The Stages Of Democrat Grief

I've remarked here on how early in this campaign cycle we've seen Democrat insiders sounding alarms about Joe's campaign, especially in comparison to earlier epic defeats for McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis. and Kerry.

In 1972, especially after the Eagleton fiasco, there was never any serious expectation that McGovern could beat Nixon, so that election is an outlier -- but even then, the real pessimism didn't even take hold until McGovern was nominated. In the 2024 cycle, we're seeing gnashing of teeth and rending of garments a full year before the election.

There was a brief surge of optimism in the middle of last month, when prognosticators like Sean Trende and Nate Silver thought they saw Joe closing the gap on Trump, but oddly, a single poll from CNN over the past weekend seems to have ended those fantasies. But something seems to be replacing the previous pattern of unattrributed insider discomfort we used to see during the summers before the election: now we're looking at much clearer auguries of disaster, still months before the ones we used to see. Even Sean Trende, backing off his earlier sanguine view, had this to say on Tuesday after that single CNN poll:

The problem is that the political science literature is pretty consistent that this is the time when the electorate’s views about the election start to harden, particularly with respect to the economy.

. . . We can repeat “It’s a long time until Election Day,” and that’s true in a sense. But Election Day is also fast approaching; we’re almost in May, and people start voting in September in some states. If voters still have a favorable view of Trump’s presidency in a few months and think the incumbent president is a failure, the situation will quickly turn critical for Biden and the Democratic Party.

We know the stereotypcal stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, with the implication that people progress from one to the other in the process. I'm starting to think that something like this is happening with elite opinion, although the stages aren't the same. What we had beginning last fall was the usual unattributed concerns about Bidenomics, Joe's age, and to a lesser degree Hunter and the family business deals -- except again, these were a full year before the election. But worse, big names like David Axelrod and James Carville began to attach themselves to the warnings.

But even then, the subtext was always, "We still have time to turn things around, bad as they may look." But I think that was always with the implication that by early this year, the lizard people could sit Joe down and explain to him that he had to drop out in favor of, say, Kamala, Gavin Newsom, J B Pritzker, or Gretchen Whitmer. But as Sean Trende now says, here we are in May, Joe's still running, and none of the alternatives look like serious choices.

Beyond that, last fall, the bedwetters were pointing just to the economy and Joe's age, while now we have the border, crime, and campus pogroms as well, while the first two haven't gone away at all. Here's ther assessment in Time's cover story on what we face if the orange guy brings it off again:

Six months from the 2024 presidential election, Trump is better positioned to win the White House than at any point in either of his previous campaigns. He leads Joe Biden by slim margins in most polls, including in several of the seven swing states likely to determine the outcome.

Here's The Atlantic in an excerpt from behind its paywall:

“I think Gaza could matter for a number of reasons,” Michael Tesler, a political scientist at UC Irvine, told me. The war, he explained, had produced a powerful brew of political forces—all of which bode ill for Democrats.

It is a divisive issue within the party, which is home to both dedicated pro-Palestine constituencies and committed pro-Israel ones. It is prominent enough, across news platforms and social media, that people are thinking about the conflict when they focus on current affairs and politics. For many younger progressives, protesting against Israel has become part of a fight for social justice: To them, the Palestinian cause is tied up with such domestic issues as racial discrimination.

. . . The war in Gaza has also helped create a perception that Biden is hapless.

Here's Michael Moore in an interview with Kaitlan Collins on CNN:

COLLINS: There's a CNN poll that showed today 81 percent of voters, who are under the age of 35 disapprove of how President Biden has been handling this war. I mean, we're seeing it on campuses. There is a question of what we're going to see in November.

I wonder what you think he should be doing differently to change those numbers.

MOORE: Thank you for asking that question, Kaitlan.

This is why I was so, when I got the call, asking if I'd like to come on tonight. I really was coming on. I know we're speaking to millions of people. But I'd like to speak to one particular individual. And that is President Biden.

I wanted to say this on your show tonight that his chance of not being reelected, I think, at this point, is so great, because of those numbers. Because he's losing the youth vote. He's lost the Arab American vote in Michigan. So even Michelle Goldberg in a column, in The New York Times, last month, said that you lose Michigan, you lose the election.

Clearly CNN, having released its negative poll, is on board with the idea that Joe could well lose the elecion, although it seems to have no answer to the campus pogrom conundrum into which Joe has backed himself: if he denounces the elite-school anti-Semitism, he loses Michigan, but if he doesn't, he looks feckless, and by the way, he loses the Jews. Here's today's asssessment from the Washington Free Beacon:

Biden wants to blend into the curtains. In a mirror image of his approach to the Israel-Hamas war, Biden aims to straddle the unbridgeable divide between the lawless and the law abiding, the intolerant and the tolerant, the virtuous and the contemptible. "I condemn the anti-Semitic protests," he said late last month. "I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and their—how they’re being… ." He didn’t finish the sentence.

. . . The president’s choice is to act in the national interest and pay a political price or to continue to hide under his desk and be forced, like Shafik, to pay the same price later—with interest.

On one hand, the campus pogroms have drawn a certain amount of attention from Trump's New York trial, which is bad for Biden, but it's starting to look like the New York trial is misfiring badly for Biden as well. If it gets back in gear, we'll be hearing from Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, and the evidence has been that every one of the Trump New York trials has been a major factor that's driven his continuing rise in the polls.

Received opinion seems to be on some sort of via dolorosa along a route through grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, or something like that. And it's been taking place,as I've observed since last fall, remarkably early in the election cycle.