Both the president and his reelection campaign are going after his coup-attempting predecessor even before the first GOP primary ballots are cast.
A full year out from the 2024 presidential election and nearly two months before Republicans cast their first primary ballots, President Joe Biden and his campaign are assuming that Donald Trump will be his opponent and have already started reminding voters why they threw him out of office in the first place.
Biden personally has stepped up criticism of his coup-attempting predecessor and is framing the likely rematch as one that will determine the survival of American democracy.
“The same man who said we should terminate the rules and regulations and articles of the Constitution — these are things he said — is now running on a plan to end democracy as we know it,” he said last week at a fundraiser in Chicago.
“This next election is different. It’s more important. There’s more at stake. And we all know why: Because our very democracy is at stake,” he told a San Francisco audience on Wednesday.
But he can still easily win with 46% or even less at this point. Technically it’s currently possible to win with as little as 23%. And I’m not talking 23% of the US population. 23% of people who actually vote. Less now actually, since that study was done in 2016, and Gerrymandering has gotten worse, shifting more power to fewer people.
All of the gerrymandering lawsuit losses have been overturned by conservative judges and the Supreme Court is corrupt now so there’s little likelihood of them doing the right thing and fixing the maps.
And if that’s not enough, there are several places that have removed polling places from cities and several places have declared that you can’t drop off absentee ballots for someone else, making it difficult for disabled people or people with “essential” jobs to vote, especially when early voting is also illegal. And if your job isn’t “essential”, employers still only have to give you one hour off. Even if you can make it to a polling place in less than half an hour, with the reduced locations in many cities, it’s often more than an hour wait to vote, so you risk losing your job. That’s if your employer even cares about the law because it might be cheaper for them to risk a fine than to let their only employee take an hour off. Not to mention it’s never actually been enforced anyway, so the risk is very low.
We need a mandatory public holiday, free transportation to polling places, and universal mail-in or early voting to be funded for it to actually allow more than a small percentage of citizens to vote, especially in traditionally more progressive places like cities.