Big Money & Biden's Big 2024 Problem

There's a flashing red light in the polls as the president courts Wall Street donors.

Photo credit: AP/Evan Vucci

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The Democratic Party has settled on its old formula — tack to the right to appease huge donors, raise enormous sums of Wall Street crash, block an honest primary process, and then hope understandably demoralized voters still turn out in the general election merely because they loathe Donald Trump.

This formula has sometimes worked in the past when the party’s voters seem unified and mobilized. But there’s a huge warning sign in the polls right now, which I spotlight in a new piece for The Guardian:

A stat from the Washington Post illustrates this larger problem: “Biden has less support for renomination among Democrats than Trump, Obama and Clinton had from their parties,” the newspaper reports, noting that surveys show just 38% of Democrats want Biden to be the party’s nominee in 2024. CNN’s polling shows that right now, just one-third of Americans believe Biden deserves to be re-elected – lower than where Trump was at around this stage of his first term.

It’s impossible to overstate how big a warning sign this is. America is drowning in partisan media that teaches millions of people to worship their preferred party’s politicians — and disdain any challenge to them. So it’s remarkable and ominous for Biden that so much of the electorate — including his party’s own voters! — nonetheless so clearly desire an alternative.

But that huge warning sign hasn’t deterred Democrats from going back to their old formula of betraying populist campaign promises and moving right while trying to stomp out any primary challenge. Why? One recent headline answers that question:

Democrats’ formula is an expression of money’s supremacy — and more precisely, big money’s supremacy.

Only a few years after Bernie Sanders’ campaign showed the potential of grassroots fundraising, Democratic leaders are back to the old-school chase for huge donors — and their entire 2024 political strategy revolves around that pursuit.

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