Opinion: Biden says he’s a defender of democracy. America disagrees.

President Biden has made preserving and protecting American democracy a central issue in his campaign for re-election. He regularly offers himself as democracy’s true champion and argues that electing his opponent, Donald Trump, would mean the end of democracy in this country.

As he said in a speech earlier this year, on the third anniversary of the January 6 Capitol attack, “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about.”

“The choice is clear,” the Biden continued, “Donald Trump’s campaign is about him, not America, not you.  Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future.  He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy to put himself in power.”

America, the president concluded, “must be clear: Democracy is on the ballot.  Your freedom is on the ballot.”

A Washington Post-George Mason University poll released this week contains good news and bad news for the Biden campaign. First, it shows that Biden has made substantial progress in convincing voters that democracy is indeed on the ballot. The survey of voters in swing states found that 61 percent say “threats to democracy” are extremely important to them.

Unfortunately for Biden, this same poll shows he is failing to persuade people that voting for him is the best way to preserve and/or improve democracy. Forty-four percent of surveyed voters in those states say that they believe Trump is best equipped to deal with threats to democracy, compared with only 33 percent who favor Biden to do so.

The news gets worse for Biden if we focus just on “undecided” voters. Among that group, 38 percent trust Trump as the preserver of democracy. Only 29 percent trust Biden on the democracy issue.

As the Post puts it, “The results offer troubling indicators for Biden, who needs voters who may be unenthusiastic about his candidacy to decide they must reject Trump to preserve America’s system of representative government.”

Biden’s problem, beyond the voters not recognizing him as the custodian of democracy, is that he is an incumbent at a time when many voters are deeply dissatisfied with the way democracy is now functioning. Voters can look at what he has done during his time in the Oval Office to improve democracy. They don’t like what they see.

Evidence of this dissatisfaction is everywhere. For example, let’s look at a Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service Battleground Civility Poll taken in March.

It found that “A strong majority of voters (68 percent) … are not happy with the way democracy works in our country. While one would expect Republicans (79 percent) and Independents (73 percent) to be unhappy, given their lack of power in the White House and Congress, even most Democrats (56 percent) report being unhappy with the way democracy is working.”

Other polls register similar sentiments.

In May, ABC News reported , “Across the board, voters were deeply frustrated over the state of democracy, suggesting that the country was off on the wrong track and expressing pessimism about whether it could improve.” As is the case on other issues , many voters don’t think Biden has done a good job addressing democracy’s problems.

And here, too, Trump is benefiting from nostalgia and revisionism about his own assault on democracy. That revisionism was registered in January of this year in another Washington Post poll.

In that survey, “Fifty-five percent of voters said the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was an attack on democracy that should never be forgotten, while 43 percent said too much has been made of it and believe it’s time to move on…[M]embers of the two major parties saw it differently, with 86% of Democrats saying the attack should never be forgotten and 72% of Republicans saying it’s time to turn the page.”

The key finding is that, compared to the same poll two years earlier, “it appears voters’ opinions about the protesters have softened with time.”

Biden’s democracy problem also arises from the mere fact that the octogenarian incumbent is running again when even most Democrats prefer that he not do so . That he will be on the ballot in November is proof enough for many voters that democracy is not working well.

In addition, the findings of the Washington Post poll offer another example of Trump’s skill in the messaging wars. They suggest that the ex-president has convinced many people, as he put it at a rally in New Hampshire last December , that “Joe Biden is a threat to democracy.”

Biden, he says, has shown that he is a threat to democracy by leading a “politically motivated persecution of a political rival.” As the Post puts it, “Trump has tried to flip the democracy issue, claiming falsely that he and his allies are facing multiple criminal investigations because Biden is weaponizing the judicial system against him.”

Trump has repeated his message about politically motivated prosecution and the weaponizing of the Biden Justice Department hundreds if not thousands of times. He has made that message a centerpiece of his campaign.

In contrast, Biden has talked only episodically about democracy. He says that he is running to save democracy , but days and weeks can go by without the president hammering that theme home.

And Americans don’t just want democracy saved. They want it reformed and improved.

If Biden wants to address the flashing red lights that the Washington Post poll results signaled, he will have to up his game.

So far, Biden has not found a way of talking about democracy that is crisp, clear and connected to the concerns of American voters. If Biden is to win in November, he needs to refresh and reboot the way he talks about democracy .

Going forward, Biden will have to acknowledge voters’ dissatisfaction with democracy frankly. He will have to lay out a plan for what he will do to address that dissatisfaction.

In the end, if Biden is to have a chance at re-election, he will have to be much more concrete about why voters should trust in him after his three years in office to make democracy work better. As the results of the Washington Post poll demonstrate, Biden’s promise to preserve a system that many people think is failing is not a winning message.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

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