Salem Political Snark

I'm freaking out about Biden's weakness against Trump

With a year to go until the 2024 presidential election, is it too soon for Democrats to freak out about the horrific New York Times/Siena College poll released yesterday?

President Biden is trailing Donald J. Trump in five of the six most important battleground states one year before the 2024 election, suffering from enormous doubts about his age and deep dissatisfaction over his handling of the economy and a host of other issues, new polls by The New York Times and Siena College have found.

The results show Mr. Biden losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of four to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found.

Hell, no. This is a perfect time for me to freak out, and judging by posts on my X feed (I really miss Twitter), so are many other political observers who I respect.

In a Politico story, Obama strategist David Axelrod raised questions about whether Biden should run for a second term. 

David Axelrod, a prominent Democratic political strategist and former White House official, said on Sunday that President Joe Biden needed to think carefully about whether he should continue to seek reelection.

“Only @JoeBiden can make this decision,” Axelrod wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “If he continues to run, he will be the nominee of the Democratic Party. What he needs to decide is whether that is wise; whether it’s in HIS best interest or the country’s?”

Axelrod — who is best known as the driving force behind former President Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 runs for president and served as a senior adviser in his administration — was responding to new polling from The New York Times and Siena that showed Biden struggling in key battleground states against former President Donald Trump. Axelrod posited those numbers as a reality check.

“It’s very late to change horses,” Axelrod wrote, “a lot will happen in the next year that no one can predict & Biden’s team says his resolve to run is firm.”

“He’s defied CW before,” Axelrod continued, most likely referring to the conventional wisdom — “but this will send tremors of doubt thru the party — not ‘bed-wetting’ but legitimate concern.”

Even though I often find Bill Maher to be irritating, when he referred to "Ruth Bader Biden" on his Real Time show last Friday I thought right on!

Ruth Bader Ginsberg was so attached to being on the Supreme Court, she passed on the chance to resign and have Obama appoint her successor. Reportedly Ginsberg was convinced that Hillary Clinton would become president in the 2016 election, and she liked the idea of having the first woman president choose her replacement.

Problem was, Trump won, and Ginsberg died in September 2020 from a longstanding bout with cancer during Trump's last year in office. So Ginsberg made the fatal mistake of hanging on too long, elevating her personal desire over the good of the country, and Trump got to choose her successor.

I see Biden doing the same thing. During his campaign against Trump I recall Biden talking about how his goal was to serve one term, then pass the presidential torch to someone younger. But now Biden is all in on running for a second term, at the end of which he would be 86. 

That's way too old. And I speak as someone who is 75 and has friends in their 80s who are as mentally sharp as when they were much younger. But they're not president of the United States!

I like Biden. I think he's done a good job as president. I'm hugely grateful that he saved us from four more years of a Trump presidency. But along with most Americans, I'm utterly unenthused about having to choose between Biden vs. Trump again. 

Been there, done that.

Gretchen Whitmer

Time for a new face of the Democratic party. A younger face. A female face. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer could be that face if Biden would simply realize that for the good of the country, he can't be the Democratic candidate in 2024, because there's too great a chance that Trump will beat him. And that would be a total disaster for the United States and the world.

Salem payroll tax like blood in water to conservative sharks

As a progressive who was happy when liberals wrested control of the Salem City Council from conservatives in 2017, now I'm worried that the payroll tax debacle could be a harbinger of a right-wing renaissance in local politics.

What's disturbing is that this is a self-inflicted wound by five of the six progressive members of the City Council who provided the votes to pass a new payroll tax on everyone who works in Salem on a narrow 5-4 vote. Now that wound is like blood in the water to energized conservative "sharks."

(The five were Mayor Chris Hoy and councilors Virginia Stapleton, Trevor Phillips, Linda Nishioka, and Micki Varney; Vanessa Nordyke favored having citizens vote on the tax.)

Public testimony was strongly in favor of referring the tax to voters. This would have been the wisest course of action, since it was clear that people were upset as much about the City Council not wanting to have the public vote on the tax, as they were about the tax itself.

Unsurprisingly, Oregon Business & Industry led a petition drive to put the payroll tax on the November ballot. The effort collected about 13,000 signatures, many more than the 4,000 needed. 

This is a sign that the tax is going to be defeated. Another sign is that unscientific surveys by the Salem Reporter and Statesman Journal indicated that most respondents oppose the tax. Now there's a third sign.

The headline of an October 17 Salem Reporter story tells the tale: "Business groups spend big to defeat Salem payroll tax."

