Must We Lose to Joe Biden a Third Time?

J oe Biden is an aged political hack who is significantly off his game, and his game was never particularly good in the first place.

Yet, assuming he’s physically capable of it, he is running again and has some serious chance of winning a second term (setting up the predicate for a crisis should his health give out before January 2029).

Yes, amazingly enough, Republicans could lose to Joe Biden a third time.

This would set some sort of record for utterly avoidable, self-imposed political futility.

Biden beat Donald Trump from his basement in 2020, and then pulled a rabbit out of his hat in the 2022 midterms when his approval ratings had pointed to a near-certain shellacking.

I thought Biden’s rocky performance during much of the State of the Union — the mumbly delivery, the sentences smooshed together, the inappropriate affect, the slightly off ad-libs — made it clear that he is running on fumes. On the other hand, having now achieved a lifelong ambition at an advanced age, he has the willpower to try to bulldog through his diminished capacity.

And, sure enough, he had a pretty good night, in part because the Republican heckling and shouted rejoinders served his purposes.

If the voters believe the choice is between a rickety Joe Biden and the party of a yowling Marjorie Taylor Greene, they’re going to pick Biden every time.

So, it’s not, as Newt Gingrich notably argued a few months ago, that Biden is more formidable than we thought; it’s that he’s proven capable, despite his limitations, of beating whomever Republicans put on the field. The NFC South champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers weren’t very good this year, either, but when everyone else in your division is literally 7-10, being good isn’t so necessary.

Trump allegedly asked after the 2020 election, “Can you believe I lost to this effing guy?” Good question. And that effing guy could easily beat him again.

There’s no guarantee of that — Trump leads in the polling in about half of head-to-head match-ups with Biden. But who would be shocked if Biden, working with a mountain of anti-Trump material that grows almost by the day, prevails against him again, should he be the GOP nominee?

To extend the NFC South analogy, it’s an advantage if you get to compete against the Carolina Panthers every year.

All this doesn’t counsel panic about 2024; it does counsel taking Biden seriously, and acknowledging that beating him is a challenge that will require shrewdness and prudence.

At times in 2022, it seemed that the political environment would save Republicans from paying the price for poor candidate choices in a number of key races (I certainly believed this to be the case). But the reality was that Republicans needed to be mindful of the real consequences of taking political risks — it jeopardized their chances in a bunch of places.

So, too, going with the risky choice in 2024, Donald Trump, makes a disastrous second Biden term likelier, even if by no means certain.

Trump already lost to him once, and that was before his delusions about the 2020 election, before January 6, before he added a whole host of new outlandish statements and actions to his already prodigious record, and before his once-fresh political act began to grow stale.

There’s every reason to believe that the Trump who lost to Biden in 2020 was much stronger than the Trump of today.

The fact is that association with Trump proved politically toxic in the 2022 midterms, and nothing has changed that dynamic.

His own former press secretary who owes her political career to him didn’t dare mention him by name in her response to the State of the Union.

Dodging the bullet on another Trump nomination, assuming the party can do it, is just the start. It needs to project a seriousness of purpose and a commitment to competent governance. That doesn’t mean that it should be fainthearted and compromising — indeed, the opposite — but it needs to realize that its target audience is wider than the base and that the often-ridiculous, usually dishonest Joe Biden is not a pushover.

Losing to him once was a shame. Losing twice was a travesty. Losing a third time would be an unforgivable disgrace.