The Democrats can still beat Donald Trump. The question is whether they have the will to win. A terrible fatalism has descended on the party following the assassination attempt on Trump, but the choice of Ohio senator JD Vance as running mate ought to give them renewed hope of victory. The Trump-Vance ticket is pro-authoritarian, pro-insurrection, anti-women and pro-Putin. This toxic combination ought to excite a broad coalition against the Republicans in November. Will the Democrats have the courage to seize the moment?
First, Joe Biden should drop out of the race. He continues to slide away as a credible candidate for re-election. The US president has good-ish days and bad days, like everybody’s grandparents. This is not a reassuring trajectory for an 81-year-old. Interviewed on Monday night by NBC’s Lester Holt, a waxen Biden looked closer to meeting his maker than Trump, 78, who entered the Republican convention hall in triumph with a bandaged ear. Yet, even at this late stage, I wouldn’t completely write off his chances.
Biden appeared peevish and snappy on screen, but he did get one thing right. Asked by Holt if he felt the shooting would affect the outcome of the 2024 race, he replied tartly, “I don’t know, and you don’t know either.” Under Biden, the stock market is up, violent crime is down, inflation stands at three per cent and the job market continues to expand. A Morning Consult taken two days after the assassination attempt showed Trump leading Biden by only one percentage point (46 per cent to 45 per cent). Camps have formed and not many voters are budging, even among those with a grudging respect for Trump’s fist-pumping resilience.
For years, Vance sucked up to the idiotic Don Jr and Eric Trump to win their father’s favour
On the other hand, a recent YouGov poll of battleground states showed Trump beating Biden decisively in Arizona (+7), Wisconsin (+5), Georgia (+4), Nevada (+4), North Carolina (+4) and Pennsylvania (+3). Numbers like these could lead to a blow-out electoral college victory for Trump. The same poll showed Democratic candidates for the Senate comfortably outperforming Biden. The danger is they will go down with their chief and the party will lose both chambers of Congress.
With the Supreme Court already in the Republicans’ pocket, Trump could gain the keys to all three branches of the US government and do as he likes. This is why the Democrats must stop sleep-walking to defeat.
We already know how Trump is promising to “unite” America. He has vowed to set the justice department on his opponents, force Ukraine to yield to Putin, implement mass deportations of illegal immigrants and fire thousands of government officials in a purge of the “deep state”. He will do nothing to ban AR 15-style assault rifles, the weapon of the child-man who nearly killed him. The Supreme Court has promised Trump immunity for his actions in office, however extreme.
As for Vance, his journey from Trump-hater to loyal attack-dog was brilliantly summed up in a New Yorker cartoon. “And again, sir,” a grateful Vance mouths into his phone, “I’m so sorry that I called you America’s Hitler and so relieved that you took it as a compliment.” Full disclosure: in 2016, I gave Vance a five-star review for his hard times memoir Hillbilly Elegy, but I already noticed that he was copying Barack Obama’s trajectory (Ivy League law school, editor of its law journal, lyrical autobiography). This became even clearer when in 2022 Vance became a midwestern senator. But to advance to the White House, the clever shapeshifter decided he needed to go full MAGA.
This meant venting about America being run by miserable “childless cat ladies”, opposing abortion, promising to replace “every civil servant … with our own people” and abandoning Ukraine. Vance’s crass humour was evident in his joke about Britain under Labour as the first “truly Islamist country” with nukes. Unlike his honourable predecessor Mike Pence, Vance said he would have been willing to overturn the 2020 election.
For years, Vance sucked up to the idiotic Don Jr and Eric Trump to win their father’s favour and brought billionaire tech bro friends, such as his mentor Peter Thiel, into the Republican fold. As a son of the rust belt, he says Trump has tasked him with winning Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, but the white, rural working-class are already pro-Trump. Vance, 39, has youth and brains but I can’t see him attracting suburban moms. All ladies, including cat lovers, have a vote and have proved their power several times over in the mid-term elections and on abortion-related ballots. You can see why Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s astute former White House adviser, warned against nominating Vance for vice-president (though she has since fallen into line).
The best course of action would be to ditch Biden and install Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, with Josh Shapiro, the competent and popular governor of Pennsylvania, as her running mate. At a stroke, the Democrats would have an energetic and intriguing pair to counter the reactionary Trump-Vance ticket. Harris and Shapiro would be pro-democracy, anti-Putin and pro-women, everything Trump and Vance are not.
A new ticket could galvanise Democratic faint hearts but many are afraid of change
Biden, however, is determined to run out the clock on his critics and stay in power. “There’s more to do and I’m reluctant to walk away from that,” he told BET News, a black entertainment channel, last night. He still insists he is best placed to defeat Trump. It is not merely a question of pride, though lord knows he is stubborn and vain. Public defections against Biden have dried up not only because of the assassination attempt on Trump, but also because congressmen back home have been told by voters to back off.
A new ticket could galvanise faint-hearted Democrats, but many are afraid of change, including African-American women, the most reliable Democrat voters. After Hillary Clinton was beaten, they worry about throwing Harris into the Republican meat grinder. That hasn’t stopped private plotting, but only a few Democrat politicians, such as Colorado congressmen Jason Crow have challenged Biden; he was slapped down.
According to revelations in Puck last night, Biden ranted furiously at Crow, an army veteran, that “nobody had been a better president” on national security “so I don’t want to hear that crap”. Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee of Biden loyalists is speeding ahead with proposals to ram through his nomination ahead of their convention by remote, electronic vote by 5th August. Biden is not going quietly. Democrats have little more than a fortnight to get out of their funk.
