The Path To The White House 2024
Everyone appears to be getting nervous about the looming prospect of a Donald Trump 2.0 presidency starting in January 2025. Frankly, that's giving political pundits and rank-and-file Democrats an acute case of "runny belly" and more frequent trips to the bathroom. But is Donald Trump's bid for the White House a done deal and inevitable? Call me pragmatic and optimistic if you will but for me the November 2024 election is light years away when it comes to United States politics in general - anything can happen before the first vote is cast. And that, my fine-feathered friends, gives me not just hope but a belief that even with all of the issues confounding incumbent president Joe Biden he STILL has more than one path to victory come November - polls and political pontification notwithstanding.
So, let me start with the bad news for President Biden. Israel is the political millstone around his neck. And it dragging him down in the polling ESPECIALLY within his own party. Why is that? Well, for starters, it's a generational thing. For Biden and the old-guard Democratic Party's grandees and seniors their historic support for ANYTHING Israel (AND Jewish) is threatened by a younger, more Internet savvy, informed and in-tuned demographic that's not buying the old stale 19th century talking point about the U.S. "blinkers on" unconditionality and cart blanche notion of "Israel's right to self-defense" when its committing genocide in plain sight.
But don't take my word for it. A very recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that, among all registered U.S. voters, people under 30 sympathized with the Palestinians over the Israelis by 51 percent to 16 percent, whereas people 65 and over favored the Israelis 54 percent to 16 percent. Among Democrats of all ages, a clear plurality backed the Palestinians, 42 percent to 26 percent. The is what's driving Biden's new and belated push for a ceasefire, a "walk back and back track" from his previously adamant "temporary pause" position that allowed Israel to continue its brutal pogrom in Gaza. Biden is not motivated by love for the Palestinians or human rights or some other noble ideal. He's simply looking to the November presidential elections - period.
Moreover, the shock that the Democratic Party got in the recent Michigan (a 2024 must-win state for the president) primary when over 100,000 Democratic Party voters, mostly Arab Americans, voted "uncommitted" was and is a very clear signal to Biden that this defection has to be contained lest it spread and contaminate the party's young African-American, Latino and progressive base that he needs to win re-election. The truth is that even with Democrats controlling the Senate and the White House there is depression and anxiety - if not panic - over a Trump vs Biden re-match. This is further aggravated by the pollsters themselves that have Trump leading Biden in national polls by as much as 16 points. Drilling down into the polling numbers I find that the Democratic Party's anxiety is also driven by the fear of Biden's age (81 years), disillusionment and waning support among Black voters, and his rabid cheerleading for Israel's Gaza brutalization that has earned him the nickname "Genocide Joe."
However, I would like to add one important caveat in this scenario. Polls approximately 11 months prior to election day during a presidential election cycle is a predictive and accurate as pinning a flag on an elephant's derriere. In short, today's polls are as important in determining who wins in November, as yesterday's green salad. So, let us dispel with the self-induced and polls-aggravated fantasies. Let us look objectively at the present state of things, what the politics say in reality in the midst of a tons of "advice," and "how tos," and what Biden "should do now" etc. I call this phase the chaos of the political contradictions. It's a search by the incumbent and his team for an inspirational message that resonates across the country and what the voters can identify with and get behind.
That's easier said than done when the Republican Party, the opposing entity, has already signaled that it's not going to campaign on issues given the simple fact that their presumptive flagbearer does not have a positive record, faces over 50 court cases, has been convicted in a few, and is a deeply flawed candidate who has a strangle hold on the party. Donald Trump and company have dusted off the "Ole Fearmongering, anti-immigrant, whites-only protectionist America" that worked for him in 2016. The GOP is attempting to fine-tune it to a 21st century reality. Will it work? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe Joe Biden's first line of attack against Trump is to re-calibrate and focus his "threat to American Democracy" message."
And too, despite the constant polling numbers and mainstream nabob talking heads constantly harping on Biden's age and poll numbers as if Donald Trump is a spring chicken, belie the fact that the president's campaign is not yet out of the starting gates. Plus, there are many Republican Party vulnerabilities that Biden and the Democratic Party have not zeroed in on as yet. In this context, for all the triumphalist chest-thumping by Nationalist Christian Right-Wing evangelicals over the overturn of Row v Wade, that came with a heavy political cost for Republicans. Today, the GOP is still reeling from the fallout of what I characterize as perhaps one of the biggest political blunders of modern time, the end-result of "packing the Supreme Court" by Donald Trump. For example, just last month voters in Ohio (a state that Donald Trump easily carried in 2020) added abortion rights to the state's Constitution by a 14 percent point margin.
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