issue.

Then there’s COVID.

Biden made a lot of promises about how his government would “follow the science”. This was a desperately needed pivot back from Trump’s politicization of the CDC into a mouth piece for COVID-denialism and Trump’s administration-supported anti-science positions about vaccines, masks, effective COVID treatment v horse dewormer, and so on.

Millions of people understand the need for COVID mitigation intimately–because they are chronically ill or immunocompromised or otherwise medically fragile (or care for someone who is), and therefore depend on society at large giving the first fuck about public health to survive.

Instead of fighting to keep the public emergency going so that vaccines and boosters would be free and easily accessible; instead of fighting for improved indoor air quality in public spaces to mitigate transmission; instead of continue to provide free masks and tests long term…

Biden declared the pandemic “over”.

(And he said this just a few weeks shy of twenty years after Dubya’s “mission accomplished” speech–who the fuck is in charge of his comm team? a Republican?)

The pandemic is very much fucking not over.

We have known for years now (yes, scientists were talking about this in the summer of 2020 for fucks’ sake), that COVID does permanent damage to the heart and the brain; now we know that newer mutations may not land as many people in the hospital or kill them outright, but that the virus does more widespread damage to literally every organ in the body.

Even worse, as we see new variants on the rise, to the point where masks are being recommended again–despite Republicans and Christofascists literally sending bomb threats to schools and hospitals requiring masks–Biden shows up to an official event joking about not wearing his own mask. The slap at immunocompromised/high risk people is significant.

But, to go back to the whole “but Biden has rebuilt “the economy” and stopped even talk of a recession!” cheer-leading masquerading as political analysis, let me say this: a lot of Biden’s “investment in clean energy” and other industries is money for corporations–most working people, by and large, are struggling as much if not more now than in 2020.

So, yes absolutley, he’s an exponentially better president than Trump was, than DeSantis or literally *any Republican* would be or has been (for at least fifty years), but a lot of his lack of popularity has been earned, not by the press not touting his ‘wins for the country’, but by his administration not fighting harder for working people.

You know what would get him a lot of Trump-level press?

If Biden engaged with those issues–even if he lost to a Republican-controlled House and a wishy-washy Senate–that he promised voters he would fight for. His engagement with what most of the population wants would win him a lot of good will ahead of another defining election.

Remember how much press the so-called Squad (in 2018, Representatives Alexandra Ocassio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib–and now also Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman [2020] and Summer Lee and Greg Casar [2022]) got during Trump’s presidency, and how much they’ve gotten since? Remember Katie Porter and her white board? Remember how close Beto O’Rourke has come to defeating Greg Abbott, with all his millions?

Even with the billionaire-owned mainstream press siding with the corporations and the Republicans, progressive representatives get elected and re-elected by engaging in the fight–even in the face of overwhelming odds.

Biden could earn a lot of good will–and win a lot of good things for voters–simply by engaging with the issues that matter to the workers rather than the owners.

Don’t get me wrong; democracy in the U.S. needs us to re-elect Biden, simply because a Republican president would kill it outright.

Most of us would prefer a different Democratic candidate, but the reality of U.S. politics is that once an incumbent president declares his campaign for re-election, primary-ing him is bascially a ‘no-go’.

So Biden it is, because even those of us who are bitterly angry at Biden over all of the above understand that the alternative is infinitely worse–the damage Trump did to democratic institutions in this country has left democracy in tatters; if any of the Republicans running this cycle goes to the White House, we’ll have a full-on Christofascist government before the next midterms–see FL, TN, TX, MT, MO, UT.

We don’t have a choice: the genocide of trans and other queer people is ongoing; the revival of Jim Crow and end to the half-hearted institutional progress after the 1960s Civil Right Movement is proceeding with alarming speed; Christofascists attacks on public libraries and public education are succeeding even in so-called ‘blue’ states; climate change denialism and anti-science are on the rise; worker exploitation, wage theft, and disenfranchisement are rampant, and whatever government institutions are supposed to fight any of these are woefully underfunded, while both local and federal money go to police departments and other ‘law enforcement’ who continue to infringe on the civil and constitutional rights of ordinary citizens.

So yes, we understand the urgency of the political moment and the need to get Biden back in the White House, if only to stave off the Christofascist takeover of the country for another four years.

But it’s hard to convince people to vote for the same person who promised so much and fought so little in regards to most of those promises, while trying to survive in a country that focuses on “the economy” as more and more of us end up living in poverty/bankrupt/homeless/chronically disabled from COVID sequelae/threatened and abused by a Biden (and Harris)-supported police/exploited by Biden-supported corporations.

My answer to Biden’s “bad” poll numbers is to engage with the issues that matter to the workers who will be voting in November 2024, not with the corporations and billionaires who exploit them.

But, what do I know? I am not a “serious political analyst”. I am just an exhausted and terrified permanent resident worker witnessing the implosion of the “American Dream” as those who supposedly know whereof they speak blather on, never addressing the things I see everyone around me grapple with.