Barack Obama once said his former vice president had a knack for messing things up although he used more profane terms. The Washington Post reports that the 44th president is worried that Joe Biden could lose in 2024.
Thus far, Joe Biden has succeeded in turning Donald Trump into “Teflon Don.” His popularity has only increased with each indictment and polling shows. In early March before the first indictment in the Stormy Daniels case, Trump’s polling for the Republican nomination stood at 43% and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis trailed him with 28% in the Real Clear Politics Average.
Now 53.9% of Republicans want Trump, and DeSantis has cratered to 18.1%.
Traditionally, an indictment would be the kiss of death for any candidate. Not Trump. The latest New York Times/Siena poll shows Trump and Biden tied at 43% apiece. Biden leads Trump 44% to 41% in the latest Morning Consult poll.
Barack Obama Has a Warning for Joe Biden
Obama met with his former vice president in the White House residence on June 26. He noted that Trump has an iron grip on the Republican Party that shows no sign of abating. He told Biden that he would do whatever he could to help him win re-election.
What used to be normal has been cast aside amid the popular perception that the prosecutions against the 45th president are politically motivated. Trump has succeeded in selling his base on the idea that the Democrats couldn’t beat him in 2016, so they hatched the Russian collusion scam and kept claiming that Trump was an illegitimate president. Now the perception lingers that they couldn’t keep him off the ballot with impeachments, so they’ve come up with a Plan B of indicting Trump to keep him out of the White House.
Polling in June showed that 62% of voters thought the charges against Trump were politically motivated.
January 6th Not a Winning Issue for Democrats
Trump’s latest indictment over his effort to overturn the 2020 election opens Democrats to being put on political trial by the former president for their efforts to undo the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections. The former president’s allies already are flaunting countless videos of Democrats complaining about how they were robbed of the elections in those years.
Democrats advocated lobbying electors in 2016 to not vote for Trump. Democratic members of Congress filed objections to the electoral votes from nine states won by Trump in 2016 during the Jan. 6, 2017 electoral vote count on the House floor.
Had Democrats stuck to going after Trump based on his mishandling of classified documents, they might have had a stronger case of making Trump look bad even to undecided Republicans.
Weak support for the January 6th hearings in Congress shows most Americans are apathetic about January 6 and that it’s not the winning issue that Democrats think it is. It might resonate in places like New York or Washington, but most Americans outside of those places will not care.
Even Republicans who supported Trump’s second impeachment and indicting him over the classified documents case are skeptical about the latest prosecution.
Obama Has Reason to Worry
Depending how Republicans handle a potential impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden, Barack Obama could have a real reason to worry. Devon Archer’s testimony that he believes that Burisma leaned on Hunter and Joe Biden to fire the Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin gives a degree of circumstantial evidence to bolster the claim that Joe Biden was enlisted to get him ousted.
If the Republicans get corroborating witnesses then it would create a situation of which man is less popular in the 2024 election. It’s an election that Joe Biden could very well lose. Trump is not well-liked, and neither is Joe Biden. That could depress voter turnout and hand Trump an advantage.
Democrats could be faced with having to pressure the incumbent to step aside so they can keep the White House in 2025. Half of all Democratic voters want someone other than Biden.
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
From 19FortyFive
