Why Biden lost

A pre-write I did mean to publish

I’ve written many several criticizing Joe Biden over the years, but at the end of the day, I think he is clearly the better choice for America in 2024 — not least because where I think Biden’s approach has been flawed (fiscal policy and interest rates, for example), Trump’s offerings are strictly worse. As a result, I don’t envision writing many Biden-critical articles down the stretch of a national presidential campaign.

But I am afraid that moderate Democrats’ inclination to be good coalition citizens, relative to the leftists threatening to withhold their votes over Gaza, has us at a disadvantage in terms of shaping narratives, especially if — as seems reasonably likely — Biden loses in November.

So for posterity, I want to pre-commit myself to a narrative about why Biden lost, something I can refer back to the morning after Election Day, if that is in fact what happens. Because I fear the dominant interpretation will be that Biden lost due to defections among young people and people of color because he broke with the left over Israel or perhaps because he re-appointed Jay Powell. There is a strong progressive faction in the Democratic Party that has, simultaneously, considerable influence over Biden administration economic policy (see here and here) and limited emotional and intellectual investment in Joe Biden’s political success. And I think that faction’s members, both inside and outside of the government, are deliberately obscuring the extent to which their own influence over economic policy is the problem.