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Narratives about Biden [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-05-30

Is President Biden doing a good job as president? Is his administration actually accomplishing anything? And do voters know it? Well….

If you want an exercise in aggravation, The New York Times has got you covered. They did one of their focus groups on the theme of:

Spoiler alert — the fact that they queried a group of skeptical voters is a giveaway on what kind of results they were seeking to explore.

Here’s how the NY Times framed what they were looking for:

For our latest Times Opinion focus group, we wanted to dig into the ambivalence and skepticism about Mr. Biden and whether it was sufficiently strong to cause some voters to flip to a Republican or third-party candidate in 2024 (or to forgo casting a ballot entirely). We convened a cross-section of 11 Americans who voted for him in 2020 and may be leaning toward or against him but haven’t firmly decided for 2024.

emphasis added

They didn’t say “Let’s go out and find Biden voters who are happy with what he’s doing” or “Voters who have been pleased and surprised by how much Biden has done” or “Americans who are convinced the country is on the right track again.” In other words, this was never going to be a happy-talk piece.

Here’s the lineup:

Chris 54, Pa., white, Democrat, teacher

Claudia 28, Fla., Latina, independent, credit portfolio manager

Donnia 62, Ill., Black, independent, not working

Jahnique 28, Del., Black, Democrat, loan processor

Ken 47, Fla., Latino, independent, software developer

Marquita 33, Fla., Black, Democrat, health care account manager

Max 30, N.H., white, independent, camera operator

Milan 39, N.H., Asian, independent, software developer

Nick 37, Iowa, white, independent, business manager

Sana 22, Ill., Asian, Democrat, not working

Vikranth 22, N.J., Asian, Democrat, medical scribe

Just as a point of interest, can you imagine what the demographic profiles of a Republican group of Trump skeptics would look like, and what they’d be asking for? Those Democratic demographics are the worst nightmare for the GOP — where’s all the white men folks? And what exactly does “not working” mean in this context?

I’l spare you the grim details — the link to the article will get though the paywall so you can see for yourself. If I were to summarize the consensus for the group, most of them didn’t vote for Biden in 2020 as much as they were voting against Trump.

Not one of them thought Biden was up to serving through 2028, and not one of them thought he’d done a good job handling the economy — but none of them regretted voting for Biden in 2020. It's a real mixed bag.

Read through the questions and responses and you’ll see a lot of the GOP talking points the mainstream media is picking up and rebroadcasting. If I were to summarize what seems to be a media through line, four more years of a Biden presidency would be about a weak leader in a contest between whether he’d decline into senility first or die in office without getting much done. I won’t deny there’s stuff in there that should worry Democrats, but I also think too many voters don’t have a clue about what the real stakes are.

I wonder how this panel would respond to the warnings Florida Travel Advisory has put together, and if they’d consider those an accurate depiction of the GOP agenda for the entire country if Republicans prevail in 2024.

Just for the record, here’s how “the paper of record” put this focus group together:

This discussion was moderated by a focus group veteran, Kristin Soltis Anderson, and the New York Times deputy Opinion editor, Patrick Healy. Ms. Soltis Anderson has done similar work over the years for Democratic candidates and partisan groups. She chose the participants. (Times Opinion paid her for the work.) This transcript has been edited for length and clarity; an audio recording of the session is also included. Participants provided their biographical details. As is customary in focus groups, our role as moderators was not to argue with or fact-check the speakers, and some participants expressed opinions not rooted in facts.

emphasis added

It would have been of interest if they had followed up that session with another one where they explored why they believed what they did, and if their views would have changed if they had had some discussion of actual facts, not opinions.

Meanwhile, compare and contrast with a piece on the Op Ed page by Brian Deese who was the director of the National Economic Council for the first two years of the Biden administration and helped shape the Inflation Reduction Act.

