Dem
51
GOP
49
David Byler, of The Washington Post, has an analysis of polling numbers, and he makes an argument about Joe Biden that is worth noting: At the moment, the President is an essential link between the Democratic Party of yesterday and the Democratic Party of tomorrow.
Biden, as you may have heard, is somewhat elderly. He's also a moderate, an "ethnic white" (i.e., Irish Catholic), and a fellow who's been around for a long time without making too many waves. And so, he attracts a lot of votes from non-college white voters. For all the talk of non-college whites heading to the redder pastures of the Trumpublican Party, fully one-third of the votes that elected the President in 2020 were from non-college white people. Yes, some of those were young people who haven't finished their degrees, but the majority were Old School, Clinton-style moderate Democrats in their fifties, sixties and seventies.
There's another, related dynamic that Byler also addresses in his piece. The three largest and most significant constituencies for the Democrats right now are college-educated whites (a group that includes most of the progressive voters, but also a lot of suburbanites), non-college whites, and Black people. To a large extent, the non-college whites' views on the issues place them right in between the college-graduate whites (most liberal, as a cohort) and the Black voters (least liberal, as a cohort).
The upshot is that as Biden works hard to maintain his Joe Scranton image, and to steer a moderate, middle course, he is holding on to a constituency the Democrats badly need (i.e., noncollege whites), especially in the states of the upper Midwest and in the coastal South. At the same time, he is also striking a balance between the various factions of the party, and trying not to lean too far in any particular direction.
The result of the Biden approach, as we have seen, is that he does not excite a whole lot of people. Hence the anemic approval ratings and the desire by a sizable percentage of the Democratic base for some other—any other—candidate. But the flip side is that he also does not turn the stomach of too many potential Democratic voters. Compare that to Donald Trump, for whom nearly all voters are fanatically "in" or definitively "out." In such a circumstance, a Democrat who is "tolerable" is in a position to claim most of the anti-Trump vote. As we have written many times, an unenthusiastic vote counts just as much as one from someone who is fanatical about their candidate.
The time will presumably come when the current realignment of parties has advanced enough that noncollege whites are not essential to Democrats' chances on the national level. But that time isn't here yet, and the blue team does not seem to have another candidate who can keep all three of the key demos listed above on board. On some level, Biden is like the Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) of national politics—an artifact of a past era who is now sui generis. This may just be why potential challengers to Biden, like Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), took a pass on 2024—they see the same polls that Byler does. (Z)