Well isn’t this just like America in the 2020s?

The New York Times did a focus group with Biden voters who are not especially happy with the president, and the thing that united them was that Republicans are even worse.

Now these are Democrats, and the focus group was run by the New York Times, so take everything with a grain of salt.

Still, the results are interesting and my gut says that the exercise did what it was supposed to do: get into the attitudes of Democrats who are not especially happy with the president. After all, there are a lot of those according to the polls, and it behooves the Democrats to figure out how to move them back into the solid D column.

Eleven disaffected Biden voters described a slate of frustrations with and criticisms of the president. They also said that they’d almost certainly vote for him again. “I’d definitely be voting against Trump or DeSantis.” https://t.co/kDh0h0dtm7

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) May 30, 2023

So what did the Times find?

Joe Biden is old and weak, and Democrats know that. No amount of gaslighting by the folks trying to sell him as the next FDR in 1933 is moving the needle with them.

Are Democrats and independents truly souring on President Biden’s re-election bid, as some recent polls suggest, or are they blowing off steam before coming home to back him in 2024? And why do so many of his past supporters, especially younger and nonwhite voters, seem shaky on him now, judging him to be a decent man with good policies but not the leader they want for four more years?

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.

We tried to get creative with some of our questions — “If you were to describe the state of America as a weather forecast, what would it be?” — along with probing how Mr. Biden aligned with what these voters want most. Perhaps the most surprising answers came when we asked the 11 if they saw Mr. Biden as a strong leader and as someone who shared their values.

Reading the responses provides a good reminder that voters, too, have Overton windows. Each of these voters is willing to debate candidates and policies within the confines of who is the best Democrat, but as with most Republicans, the commitment to the tribe is so strong that any Democrat is better than any Republican.

To be fair, that is precisely how most of us see things too, including me. I find the Democrat agenda so offensive that I would likely vote for almost any Republican against any Democrat. I tell myself that my allegiance is driven by fundamental policy differences, and that is true. But I have to admit that it would be extremely hard to pull the lever for a Democrat due to tribal allegiances as well.

None of our participants thought Biden was a strong leader.

None thought he’d be up to the task of being president through 2028.

But none would pick Trump over Biden if we wound up with a rematch. https://t.co/E9FxxviHhh

— Kristen Soltis Anderson (@KSoltisAnderson) May 31, 2023

This is why elections are won and lost with Independents, of whom there are very many these days. Both parties have been shrinking as a percentage of the electorate.

So let’s take a look at some of the questions and responses:

That is quite a set of answers given how glowing the reviews of Biden are with the Left. Most Democrat pundits will give you a long list of wins that Biden has wracked up, especially during his first two years in office when he and the Democrats controlled everything. They spent like Putin building a Dacha, throwing money at everybody and everything, and at the end of it all Democrat voters think that a severe thunderstorm is on the way.

Max there in New Hampshire isn’t quite so gloomy, I want some of what he is smoking.

These voters–and remember, Democrat voters as a group are not high on Biden, so these people are hardly unique–are not looking forward to 2024. Not because they expect Biden to lose, necessarily, but because they are disappointed that Biden is going to be the choice.

Having sat in a room with a lot of political consultants looking over polling and focus group data, I have to say that nobody looking at these responses in the Biden camp is jumping for joy.

In an ideal world, a sitting president wants to run on his record, while the opponent wants to run on the guy’s record and character. The challenger is always the underdog for obvious reasons. Yet it seems pretty clear that Biden’s path to victory is running against his opponent, which makes the election more a choice about two people and less about the direction of the country.

Joe Biden literally cannot run on his vision, or as he says, finish the job. People don’t like the job he is doing, and that includes his base of support. He will have to rally his troops to back him against the other guy, not rally behind him as their standard bearer.

Biden won the choice war between him and Trump, and each of these voters made it clear that their vote for Biden was really a rejection of Trump. Even in 2020, Biden was old and tired–remember how he barely campaigned? In 2024 he will be older and more tired. Each of these voters could be picked off easily enough–but probably not by any of the candidates who might wind up on the ticket.

The most striking thing about this group of Biden voters is just how little respect they actually have for the president. Most, if not all, will wind up voting for him in 2024 (assuming they don’t sit the election out), but not a single one of them thinks that he is actually competent and up to the job of representing the US abroad or running the government here at home. Several described him as an embarrassment, and they all think he is just not all there.

This tells us something profound about political behavior. As easy as it is to attribute this to the fractured nature of the electorate, I am pretty sure that even in more moderate times most voters will stick with their tribe when pushed to make a choice. Not a one of these people is proud or even confident in Biden, who has and will have his finger on the nuclear button. Yet chances are great that most and perhaps all will vote for him.

I don’t view that as a Democrat thing, as disgusted as I am with Democrat policies. I think it is a sign of how aligned people are with political parties in a way that goes far far beyond rationality. It is an identity thing for partisans.

It’s striking how on the big top-line issues–leadership, the economy, and ability to do the job not a single of these Biden voters think anything positive about Biden. But to a person they indicated they either would vote for him or at best sit out the election.

Why?

Social issues.

As somebody deeply invested in social issues this neither surprises me nor leads me to believe that Republicans should back down. But it does tell me that we have to fight smart on those issues because the Democrats are obviously doing a good job selling their message to disaffected Democrats.

I have seen this in my own circle of friends and family. Not one of them is happy with the state of the country, and none of them is on board with the alphabet agenda. Yet they view opposition to it as aggressive and mean. The appeals to compassion work, and work especially well with a large swathe of the population.

Unfortunately, I don’t see an easy way to break through to this group, given their prejudices against social conservative arguments. As we saw in Virginia it took parents actually getting slapped in the face repeatedly for people to wake up. There is a visceral distaste for fighting the culture wars, and as unpleasant as the Left’s tactics are, they work with the demographic they need to persuade.

You and I may wonder what kind of arguments it will take to change people’s minds, and the answer, unfortunately, is that none will. Nothing but experience with the evil nature of the Left project will do.

Which means a lot more child sterilization and mutilation, and a lot more CRT and DEI. It apparently takes a person whacking a baseball bat to your head to jar one out of the fantasy world that the Left isn’t destroying America.

This is why you see cities declining despite how obvious the solutions are, if not easy. Here in Minneapolis, the crime problem is out of control, but voters chose a Soros prosecutor for County Attorney anyway. Things are getting worse. Even our Marxist Attorney General Keith Ellison is to the right of her, if reluctantly so.

Only a crisis will change behavior.

That sucks, but there it is.