Ridin' With Biden, Con't

ZVTS reader Scopedog makes a salient point in the comments on Biden's polling:

 

Polls taken this far out from next year's election are....meaningless. But apparently they are enough to cause Doomsday+1 meltdowns and bring out the worst political takes ever--both from the right and the left.

The polling methods are crap. And let's not forget the polls last year said that the GOP would win in a blowout and there would be "red wave".

That never happened.

And the polls today are flawed because they also do not take into account the Dobbs decision, which took a major right away from over half of the US population. And the fallout from that decision has led to the GOP getting their asses kicked in several special elections.

 

NY Times writer Reid Epstein has reached a similar conclusion: Dems win anyway and have been winning when the rubber meets the road in special elections across the board over the last 18+ months.

For nearly two years, poll after poll has found Americans in a sour mood about President Biden, uneasy about the economy and eager for younger leaders of the country.

And yet when voters have actually cast ballots, Democrats have delivered strong results in special elections — the sort of contests that attract little attention but can serve as a useful gauge for voter enthusiasm.

In special elections this year for state legislative offices, Democrats have exceeded Mr. Biden’s performance in the 2020 presidential election in 21 of 27 races, topping his showing by an average of seven percentage points, according to a study conducted by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the party’s campaign arm for state legislative races.

Those results, combined with an 11-point triumph for a liberal State Supreme Court candidate in Wisconsin this spring and a 14-point defeat of an Ohio ballot referendum this summer in a contest widely viewed as a proxy battle over abortion rights, run counter to months of public opinion polling that has found Mr. Biden to be deeply unpopular heading into his re-election bid next year.

Taken together, these results suggest that the favorable political environment for Democrats since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade has endured through much of 2023. Democratic officials have said since the summer of 2022, when the ruling came down, that abortion is both a powerful motivator for the party’s voters and the topic most likely to persuade moderate Republicans to vote for Democratic candidates.

“Dobbs absolutely changed the way that people thought about and processed things that they had perceived as a given,” said Heather Williams, the interim president of the D.L.C.C. “We continue to see voters recognizing what’s at stake in these elections.”

Democrats are now using abortion rights to power races far down the ballot — an extension of how candidates in special elections at the congressional level have long used prominent national issues to fuel their campaigns.

In January 2010, Scott Brown won a shocking upset in a Senate special election in deep-blue Massachusetts by running against President Barack Obama’s health care push. In March 2018, Conor Lamb won a special election to fill a House seat in a deep-red Pennsylvania district by campaigning as a centrist voice against Mr. Trump.

Both the Brown and Lamb special elections served as indicators of the wave elections their parties won in subsequent midterm elections.

Some of the special elections won by Democrats this year have involved relatively few voters: Under 2,800 ballots were cast in a New Hampshire State House contest last week.

“The best evidence that a special election produces is whose side is more engaged on a grass-roots turnout level,” Mr. Lamb said in an interview on Monday. “That gives you some signal about who is bringing their turnout back next year.”

 

Right all the way around. Dems are winning in the age of Dobbs. They will continue to win. If you think Biden is an albatross on the nicks of Dems, you should see the other team dealing with Trump, DeSantis, and Dobbs. 

For Biden's part, he was on the UAW picket line in Detroit on Tuesday.

President Joe Biden made history Tuesday when he visited a picket line in Michigan in a show of loyalty to autoworkers who are striking for higher wages and cost-of-living increases.

Biden is looking to polish his pro-labor persona, becoming the first sitting president to appear on a picket line.

Speaking through a bullhorn, he told the striking autoworkers in Wayne County, "You deserve what you earned, and you've earned a helluva lot more than you're getting paid now."

Simply by showing up, Biden set a new precedent for American presidents about how to respond to future strikes. Union officials and their congressional allies may now expect a president who purports to be pro-labor to join them on the picket lines, invoking Biden as an example.

“It is indeed a historic move on Biden’s part to walk a picket line — especially in as high profile a strike that is captivating both the economy and broader public attention,” said Tejasvi Nagaraja, an assistant professor of history at Cornell University’s ILR School.

The UAW strike against the Big Three auto companies — General Motors, Ford and Chrysler maker Stellantis — has entered its 11th day. In traveling to Wayne County at the invitation of union president Shawn Fain, Biden positioned himself squarely on the side of striking workers, after the White House spent weeks quietly seeing whether it could play a more neutral role in mediating the dispute between labor and management.

 

Gonna side with the guy with the guts to show up for workers as the first sitting president to do so on a picket line.

 

We all should side with him.