..But let’s first see how far the country has come since the I.R.A. became law. Companies have announced at least 31 new battery manufacturing projects in the United States. That is more than in the prior four years combined. The pipeline of battery plantsamounts to 1,000 gigawatt-hours per year by 2030 — 18 times the energy storage capacity in 2021, enough to support the manufacture of 10 million to 13 million electric vehicles per year. In energy production, companies have announced 96 gigawatts of new clean power over the past eight months, which is more than the total investment in clean power plants from 2017 to 2021 and enough to power nearly 20 million homes. ...The investment appetite is defying geographic and political boundaries. From Oklahoma and Ohio to North Carolina and Nevada, new investment is breathing economic life into communities that have seen their economies decline. This is in part because the I.R.A. provides an explicit incentive to invest in places with contaminated industrial sites, communities with a significant economic reliance on traditional fossil fuel production or those with shuttered coal mines or coal-fired power plants. ...But that is only part of the overall calculation. The I.R.A. is about more than just clean energy. It also includes corporate tax increases and reductions in prescription drug spending by Medicare. That’s why the I.R.A. overall is still projected to reduce the deficit over 10 years, with the reduction growing to $50 billion a year by 2032. Recent academic research has shown that the long-term deficit reduction could be much greater than these estimates anticipate, with the I.R.A.’s innovative investments in technology and audit capacity generating about $500 billion and potentially much more over the next decade. While it is a mistake to undercut those investments, the savings are achievable even with the rescissions to Internal Revenue Service funding included in the debt limit compromises. If we build on the I.R.A.’s investment-driven model, the optimistic outcome of more clean energy, more economic potential and a stronger fiscal future is within reach.

The I.R.A. is one of the most significant pieces of legislation anyone has managed to pass in years — but it has largely dropped off the radar of the media since the fight to get it passed is history — and getting stuff done like government is supposed to do is not news. And that’s the problem.

Under Biden, unemployment is at all-time lows. Inflation was up — but is coming down, and it looks like the economy won’t have to throw millions of people out of work to cut demand and therefore bring prices down the hard way. The pandemic is still out there, but no longer making the headlines so the Biden administration success in getting vaccines out is not a big deal. The only Biden administration scandals are the fake ones Republicans keep trying to create. Our international relations have been in a big turn-around after the chaos of the Former Guy. The big problem there is our allies are nervous about what Republicans will do if they take back the White House.

There’s a three-fold problem here for Biden.

As far as the media is concerned, good news for Democrats is not news — because Democrats are supposed to deliver good news. It’s what they do when everything is going right. What IS news is “Democrats in disarray”, “Democrats disappointing their base”, “Democrats trying to control their far-left extremists”, “Democrats failing to reach across the aisle for bipartisan success”, and so on. If people don’t hear about the success stories and how they are personally benefitting...

On top of that add the determined effort by Republicans to control the narrative by putting out a constant spin of negative stories, and outright fabrications — which too often are picked up by mainstream media following Cokie’s Law: “it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not because everyone is talking about it.” The press rule that “It’s always good news for Republicans” is what makes IOKIYAR work. Throw in culture war distractions to change the subject...

And then we have the press focus on Republicans is all about whether or not anyone can take the nomination from Trump — not on how horrible any Republican candidate would be, or the disaster the Republican Party would inflict on the country if they win. They talk about the Republican who will win the nomination is the one who can tap into Trump’s ‘populist’ appeal — AKA racism, homophobia, Christian nationalism, etc. Seriously? And has everyone in the press forgotten January 6, how Trump incited it, and the GOP has not backed from him or it? Or how Republicans have pissed off women over abortion?

Again, there’s a website, Florida Travel Advisory, which has a detailed list of all the ways Florida has become a dystopian hell hole under Ron DeSantis — and is a blueprint for Republicans wherever they have political power. Click on any of the headers for a drop-down summary of the risks. Again, I wonder if any of the members of the focus group are aware of just how extreme the consequences would be of another Republican presidency. Three of them live in Florida — what do they have to say?

Claudia:

I’d definitely be voting against Trump or DeSantis. So if those really are my choices, then, again, just the lesser of two evils.

Ken:

I just couldn’t stomach Trump. I was hoping that he would not announce that he was running again. I was hoping for a new phase. But having said that, if it’s between him and Trump, I would vote for Joe Biden again. Yes, I would vote for him again. Moderator, Patrick Healy And you’d be voting for him or against the Republicans, do you think? I would say both. Both are valid for me.

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