While President Joe Biden has been hidden away from public view as he prepares for his first debate against former President Donald Trump in the 2024 election, his handlers have previewed his purview on X. The president is largely ignoring his own abysmal record on the economy, foreign policy, and piss-poor state of the southern border, instead blasting his predecessor for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, which happened during Biden’s tenure, and calling Trump “the greatest threat to our democracy.” Biden clearly understands that although he is the incumbent, he is also, statistically speaking, the underdog, and rather than try to explain away the worst inflation crisis in 40 years or conflagrations in Ukraine and Gaza, he must redirect the narrative. The only problem is that the only issues that favor Biden in the polls are issues nobody cares about, and to the extent that Biden believes he’s even winning those issues, his support is still shockingly limited.
A wide plurality of 36% of voters polled by Gallup said the economy remains the single most important problem facing the country, with Pew determining that 62% of voters, including nearly half of all Democrats, said inflation specifically is a very big problem, the greatest share of any other issue. Just 4% of people cited either “abortion” or “democracy” as the biggest issues facing the nation.
Biden is correct to run away from discussing the immigration crisis and the economy, as voters across polls repeatedly give Trump a double-digit margin over Biden on those topics, and a Fox News poll from May found Trump has an 8-point lead over Biden on crime and a 5-point lead over Biden when it comes to foreign policy. In a New York Times poll of swing-state voters last month, registered voters favored Trump by more than 20 points on the economy and 15 points on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Only on the issues of abortion and democracy, issues that nobody really cares about anyway, does Biden beat Trump, and even then, there are a few caveats.
In April, the Associated Press found that Biden had a 12-point lead over Trump on the issue of voting rights and election security and a 15-point lead on the issue of abortion. Fox found Biden had a 7-point lead on election integrity and an 8-point lead on abortion among the national electorate. But among swing-state voters in particular, the Washington Post found that 44% believed Trump would better handle “threats to democracy,” 11 points more than the 33% who believed the same of Biden.
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These swing-state voters still reported they’re much more inclined to believe Trump would reject the results of an election loss as he did in 2020 than that Biden would do so. But perhaps the show trial in Manhattan and the progressive legal movement’s attempt to use the rule of law to keep Trump out of office has created a paradigm shift in the minds of voters. However whiny, unfounded, and embarrassing Trump’s lies about Democrats trying to steal the 2020 election were, if he claims they’re trying to steal the 2024 election from him by weaponizing the rule of law against the electorate, Trump actually has a point this time.
While Biden still has a decisive and safe lead over Trump on the issue of abortion, in no small part due to the obscene lack of message discipline from Republicans undermining Trump’s correct determination that abortion should be determined by the states, Biden has lost the moral high ground on the topic of preserving democracy, and voters are responding accordingly.