A recent Fox News poll drew wide attention when it showed President Joe Biden pulling marginally ahead of former President Donald Trump for the first time since October. His 2-point lead was due to an 11-point swing among independent voters, who had favored Trump by 9 points in May.
This good news for Biden may, however, be a problem because it will encourage him to believe he’s doing everything right. It’s reported that some Democratic strategists think he needs a new strategy because he’s betting too much on presenting himself to voters as the savior of democracy, under mortal threat from Trump.
Voters’ chief concern is high prices, not threatened democracy, and they remember they were better off economically under Trump. If the danger of Trump to democracy resonated strongly, you’d expect his conviction on 34 felonies would shift polls against him. But opinions on Trump seem to have hardened, not changed, because of his legal woes. He is still ahead in the RealClearPolitics average. Biden has fared far worse in polls this election cycle than he did against Trump in 2020.Â
If the Fox News poll turns out to be an outlier but persuades Biden to hold steady, it might steer him wrong, to the dismay of Democrats who already doubt the wisdom of his current course.
There is another big reason to be skeptical about Biden relying on an election message about being the savior of democracy. It is that his policies strongly suggest the opposite — that he is, in truth, a danger to democracy himself.
Democrats, with Biden’s approval, are waging lawfare against Trump with their several election-year prosecutions. The president and his party have abused the justice system in their quest for power. It is hard to claim you’re a champion of democracy when you’re putting your political opponent on trial. Voters know that’s what dictators do.
Biden and the Democrats are also mounting a nonstop assault on the Supreme Court, attacking its 6-3 originalist majority. They want to remove Republican-appointed justices by recusal or overwhelm them by packing the court with lefties so nothing stands in the way of left-wing policies for which there is no voter mandate or constitutional authority. Trashing one of the three constitutional branches of government to exercise more power is not the behavior of a champion of democracy.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Nor is opening the nation’s borders to lawbreaking alien immigrants, 9 million of them during Biden’s first term in office, including more than half a million criminals. Likewise, his unconstitutional executive orders to forgive student loans. Also, the Democratic staple of casting doubt on republican institutions such as the Electoral College. The list of anti-democratic Democratic actions is a long one.
Biden is resting his case for another four years in the White House on a shaky claim to constitutional probity. Policy after policy, tactic after tactic, shows that he’ll let nothing get in the way of his quest for power. Voters know Biden repeatedly demonstrates that he is a savior of democracy only in rhetoric, but he is its enemy in practice.
