Politico: Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden

Famed Russo-Chinese state propagandist, Politico, is also joining the chorus of panic over Biden and whether there’s actually any reason to vote for him.

Some choice quotes:

A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump.

“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. “This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.’ It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end.’”

Despite everything, Trump is running ahead of Biden in most battleground states. He raised far more money in April, and the landscape may only become worse for Democrats, with Trump’s hush-money trial concluding and another — this one involving the president’s son — set to begin in Delaware.

While he’s long lagged Biden in cash on hand, Trump’s fundraising outpaced the president’s by $25 million last month, and included a record-setting $50.5 million haul from an event in Palm Beach, Florida. One adviser to major Democratic Party donors provided a running list that has been shared with funders of nearly two dozen reasons why Biden could lose, ranging from immigration and high inflation to the president’s age, the unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris and the presence of third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. […] The adviser added, “The list of why we ‘could’ win is so small I don’t even need to keep the list on my phone.”

…

But Democratic critics of the campaign’s approach — while agreeing that abortion should be a winning issue — said they’re challenged when pressed by friends to make the case for why Biden will win.

“There’s still a path to win this, but they don’t look like a campaign that’s embarking on that path right now,” said Pete Giangreco, a longtime Democratic strategist who’s worked on multiple presidential campaigns. “If the frame of this race is, ‘What was better, the 3.5 years under Biden or four years under Trump,’ we lose that every day of the week and twice on Sunday.”

Whatever the Biden campaign has been doing over the past two months — and it’s a lot of activity, including $25 million in swing-state ad spending, according to AdImpact — it has had only a limited effect. According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s average job-approval rating on March 7, the date of his State of the Union Address, was 38.1 percent. As of Friday, it’s 38.4 percent.

And his standing against Trump has also changed little. On April 22, the day Trump’s criminal trial began, the presumptive GOP nominee held a 0.3-point lead in national polls, according to FiveThirtyEight. Trump is up about a point since then, currently leading Biden by 1.4 points in the FiveThirtyEight average.

“New York Democrats need to wake up,” said Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “The number of people in New York, including people of color that I come across who are saying positive things about Trump, is alarming.”

“The greatest political challenge confronting the president starts with an “i,” but it’s not Israel, it’s inflation,” Torres said. “The cost of living is a challenge that we have to figure out how to manage.” He said Biden should focus on issues around affordability and continue to tout his success in capping insulin costs in areas with high rates of diabetes, like his Bronx district.

Judging from the socdems/social fascists I sometimes watch (e.g. at r/curatedtumblr), the anxiety is also heightening in the non-wonk population, too. Increasingly frequent shit like how you’re transphobic if you don’t vote for Biden, etc. Entirely plausible that if Biden can’t get the cost of living down in the next five months, it is officially Joever. And just bleating “the economy is actually great, the best it’s ever been actually” won’t change that. You can’t gaslight somebody into thinking that they haven’t spent noticeably more money on bills lately no matter how many fancy indices you throw at them.