Tuesday’s results were a win for the president after demoralizing poll numbers. But some strategists argue the outcomes only show that Democrats are doing well, not necessarily the president.
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The wave of Democratic success did not, in the view of some strategists, change the perception of an incumbent in the White House with historically low approval ratings.
Poll? What poll? The Democratic victories in Tuesday’s off-year elections gave President Biden’s White House some breathing space that it desperately needed just when it needed it.
After days of deepening angst within the party following a demoralizing survey that showed Mr. Biden losing in five key battleground states, Wednesday morning arrived with a sense of told-you-so vindication at a White House that has long insisted that polls don’t matter, only elections do.
“Ok Dems. Deep breath,” former Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, aptly summing up the feeling at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “Looks like the best the Republicans can say tonight is ‘well, we didn’t lose Mississippi’. Stop panicking over one poll 12 months out.”
The Biden campaign quickly issued a celebratory email meant to capitalize on the results, calm nervous allies and poke at the pessimists. “Voters across the country overwhelmingly proved the pollsters and pundits wrong once again and turned out to reject the MAGA extremism that has come to define today’s Republican Party,” wrote Michael Tyler, the campaign’s communications director.
But the moment of validation may provide only a brief respite as some political strategists have concluded that what the election outcomes really show is that the Democrats don’t have a Democrat problem, but a Biden problem. The wave of Democratic success in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio did not, in this view, change the fundamental weakness of an incumbent in the White House with historically low approval ratings. It only emphasized the disparity between his public standing and the party’s.
“It would appear that the Democrats’ success in the 2022 midterms and 2023 elections was in spite of Biden, not because of him,” said Douglas B. Sosnik, who was White House political director for President Bill Clinton.
Off-year elections are not predictive of future races, and it has long been a hazardous exercise to draw overly broad conclusions from state and local elections around the country in odd-numbered years, when turnout is a fraction of a presidential election and a variety of parochial factors influence results.
Nonetheless, the Democrats had plenty to cheer about on Wednesday after winning a hard-fought gubernatorial re-election in the red state of Kentucky, passing a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion rights in Republican-leaning Ohio and capturing the state legislature in Virginia, despite the concerted efforts of the Republican Party’s star governor, Glenn Youngkin, possibly dashing his own White House ambitions.
The wave of relief washing over the White House was palpable as the president’s team welcomed the first good day it has had politically in a while. Mr. Biden spent Tuesday evening watching results with Steven J. Ricchetti, his counselor, and called some of the winners, including Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky; Gabe Amo, a former Biden White House aide and a son of West African immigrants who won a special election for a House seat in Rhode Island; and Cherelle Parker, the first woman to be elected mayor of Philadelphia. Aides spent the evening sending each other “Dark Brandon” memes, a playful internet alter ego of Mr. Biden.
ImageGov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, won re-election in Kentucky.Credit…Jon Cherry for The New York Times
Several aides said privately that the mood in the West Wing was upbeat and they expressed a sense of validation that their theory of the case was still valid. Coming after the survey by The New York Times and Siena College, which found Mr. Biden losing to former President Donald J. Trump in five swing states that Mr. Biden won in 2020, the off-year elections were well timed.
The results, Biden advisers stressed, reaffirmed that Democrats have outperformed in every election since the Supreme Court’s decision overturning a constitutional right to abortion. And the results bolstered the West Wing belief that members of the political-media class, particularly the “bed-wetters,” as Mr. Biden’s advisers call worried Democrats, get too worked up over polls and underestimate how well the party will do when voting actually gets underway.
They pointed in particular to Mr. Beshear’s victory, noting that Republicans spent $30 million attacking the governor by linking him to the unpopular president without success. His Republican challenger, David Cameron, closed the campaign with an endorsement from Mr. Trump but fell short. It is also true that Mr. Beshear spent much of the campaign distancing himself from Mr. Biden. But Biden advisers noted that two-thirds of the 23 Democratic candidates for the state legislature in Virginia endorsed by the president and Vice President Kamala Harris won.
“What if — and just hear me out for a second — the Democratic brand *and* Joe Biden have policies people actually like?” Jim Messina, who was President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign manager in 2012, wrote on X. “And the way people voted last night is a reflection of both those things?”
His colleague, David Plouffe, the architect of Mr. Obama’s rise to the presidency in 2008, offered a more tempered verdict in an email on Wednesday. “There are many political lifetimes between this November and next,” he noted. “But last night’s results show, on balance, strong Democratic candidates would have prevailed in today’s atmosphere. Abortion remains an issue driving voters everywhere.”
He added that the results will help the Biden campaign find the voters it needs next year. “The president’s campaign and other Democrats who are struggling now will figure out across these states who voted Democrat or progressive on issues but are not yet with them and discover why and how they can be moved back into their column,” he said.
ImageAttendees at a watch party in Columbus, Ohio, celebrated after a measure passed enshrining abortion rights in the state’s Constitution.Credit…Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said Tuesday’s elections demonstrated the power of the abortion issue for Democrats and the failure of Republican culture war issues to resonate.
“I really think people need to stop looking at the pre-Trump era for guidance on what will happen now,” she said. “Our electorate is more polarized, more ideological, more energized and fragmented, and I don’t see us going back to normal anytime soon.”
Even as Democrats notched their wins on Tuesday night, more gloomy polls came in illustrating Mr. Biden’s challenges. A new survey by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the University of Georgia showed the president in a dead heat with Mr. Trump in Georgia, a state that was critical to Mr. Biden’s victory in 2020.
And for the first time in his presidency, a majority of voters in reliably blue California disapprove of Mr. Biden’s job performance, according to another poll by The Los Angeles Times and the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Biden still leads Mr. Trump, and no Democrat is seriously worried about losing California. But the findings underscore the problems of the president, who is 80 years old, with his own base as many Democrats tell pollsters that they think he is too old to run again.
As much as they are frustrated by such polls, some Biden advisers see a silver lining in them because they remind the president’s supporters that next year’s election could be achingly close, thereby motivating them to work harder for his campaign and turn out in greater numbers.
The president’s allies increasingly have come to the conclusion that they may not be able to sell Mr. Biden and instead need to focus more on scaring voters about the possible return of Mr. Trump. In the meantime, they will savor Tuesday night’s elections and use them to bolster Democratic morale.
“The immediate benefits to Biden are mostly narrative,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and a leading opponent of Mr. Trump who supported Mr. Biden in 2020. “If you’re his team, you can wave last night’s results in naysayers’ faces and say, ‘See, Democrats keep winning elections under Biden. You keep underestimating him, but he wins when it matters.’ It also disrupts his doomsday news cycle after the bad polls.”
“But ultimately,” she added, “I don’t think last night tells us anything about 2024.” While the New York Times poll showed Mr. Biden’s vulnerability, she said next year’s election “is going to be about Donald Trump.” The task for the Biden campaign then, she said, will be making sure that “it galvanizes the anti-Trump vote, which is a different thing than a pro-Biden vote.”
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker
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Source: nytimes.com
