NATHAN ROBINSON, nathan@
Robinson is founder and editor of Current Affairs Magazine. He is the author of several books, including Why You Should Be A Socialist and Responding to the Right. He recently published a piece titled “Democratic Voters Want To Get Rid of Biden — But Will The Party Let Them?”
He writes: “Joe Biden’s presidency has been an abject failure. This is certainly the impression one gets from looking at the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll results, which find that ‘more than 6 in 10 Americans (62 percent) say they would be “dissatisfied” or “angry” if Biden were reelected in 2024.’ Just seven percent of voters say they are ‘enthusiastic’ about Biden (one wonders who the seven percent are). Perhaps most astonishingly, the overwhelming majority of Democrats want to get rid of Biden.”
Robinson describes the conflict between voters and Democratic Party officials: “Even though voters’ views are pretty clear on this, party leaders are actually trending in the opposite direction. The Wall Street Journal tells us that those at the top of the Democratic Party are actually becoming even more strongly committed to supporting Biden’s reelection, that Biden ‘isn’t expected to face a major primary challenge,’ and that the Democratic National Committee recently ‘approved a resolution expressing its ‘full and complete support’ of the president’s re-election.””
He continues: “Biden and the DNC are actually rigging the primary schedule in order to improve Biden’s chances of fending off the kind of challenger that voters clearly want to see (pushing back New Hampshire, where Bernie Sanders did well, and pushing forward South Carolina, where Biden triumphed).”
He concludes: “I don’t want Donald Trump to return to office. … To stop this outcome requires, one would think, Democrats to have a candidate that people actually want to vote for. All of the evidence right now indicates that most votes for Biden would be grudging at best. That’s not a good sign, and anyone who doesn’t want to see a Trump or DeSantis presidency…should want the Democrats to have a strong candidate running. Instead, they’re pushing Joe Biden, a man whose presidency has been an abject failure.”