Bargainer Biden needs to counter the age factor

In the 2020 Democratic primaries, Joe Biden seemed like a relic in a field where everyone was striving to out-radical the next. Yet it was “Uncle Joe” — the lone candidate who ignored Twitter, thought there should be some controls on the US-Mexico border, and who lacked the zeal of the rest on critical race theory and gender identity — who took the prize. In spite of all the hype about faculty lounge radicalism, it was working class African American voters who decided the race.

Biden would be fortunate to repeat history in 2024. Though he does not face a serious challenger for the nomination, the Democratic party is on constant tenterhooks for a physical stumble or gaffe that would cement public scepticism about his advanced age.

Since he was elected to the US Senate in 1972, Biden has always aimed for that transactional space where sufficient consensus can be achieved. At times, this earned him opprobrium from the left. Yet, when a bargain was needed, Biden was the man to find it.

As Barack Obama’s vice-president, he averted a US debt default with Republican Senate leaders. As president, he has struck more bipartisan deals — on infrastructure, industrial policy and prescription drug price caps — than any Democratic president in decades.

But none of this appears to have bought him any credit with voters. His approval ratings are languishing several points below those of Donald Trump and continued to slide in the last months of 2023. The question is whether there is anything Biden can do that would outweigh the public’s misgivings about his age. There is only one way of finding out.

Aside from age, Biden’s challenges can be boiled down to two broad areas. The first is continued voter dissatisfaction with their economic circumstances.

The second is a fear about illegal immigration and crime, and a broader mistrust of Democratic cultural radicalism. In short, Biden is losing blue collar America, including a rising share of the non-white working class. But for his age, Biden would be the right Democrat to win them back.

His area of greatest impotence is on the economy. In the pandemic’s wake, the median US household has seen no income gains since 2019 and, with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, no scope exists for stimulative legislation in 2024. Biden’s main hope lies with the US Federal Reserve.

In December, Fed chair Jay Powell called the peak of the US interest rate cycle. If the Fed speedily cuts rates in early 2024, that is likely to feed into improved consumer sentiment — via results such as reduced mortgage and auto-loan repayments — in time for the general election.

Biden has greater scope to insert himself into the narrative on crime and illegal immigration. Across many big US cities, there has been a rising public sense that Democratic prosecutors are soft on crime, amid big jumps in homicide rates since the pandemic. Unlike voter worries about their pocket books, which they understand better than any macroeconomist, much of the Democratic party’s problem on crime is about branding. This is one area where Kamala Harris, Biden’s equally unpopular vice-president, could be put to better use. As a former public prosecutor, Harris should be hammering on the theme that the Democrats are allies of law enforcement.

In practice, the Democratic “defund the police” campaigns got nowhere. Many allies of Trump, on the other hand, want to “defund the FBI”. It would be malpractice not to drive this home. Since Harris is widely seen as part of the progressive left, her sustained intervention on this theme could kill two birds with one stone.

The same applies to illegal immigration. Again, much of this is about branding. The Democratic party’s “open border” radicalism of 2020 was never put into practice. Yet illegal crossings have surged to record levels since Biden became president. He should be able to strike a deal with Senate Republicans in early 2024 to replenish aid to Ukraine in exchange for more resources on the US-Mexico border. Such a bargain would trigger howls of betrayal from the left, which would accuse Biden of putting migrants under the bus. But, the louder those protests, the better. This would help Biden to blunt Trump’s allegations of lawlessness on the border.

Biden could also seek out a Bill Clinton-type 1992 “Sister Souljah” moment — when the then presidential candidate singled out the African American activist and novelist as extremist — to distance himself from his party’s more outlandish cultural positions. For example, many in today’s Democratic Party take contestable stances on gender identity and some still advocate open borders and defunding the police. The question is whether Biden has the vitality to deal with all this.

He does have two things going his way. First, the backlash against the repeal of Roe vs Wade, and draconian anti-abortion laws in Republican states like Texas, is of existential concern to millions of women. This could tip the election. Second, Trump is likely to be convicted in at least one of his four criminal trials during 2024. That could change the political weather.

Either way, an election that will decide the fate of US democracy is likely to be settled by a host of mostly unrelated issues.