This weekend, ABC News and the Washington Post released a poll showing former President Donald Trump with a commanding 10-point lead over President Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election.
The Washington Post was clearly embarrassed by its poll, and scrambled to come up with reasons readers should ignore it. Democrat analyst Larry Sabato, who confidently predicted Hillary Clinton would win 352 electoral votes in 2016 (she received 227 in her loss to Donald Trump), asked the Washington Post, “How could you even publish a poll so absurd on its face? Will be a lingering embarrassment for you.”
Other Democrats also composed panicked posts for social media.
Now, on the one hand, like all polls, the ABC News/Washington Post poll should be viewed skeptically. It’s the poll that had Biden up 12 points in 2020, overestimating his support by eight points. The media outlets’ last Wisconsin 2020 poll predicted Biden would win by 17 points. In fact, he eked out a win by seven-tenths of 1 percent.
The poll systematically privileges Democrat candidates in dramatic fashion, both nationally and at the state level. But that just makes this weekend’s results more frightening for Democrats.
Further, the Washington Post is clearly sounding the alarm about Biden in particular. It published David Ignatius’ dispatch from the Deep State telling Biden to get out of the race and take the politically toxic Kamala Harris with him. In case their perspective wasn’t clear, the left-wing propaganda outlet followed it up two days later with a missive from the deputy editorial page editor saying much of the same.
The poll could be a legitimate snapshot of public opinion or an attempt to shape public opinion. But a wide range of other polls is also showing Biden weakness. Josh Kraushaar points out that President Biden’s disapproval rating is at 56 percent in multiple polls, “dangerous territory for any incumbent.”
Langer Research, which conducted the poll for ABC News and the Washington Post, speculated that voters might be trying to send a message about their frustration with Biden’s policies.
Susan Glasser, a left-wing writer for The New Yorker, stumbled around this point in a social media post venting her frustration that Americans weren’t siding with Biden:
Take away the unhinged ranting about insurrections and personal revenge and note the underlying point: Biden and other Democrats took a speedboat across the Rubicon and had their main political opponent indicted four times in an attempt to prevent his election, and it’s completely backfiring.
Democrat activists up and down the Eastern Seaboard have indicted the former president on an overwhelming number of charges, some serious and the vast majority patently absurd. In so doing, they violated norms kept by every president up to Trump himself of not prosecuting defeated candidates.
Biden let his desire to target his top political opponent be known through an April 2022 story placed in The New York Times, these days something of an in-house Democrat newsletter. Democrats in New York, Atlanta, and D.C. followed through. It’s not just Jack Smith, Fani Willis, and Alvin Bragg. As Chris Bray reports, it’s also New York Attorney General Letitia James, who campaigned on a pledge to prosecute Trump:
Attorney General Letitia James is waging scorched-earth economic warfare against a political enemy, using governmental power in an attempt to crush multiple generations of a family that disagreed with her about party politics. You can win an election, sure, but then your family starves, so.
While politics-addled leftwingers love what Democrats are doing to their political opponents, most Americans are absolutely shocked and appalled by what they’re witnessing. It’s not just Trump who is being targeted by the regime, but other Republicans and their grassroots supporters. Attacking the right to legal representation, free speech, the right to redress, and freedom of the press is popular with Democrats, yes, but horrifying to many other Americans.
“Are we the baddies?” you can see the few self-aware Democrats asking.
The strategy of indicting political opponents was supposed to help Democrats wage political warfare in an environment where their policies have led to open borders, endless war, pro-crime district attorneys, and economic malaise. These outcomes are exceedingly unpopular. On top of the policy failures, they’re trying to imprison their top political opponent and keep him off the ballot.
They rushed headlong into the campaign strategy of indicting their political opponents without realizing it would be difficult to change course if that backfired. They can’t very well drop the charges at this point, but the more aggressively they prosecute them, the more it reminds Americans of how absolutely reckless and dangerous they’re being.
The Democrat proposal is to vote for open borders, inflation increases, energy dependence, rampant crime, and actual imprisonment of political opponents. In this light, the polls aren’t so surprising. Even people who don’t love Donald Trump, however much they enjoyed his presidency, are saying they think it’s Democrats who are the real threat to the republic, and it’s not even close.