The November election which will decide whether Salem workers put part of their paychecks toward city services is fast approaching, with opponents raising nearly $170,000 to kill the tax according to campaign finance records.

In contrast, supporters have raised less than $6,000.

With local, regional and nationwide heavyweight backers, Oregon Business & Industry’s Defeat the Tax on Salem Workers campaign committee has raised $168,816 of in-kind and cash contributions as of Tuesday, Oct. 17.

Among their contributors is $10,000 in August from the Americans for Prosperity, an advocacy group funded by two of the nation’s most influential people in politics, brothers Charles and David Koch. The group promotes cutting taxes and reducing regulation of businesses, and is best known for its role in the Tea Party movement during the Obama administration.

...The Salem Area Chamber of Commerce donated $20,135 to the effort to refer the tax to the ballot, and another $10,000 on Friday, Oct. 13.

...Oregon Business & Industry, the statewide business group running the campaign, and its PAC have spent a combined $85,766 on the referendum and subsequent campaign.

Other contributors to the no campaign include the political action committee affiliated with the Home Builders Association of Marion and Polk Counties, called Mid-Valley Affordable Housing Coalition, which contributed $5,000. The conservative group Marion + Polk First has contributed nearly $9,000.

Now, the conservative candidates for Mayor and City Council almost always outspend their progressive opponents. But the payroll tax shows a huge gulf between the liberals working to pass the tax and the conservatives working to defeat it.

If Salem voters end up agreeing with opponents of the tax, this will be wind in the sails of the conservative groups hoping to take back control of the City Council.

Every two years, half of the eight city councilors are elected. The mayor, who is a member of the City Council, is elected every two years.

So in 2024 progressives will be defending four of the nine City Council seats -- the seats held by Mayor Hoy and councilors Virginia Stapleton, Trevor Phillips, and Vanessa Nordyke. Conservative councilor Jose Gonzalez also is up for reelection. Phillips has said he won't be running again. That makes his seat an enticing pickup for a conservative.

It's entirely possible, though unlikely in my current view, that conservatives could have a net gain of two City Council seats in 2024, which would result in progressives on the short end of a conservative 5-4 majority.

A lot will depend on the outcome of the payroll tax vote.

If it passes, or is defeated narrowly, the damage to the local progressive cause will be less than if it goes down by a large margin. In that case, conservative candidates will have a valid argument: tax and spend liberals on the City Council have lost touch with citizens, so vote for us and we'll make things right (in both senses of that word).

I love the idea of a Whitmer-Warnock Dem presidential ticket

Few Americans are excited about a repeat of Joe Biden versus Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. I'm sure not. 

Sure, as a Democrat I hugely prefer Biden over Trump. I think Biden has done a very good job as president, better than expected, absolutely.

But Biden doesn't excite me. He doesn't even enthuse me. His appeal for me and many others is more that he's a competent decent person who isn't Trump.

That worked to elect Biden in 2020. I'm deeply worried that the same game plan won't work in 2024.

And the stakes are too high to risk Biden going down in flames, giving Trump another four years in office when every indication is that Trump would be much more successful at turning the presidency into his authoritarian throne of power, smashing democracy and the rule of law into smithereens. 

That's why I found an article in The Bulwark so compelling. A.B. Stoddard has a terrific idea in To Beat Trump, Democrats Need a Whitmer-Warnock Ticket. 

As soon as I thought about Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock  being the Democrat president and vice-president candidates respectively, I felt an Obama-era surge of enthusiasm well up within me.

Here's an excerpt from the article.

DEMOCRATS HAVE A DEEPER BENCH than many people appreciate. In particular, there are two leaders from swing states who can provide generational change, a fresh start, and a far more serious threat to Trump than Biden can: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock.

Whitmer, 52, is one of the most experienced, exciting, and winning Democrats in the country. She is as tough a candidate, and leader, as the Democrats can find, and she was vetted as a potential VP pick in 2020. Warnock, who has won pluralities or majorities in five elections in three years, is the cerebral 54-year-old senior pastor at Martin Luther King Jr.’s church. He grew up in public housing, went through a messy divorce—no longer disqualifying in the age of Trump—has small children, and was the top small donor fundraiser from either party in 2022. The dramatic stakes of his election gave him national name recognition: Less than 10 percent of Warnock’s individual donations came from within his state.

Young. Dynamic. Diverse. Competent and experienced. Broadly appealing. Can mobilize core voters. Would deliver two battleground states. Those are seven big boxes already checked. 

There are other benefits: Such a ticket would take away the core self-justification of the No Labels project, would seriously dent West’s vanity run, and would circumvent the ever-expanding Hunter Biden issue.