If there’s one thing both political parties have in common, it’s the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The latest example comes from the Democrats, who might decide to lose a winnable election against Donald Trump in 2024. 

Representative Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), the hard-left democratic-socialist congressman whose district covers much of the Bronx and southern Westchester County, told the Messenger that he has personally advised President Joe Biden to put the Squad “front and center” in his reelection bid. 

Upon hearing this, Republican strategists must have begun levitating like cartoon characters who just smelled pie sitting on a windowsill. 

Putting aside the fact that the Squad’s nonsensical policy agenda would be a mistake to enact, this is the exact opposite strategy from the one Biden employed during the 2020 election, which, Bowman might need to be reminded, Democrats won. Biden, in both the primary and the general that year, positioned himself as a relatively moderate liberal — relative in the sense that he was to his competitors’ right on the political spectrum while still being the most progressive presidential nominee in modern times — and was able to win the college-educated suburban voters who fled the GOP in droves after Trump’s hostile takeover of the party. 

If Biden wants to beat Trump again, he shouldn’t touch the Squad with a ten-foot pole. Its most notable members, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), and their social-media-celebrity antics serve only as fodder for Republican attacks, and their extreme positions and eat-the-rich rhetoric would have even stronger an effect than shark-repellent bat spray on the moderate voters Biden needs to win in order to stay in office. 

In 2020, Trump tried his darndest to tie Biden to the Squad. If I were the former president, or any other Republican with a shot at the nomination, I’d be licking my lips at the thought that Biden might make my argument for me.