Dems In Full-Blown ‘Freakout’?

The big news this morning is the headline in Politico, Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden.

“You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely.

But Biden’s stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said.

Except just this past weekend,

Prominent Democratic strategist James Carville slammed his own party Saturday in a rant in which he called its messaging “full of s–t” — and accused the Biden campaign of worrying too much about the war in Gaza.

Carville, who helped run Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 White House campaign, ripped into national Democrats as polls continue to show President Biden struggling in his likely rematch with former President Donald Trump.

As early as February,

Ezra Klein, a prominent liberal columnist for The New York Times, published an audio essay Friday making his case against President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, saying he should withdraw from the race and allow delegates to pick from a slate of candidates with a better shot at defeating Donald Trump in November.

“We had to wait till this year — till now, really — to see Biden even begin to show what he’d be like on the campaign trail. And what I think we’re seeing is that he is not up for this,” Klein said on his popular semi-weekly podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”

Yrt again, let's put these calls in context. The point isn't that they're coming, the point is how early they're coming in the cycle. Michael Dukakis had been ahead in the 1988 election polls until he rode an Abrams tank on September 13. That image turned things around:

On Monday, Sept. 19, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak offered perhaps the most devastating press account yet in their syndicated column. “Howls of laughter echoed through Bush headquarters in Washington,” they wrote, “where ridicule was prepared for the candidate’s speech Friday. Democratic insiders could only shake their heads in dismay.”

By Tuesday, one poll found that Dukakis had lost significant ground, with 25 percent saying they were less likely to vote for him because of the tank ride.

Election Day was seven weeks away.

The curret round of freakouts is taking place five months before the election. Another disastrous moment in a campaign, John Kerry's windsurfing escapade, became a decisive issue throughout September 2004, and by late that month, the Bush campaign had turned it into a devastating commercial. Before that,

YOU'D think John Kerry could be excused for wanting to spend a summer afternoon on the water.

Instead, David Letterman mocked him for windsurfing instead of campaigning. Jay Leno played the flip-flop card, quipping that even Mr. Kerry's hobby depends on which way the wind blows.

Zell Miller, who could himself be accused of being flip-flopper-in-chief, derided Mr. Kerry's swim trunks as "silly little bicycle pants."

Again, this took place, like Dukakis's tank ride, in September, during the traditional campaign season. Even Thomas Eagleton withdrew from the McGovern campaign in 1972 as vice presidential candidate after he had been nominated at the convention, 99 days before the election, although Democrat insiders had already determined that McGovern had no chance against Nixon without Ted Kennedy on the ticket, which Kennedy had refused to join.

Another unique feature of this year's campaign has been that that unlike Dukakis or Kerry, Biden hasn't been ahead in the polls at all this year, and there's been no single late campaign error like the tank or the windsurfing that turned things around. In fact, I've argued that the pervasive issue that underlies the national mood, of which more specific problems like inflation and illegal immigration are just indicators, is the sense that the 2020 election was stolen, and we have an opportunity to reverse it.

And the polls simply aren't performing their usual function this year. I keep referring to Rush Limbaugh's observation that their purpose is normally to demoralize Republicans, especially in cases like 1980 and 2016, when they simply proved incorrect as predictions of electoral results. This year, they've been focusing almost exclusively on the swing states that Trump lost in 2020 but seems likely to regain this year, and the peculiar picture they've tried to show over a period of many months is that they haven't budged, with Trump remaining narrowly ahead in most.

Data points like the Wildwood, NJ or Bronx rallies keep emmerging as surprises in this context, along with individual polls showing Trump doing well in states like Minnesota, Oregon, Virginia, and New Hampshire, which on one hand are dismissed as outliers, yet there seems to be no effort at serious followup. Are those outliers or not? Maybe the pollsters are too timid to find out.

The fact that insiders are sending up anonymous warnings so many months in advance of the traditional campaign season is just one indicator of how bad things may be for Biden.