Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has struggled to overcome voters’ nostalgia for the material conditions that typified the first three years of Donald Trump’s administration. The campaign’s preferred solution to this conundrum is reportedly to remind voters of Trump’s fourth year in office — a period dominated by Covid-19 and the restrictions on social and economic life that it prompted. Biden’s team will encounter two obstacles if that is their approach: voters’ desire to avoid recalling the pandemic and the fact that the Democratic Party’s progressive base will not allow the president to advance the arguments he needs to make. After all, if most voters hated that time in American public life, Biden’s tormentors in the progressive movement did not.
“The renewed focus on the crisis’ earliest days represents a conscious choice,” Politico reported on Wednesday. The report notes the extent to which Biden’s advisers are conflicted over this strategy. They once recognized that memories from 2020 are simply “too painful” and the public-policy arguments over pandemic-mitigation strategies “too divisive” to yield political benefits. “But as former President Donald Trump seeks to portray his time in office as a long-lost Golden Age, the calculus inside the Biden camp has shifted,” the dispatch reads.
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