The “bloodbath” battle and the electric car war

If President Joe Biden’s advisors and allies are to be believed, his intention is to contest the 2024 election based primarily on threat that Donald Trump represents for American democracy.

In his view, this worked in 2020, when Biden promised to protect “the soul of the nation” from Trump’s depredations, and again in the 2022 midterm elections, when Biden made the threat to democracy his goal . final topic and the Democrats then outperformed. So there’s no reason why it can’t work once again.

As November approaches, longtime Biden adviser Mike Donilon recently told the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos:

“Attention will become overwhelming in democracy. “I think the most important images in people’s minds will be those of January 6th.”

I’m not sure how seriously we should take this type of conversation.

Biden’s thesis about democratic norms appears to have paid off in some key 2022 races, but I’m less convinced it made a difference in 2020, at least compared to Biden’s promise of a steady hand and his reputation for ideological moderation.

And in any case, 2024 is an even different context, one in which Biden appears to be at greater difficulty with disaffected working-class voters, an electorate that should respond with more force to material appeals than to altruistic arguments about civilization.

As far as the White House knows, we should probably take quotes like Donilon’s with a grain of salt.

Perhaps he was simply sent to manage Biden’s liberal base, preaching the gospel of anti-Trumpism to readers of a liberal publication while someone else gets to work on more traditional economic appeals to undecided voters.

Cases

But last week gave us a good example of what it would look like if the White House fully believed Donilon’s case and viewed his January 6 invocations as a powerful alternative to the usual methods approach and moderation.

First, the zeal with which the presidential campaign seized on Trump’s comments during a rally in Ohio on the “bloodbath”” which would presumably follow Biden’s re-election.

In context, the term “bloodbath” certainly referred to the expected collapse of the American auto industry if Biden wins another term, and likely predicted some form of general chaos or disaster.

But Biden (or his social media ghostwriter) immediately elevated the issue and interpreted it as evidence that Trump “wants another January 6th.”

Still

Then, just as the great “bloodbath” debate began to die down, Biden’s EPA announced sweeping new emissions rules aimed at accelerating the adoption of electric vehiclesincreasing sales from the current 8% of the US market to 56% in 2032.

These rules have been in the works for some time and, from the point of view of climate activists and internal Democratic Party politics, their substance represents a political compromise, in which the biggest change is postponed for a few years and both hybrids and fully electric cars count towards the goal.

However, from the perspective of reaching undecided voters in a presidential election year, the new rules seem like a rather unwise gamble.

Explicitly seeking the rapid disappearance of the types of automobiles used by the vast majority of Americans would be politically fraught under any circumstances.

It’s even more complicated in an election where states like Michigan hold the key to Electoral College victory.

And above all it is tense at a time when higher interest rates have made auto loans more expensive for the American consumer (who, in fact, is now being told by an unpopular sitting president:

“If you like your car, I don’t want you to keep it.”

In summary: First, Trump made an apocalyptic statement about the effects of Biden’s policies on the auto industry.

Biden’s team then eagerly exaggerated that claim as evidence of Trump’s incompetence.

Then the Biden administration rolled out a plan to radically transform the auto industry, which even if it worked as expected, as one editorial colleague reported, “would require enormous changes in manufacturing, infrastructure, technology, jobs, trade globally and in consumer habits.

In other words, Biden’s camp brought up the outburst of Trump against his auto policies and then set the political goal more mature possible for its next round of attacks.

Lack of coordination

This is probably just one example of how an administration’s policy arm and its policy department operate without particularly intelligent coordination.

But it’s a good case study of how a “January 6th is the biggest thing of all” in 2024 could go very wrong:

promoting a fatal disregard for the material concerns of working-class Americans on the theory that any Trumpian attempt to exploit such concerns can be preemptively defused by painting the former president as a fascist.

Biden’s path to victory involves arguing against Trump for reasons anti-authoritarian and material at the same time.

While imagining that the anti-authoritarian card is powerful enough to let you get away with unpopular liberal activism on other issues seems the most likely path to Biden’s defeat.

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