Democrats hoped that Republican defections from President Donald Trump would help former Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, but an article in The Nation observes that Trump is consolidating support, even from “Biden Republicans.”
National affairs correspondent Jeet Heer noted in an article titled “Biden Republicans Are a Political Illusion”:
In late August, Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff under President Barack Obama as well as onetime mayor of Chicago, declared, “This will be the year of the Biden Republican.” Emanuel was describing the hope that the Democratic Party would convert enough hardcore partisans to fundamentally realign American politics. Just as Reagan Democrats helped the Republicans dominate American politics in the 1980s, so Biden Republicans could help usher in a new era. To that end, much of the Democratic National Convention was tailored to please Republicans more than Democrats, with plenty of speeches by past and present Republicans like Colin Powell, Michael Bloomberg, John Kasich, and Cindy McCain. Progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were marginalized. This stood in contrast to the Republican convention, which was aimed not at outreach but at bolstering the party’s Trumpist identity, with all the adult children of the president speaking.
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Enough time has gone by since the convention that we can safely say that the Republican message was more successful.
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Trump is succeeding in consolidating Republican support behind him, while the Democratic pitch to Republican voters hasn’t gained any traction. Republicans who are skeptical of Trump are returning to the fold, while Democrats aren’t winning new converts.
Heer also referred to a recent Washington Post op-ed by former “Never Trump” stalwart Danielle Pletka, “I never considered voting for Trump in 2016. I may be forced to vote for him this year.”
Pletka said in 2017 that there were rumors Trump was “crazy” or on “drugs,” but now says:
I fear that former vice president Joe Biden would be a figurehead president, incapable of focus or leadership, who would run a teleprompter presidency with the words drafted by his party’s hard-left ideologues. I fear that a Congress with Democrats controlling both houses — almost certainly ensured by a Biden victory in November — would begin an assault on the institutions of government that preserve the nation’s small “d” democracy. That could include the abolition of the filibuster, creating an executive-legislative monolith of unlimited political power; an increase in the number of Supreme Court seats to ensure a liberal supermajority; passage of devastating economic measures such as the Green New Deal; nationalized health care; the dismantling of U.S. borders and the introduction of socialist-inspired measures that will wreck an economy still recovering from the pandemic shutdown.
I fear the grip of Manhattan-San Francisco progressive mores that increasingly permeate my daily newspapers, my children’s curriculums and my local government. I fear the virtue-signaling bullies who increasingly try to dominate or silence public discourse — and encourage my children to think that their being White is intrinsically evil, that America’s founding is akin to original sin. I fear the growing self-censorship that guides many people’s every utterance, and the leftist vigilantes who view every personal choice — from recipes to hairdos — through their twisted prisms of politics and culture. An entirely Democratic-run Washington, urged on by progressives’ media allies, would no doubt only accelerate these trends.
Nor do Biden’s national-security positions reassure me. While he promises a welcome change in style and a renewed respect for U.S. alliances, Biden would, like Trump, pull our troops from the Middle East and South Asia. Worse yet, he would slash defense spending and likely renew the Obama administration’s misbegotten love affair with Iran’s tyrants. Then there is the Democratic Party’s hostility to the state of Israel. Biden supporters will clamor that the candidate’s history is very pro-Israel, but as president would he be strong enough to stand up to the new Democratic Party’s less-than-ardent support for the Jewish state?
Read Heer’s full article at The Nation.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.