Joe Biden Doesn’t Care About You

Joe Biden’s campaign strategy in 2024 is really puzzling.

He has not been running to the middle. He has not been trying to unite the country. Biden’s campaign strategy is apparently now completely banking on people believing that Joe Biden is a sympathetic elderly man who genuinely cares about people.

It’s a weird strategy, but you have to understand why Joe Biden is employing it.

When it comes to presidential elections since 2008, there have been three types of elections.

One: Unity Elections. Elections where the referendum was about unity. Are we going to come together as a country? Who’s the kind of person who can unify us?

Two: Revolution Elections. Let’s overturn what has existed previously and completely revamp the system.

Three: Cares-About-Me Elections. Elections in which the level of how much compassion the candidate supposedly has for you decides the election.

2008 was a Unity Election. Barack Obama campaigned as, “I am the great unifier. I am not black, not white, no red America, blue America. There is just America.” That was a Unity Election. We would all come together. We would end our racial conflagrations by electing a half-black president who, in his very personage, embodied the American Dream.

Weirdly enough, 2020 was also a Unity Election. The 2020 election took place in the middle of massive riots and a huge controversy about COVID-19. So the question for the American people was, who can bring us together? Who can restore some sense of calm, tranquility, and social fabric? People opted for Joe Biden in that election, mainly because Donald Trump seemed to be incredibly volatile.

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So, 2008 and 2020 were about calmness and unity, although that’s not what emerged from them.

A Revolution Election occurred in 2016, when the American people were deeply unhappy with the way the country was going, and they wanted a revolution. That revolution was Donald Trump.

Then, there is the Cares-About-Me Election, situations where the candidate who was perceived as most caring won. There have not been that many of these in American history, but it was the campaign Barack Obama ran in 2012.

The truth was that Obama did not care about people who opposed him. Those people, for him, were bad. But he believed he had a coalition of people who had great personal and emotional connection with him, and he would drive to victory on that basis.

Now, if you’re Joe Biden, what kind of election do you want 2024 to be? It’s very difficult for him to run on unity because he has not unified the country as president. Biden has been president for three years. Not only is the country not unified, but things are also far worse than when he took over. By virtually every metric, he can’t run a unity election.

He also can’t run a Revolution Election. He’s not Bernie Sanders. He was elected to be a moderate and, not only that, but how do you run a Revolution Election against yourself? Revolution Elections are typically won by the non-incumbent party because you have to be overturning something.

That leaves Biden with only one kind of election he can run: a Cares-About-Me Election.

This is evident in Joe Biden’s tactics over the last few weeks. Virtually everything he has done is geared toward this particular line: He cares about people like you.

To understand why this is a failing strategy for Biden, the nature of the past few American elections is critical to understand. The 2012 election is the election that Biden clearly wants to copy. Barack Obama, an incumbent president who won by a large number of votes in 2008, won reelection in 2012, despite losing five million votes in the popular vote from the previous election.

The question is about how Obama won. It wasn’t on the basis of his policy. His policies were incredibly unpopular at the time. It turns out that by all of the available exit polling, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012 on one metric: Who cares more about people like you? ABC News exit polling in 2012 showed Obama beat Romney by “a whopping 63 points” when it came to which candidate cared more about you.

Exit polling from the Washington Post in 2016 showed the one factor where Donald Trump skunked Hillary Clinton in 2016: By 82-14, Trump demolished her on who could bring needed change. A Revolution Election.

In 2020, Biden beat Trump 75-24 in who could unite the country and 68-26 on who had better judgment. Trump beat Biden 72-28 on who was a strong leader and 50-49 on “cares about people like me.”

That was a sea change for the Republican Party. Better than any Republican candidate in living memory, Trump has made a significant slice of the electorate — blue-collar, white Americans — believe that he cares about people like them. A huge percentage of the electorate believes the Democratic Party has abandoned them, and Trump makes them feel connected to him.

That is because he connects with them on an emotional level. When Trump is at events, he connects with people on a one-to-one level. He speaks the language they speak.

But in 2020, that wasn’t enough because there was so much chaos, and the American people believed the qualities of a uniter and of good judgment were more important than those of a strong leader and one who cared about people like them.

But now, it’s 2024 and Biden has no choice — because the shift toward Trump has been so marked.

When it comes to the candidate who “has good judgment,” Biden has failed signally. He has fallen off dramatically in those categories. An April 2024 Gallup poll asked who “displays good judgment in a crisis,” and Trump won 45-40. CNN exit polling in 2020 had Biden leading Trump 68-26 in the category of good judgment. That means there has been a massive 47-point swing toward Trump.

Biden has to rely on the Cares-About-Me Election because this time, the election can’t be a Revolution Election and it also can’t be a Unity Election.

The big problem for him is convincing people that an 80-year-old senile man who stumbles into walls, yells at people on a regular basis, and is crotchety and nasty to people around him, cares about people like them.

Does anyone look at Biden and think, “He cares about people like me”? His hand-holding routine — the sympathy limned as, “This is a man who knows what it’s like to suffer, and he’s suffered just like you suffered” — was much better 20 years ago. How many times can you drag out the Beau Biden story in the wrong context before you stop looking sympathetic and you start looking manipulative?

And how do you claim that you are the party of caring when the vast majority of Americans are not happy with the situation and your strategy is to appeal to your radical base?

Joe Biden is not capable of winning a Cares-About-Me Election.

When you read off a teleprompter, “I care about you,” it doesn’t work.

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