If Biden’s Campaign Chair Is as Clueless as She Appeared on Morning Joe, Democrats Are Doomed

One Morning Joe guest went into her Friday appearance on the show with a clear message: The American public’s opinion of President Joe Biden is “hardened.”

“You know this, the reason is because so much of this race is hardened already. The American people know that the president is older. They see that, they knew that before the debate,” she observed in one instance.

“What people know about the president is pretty hardened,”  she declared in another.

“So at the end of the day, as I was talking about the president, the impression of the president is very hardened. And that’s really important because people know and are baked in,” she boasted.

“They know who Joe Biden is,” she added.

The strange thing about this message is that it came from Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and was meant to be a comfort to Democrats who worry that Biden’s candidacy may no longer be viable.

What O’Malley Dillon says is true, but if she’s comfortable with that, Democrats are as doomed as the most shrill alarmists among them have warned.

Joe Biden is extremely — almost impressively — unpopular. This has been the case for the better part of three years now; FiveThirtyEight’s aggregation of polling data indicates that Biden’s approval rating has been underwater since September 2021. Right now, just 38.5% of the country approves of his job performance, that’s 17.7 points lower than the proportion of Americans who say they disapprove. The last time that gap was not in the double digits was May 2023.

So yes, it’s true that Americans have a perspective on Biden that shows little sign of changing . But contra O’Malley Dillon, this is a reason — even the reason — why Democrats would be wise to throw Biden overboard and find a new captain to lead them through this election cycle.

What’s more is that impressions of Biden’s opponent, former President Donald Trump , are also largely baked in to the race. He has been the preeminent political figure of the last decade. He served as president for four years. He was a ubiquitous celebrity for decades before that. Americans know who Donald Trump is; there is both a lot of hate and a lot of love for him, and if you look at just his favorability rating in the right light and at the right angle, you might be able to convince yourself that Biden is capable of besting him again.

But polling also suggests that voters have pretty much decided that Trump’s actual performance in office was just flat-out better than Biden’s. That’s why Trump is not only leading in all of the states that were expected to be battlegrounds this November, but pushing Biden in what were previously considered blue states such as Minnesota, New Hampshire New Mexico, and New Hampshire.

For some perspective on just how bad the status quo is for Democrats, consider that Trump is ahead of Biden by more than 3 points according to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregation of national surveys. He won the 2016 election despite losing the popular vote by two points and came very close to winning reelection in 2020 despite losing the popular vote by 4.5 points. In both cases, the polls actually underestimated his popular vote performance.

If Joe Biden means it when he says he’s staying in the race and his team is even half as clueless as Jen O’Malley Dillon appeared to be on Morning Joe on Friday, Trump can start measuring drapes.

Watch above via MSNBC.