The Bulwark, a site founded by ex-Republicans who hated Trump so much that they also jettisoned whatever conservatism they claimed to believe in, substacks its thinkpiece as, “The Media Still Doesn’t Get Biden Voters”, complaining that the media spends a great deal of time studying Trump voters, but not Biden voters.
Reporters don’t do safaris to “Biden Country,” seeking to understand the voters who put him in the White House. While there are pieces explaining how, for example, black women in Georgia suburbs made a big difference in the 2020 election, there’s nothing approaching the ongoing coverage of white men in Ohio diners.
In case I had a blind spot, I turned to crowdsourcing, asking on social media whether anyone knew of examples of journalists making the case for trying to understand the Biden voter. Few could think of any.
I agree that the Biden voter is every bit as much a phenomenon as the Trump voters, for opposite reasons. Where Trump voters helped form a movement, Biden voters are the absence of a movement.
There are Trump voters, conservative voters and anti-leftist voters, but there are no Biden voters. I doubt even Jill actively voted for Joe Biden. There was an Obamacare, but despite the best efforts of the White House, there’s no Bidenomics or Biden anything. People don’t vote for Biden, they voted against Trump or which Republican will end up on the ballot this time around. It’s a purely negative image.
Obama had a genuine following. Biden was ushered into office by a political machine that turned out the black vote in the south to drag him through the primaries and then by Democrats, lefties and some independents who were conditioned to believe that Trump (like every Republican running for office) represented the end of civilization and the end of mankind.
The people in pink hats screaming in the streets weren’t Biden supporters. Some of them couldn’t even name him.
Obama represented a movement while Biden is a placeholder defined in history by what he is against, not what he is for. There are no Biden voters, just people opposed to any alternative to a broken system that they’re invested in for cultural, racial, economic or other reasons.
No one votes for Biden. They just vote against the alternatives.