Biden Risks Radicalizing the Center
The president can reverse the chaos narrative. He must act.
ON TUESDAY PRESIDENT BIDEN will speak on antisemitism at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at the U.S. Capitol. He better lean in hard—like his re-election, and the future of American democracy, depend on it.
He must speak to the young liberal father in Georgia, a proud and observant Jew who can’t stand Donald Trump but doesn’t know how he will bring himself to vote for Biden this year. It’s the vote of this disheartened Peach State Democrat that Biden must salvage.
But it seems like Biden may have lost the plot. Trying to win with young voters, he is paying off more student debt and is reclassifying marijuana. Yet for every young American screaming at “Genocide Joe,” there are far more voters in the middle who find the normalcy Biden promised four years ago is nowhere in sight.
In 2024, Biden is the chaos candidate. Fair or unfair, in politics perception is reality.
Majorities now approve of Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans—including 42 percent of Democrats—as well as a border wall. And while violent crime has fallen dramatically since the Trump presidency, voters see more disorder. Drugstores didn’t clear their shelves and lock up merchandise because of widespread looting until Biden was in charge. Videos of open-air drug markets and mayhem on subways don’t just make people scared, they make them angry.
There has been record inflation too, and high prices contribute to a pervasive sense of anxiety in the electorate. But Biden would be far better off politically if high prices were the sole challenge he had with voters. Disorder is a drain on the American psyche. And it’s threatening Biden’s re-election, as it leaves voters receptive to the kind of harsh law-and-order appeal Trump prefers.
Of course, there is nothing chaotic about the Biden administration itself—to the contrary, it has achieved more legislative success in one term than any president in memory and executes competently with a drama-free team of grownups. Biden continues to govern: He is working mightily on a ceasefire in Gaza. He and his team were successful in their long, quiet efforts to convince House Speaker Mike Johnson to protect America’s leadership abroad and defend Ukraine. And they helped avert a looming recession.
Yet look at the polls—none of this resonates. There is bipartisan fury over protests and immigration. Trump is running to restore order, and voters have given him a lead.
Last week Biden spoke out on the campus protests, and he said the right things. He disavowed destroying property, vandalism, breaking windows, trespassing, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations, threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear, and hate speech. He emphasized that “dissent must never lead to disorder,” and that we are not a lawless country. “We are a civil society, and order must prevail.”
This is the same Biden who spoke out four years ago after riots broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. He said many of the same things at that time: “Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting.”
But Biden dragged his feet this time, and took too long to speak up. It seemed a reaction to criticism, not leadership. Biden said it wasn’t a moment for politics, which is laughable. Trump and Republicans got to unite in criticism of the campus protesters, along with the center of the electorate, and blame Biden for the chaos. This is only about politics.
It is not Biden’s fault that cowardly university administrators permitted encampments and barricades, antisemitic rhetoric, taunting and threats and intimidation of Jewish students, disruption of classes and exams and graduation ceremonies for a class of students who didn’t get to have high school graduations in 2020. But it’s repugnant, and unacceptable to a majority of Americans.
The electorate is not only with Israel, against Hamas, it doesn’t empathize with fanatics.
Rep. Jake Auchincloss put it perfectly on Sunday: “The margin of victory for Joe Biden isn’t college protesters on the coasts. It’s Haley voters in the heartland—who aren’t sympathetic to underinformed, overprivileged kids on elite campuses.”
Biden was moved to run for the presidency in 2020 after watching Americans marching through the streets in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” He must call out the left as he called out the right. While Jewish Americans have appreciated Biden’s defense of Israel, they see equivocation in his response to the protests.
Meanwhile, Trump gets to have it both ways on Israel. He recently conceded the Israelis were “absolutely losing the PR war,” but he has also said he doesn’t think a two-state solution is possible.
Biden has refused to speak to the nation about this gray area—his defense of Israel and his push for a ceasefire, as well as his efforts to get humanitarian aid to Gaza. This is why it’s critical that he speak more vigorously, and more often, about the protests. Biden is not managing the war against Hamas, but he owns disorder at home. The campus protests will likely thin out now that the school year has ended, but protesters are coming for the Democratic convention in August. Biden needs to address the question of disorder repeatedly so that every last voter knows what he thinks. And no matter how much pressure he gets from progressives, he must not visit any protests.
THROUGHOUT ALL OF THIS, Biden has also refused to mitigate what may prove to be the worst threat to his re-election. Stunningly, he has taken no discernible action to stabilize the southern border, though immigration is the most important issue to voters. Gallup has recorded this three months in a row, “the longest stretch for this particular issue in the past 24 years.”
The number of border crossings is unprecedented and Chinese migrants are the fastest-growing group attempting entry to the United States. It is not partisan to call this a national security threat. It is also not enough to say there was a great bipartisan bill to fix the border and Trump killed it. Most Americans know Biden hasn’t acted to fix the problem—not before the bill was introduced and not after it was killed.
Biden was inaugurated just fourteen fraught days after January 6th—in a city still locked up by security in the wake of the insurrection. He promised stability and calm. He can reject the tactics of the protesters and fight antisemitism. And he can do something, anything—even if it’s challenged in court—at the border.
But Biden cannot just wish this away. He can lose the kids; they don’t vote much anyway. He cannot lose the center. He must own the chaos. And fix it. Soon.