King of Wishful Thinking

Joe Biden says he could have defeated Donald Trump.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence because one can paint it whatever color one wants. President Biden's counterfactual is an example of this. I understand the logic; if one presumes that Vice President Harris lost because she lost a greater vote share than Donald Trump did in the all-important "battleground/swing" states, then it stands to reason that if President Biden had been able to keep all of those votes, he would have won.

Except for the minor fact that there is absolutely no world in which President Biden kept all of his 2020 voter coalition.

For starters, by 2020, there were a lot of people who were fed up with the Trump Administration. By last year, it was the Biden Administration's turn to have worn out its welcome. It's really difficult to look back over his four years in office and imagine the majority of the public saying "yeah, gimme more of that." Not to mention the fact that President Biden had been showing his age during the 2020 campaign season; by last year, he was seeming positively decrepit. There was also the matter of being a "bridge." Candidate Biden had been able to read the room well enough to understand that people did think that he had eight years in the White House in him, but the fact that he never publicly committed to only serving a single term tipped his hand as to his ambitions, and those ambitions prevented him from having the Democratic party put the wheels of succession in motion, which they really needed to be doing. And Mr. Biden's apparent belief that he was owed two terms prevented him from getting down to business from the jump. Case in point; his Executive Order on border security from June of last year. There's no reason that should have waited until 2024, when it could have been just as easily enacted in June of 2021.

The President has run afoul of the same thing that plagued so many Democrats and their supporters, the idea that Donald Trump and the Republican Party in general were so self-evidently loathsome that any viable alternative was a shoe-in. Running a winning campaign takes work, work that Vice President Harris didn't have time to lay the groundwork for, and that President Biden apparently lacked both the energy and the mental sharpness for.

And mistaking loyalty to the President for loyalty to the nation, or even to the party, the Democrats as a whole waited until it was evident to anyone paying attention that President Biden was in serious trouble before acknowledging that he hadn't managed to keep the voters that had elevated him to the White House satisfied, let alone enthusiastic. And he certainly hadn't made inroads into the rest of the electorate. Not that the President himself would have confessed to that, having a million and one reasons for his low approval ratings, except for understanding that he wasn't getting things done in a way that resonated with the public. At least President Biden has creeping (or maybe sprinting, take your pick) senility to blame. Democrats in general should have known better.