The New Year in Canada and the US begins with loud grumblings on both sides of the border about leadership at the top.
Multiple opinion polls indicate that US President Joe Biden and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are profoundly unpopular. The disapproval numbers for both far exceed their approval ratings.
Polls might only be useful for dogs, as John Diefenbaker (Canadian PM from 1957 to 1963) once quipped. But a lot of political professionals and analysts take them very seriously.
Whatever their actual value, one thing is true of polls in general: The closer to an election they are taken the more they are relevant.
That means Joe Biden’s bad polls are more of a problem for him and his Democratic Party than are Trudeau’s for the Prime Minister and his Liberals.
US citizens will vote this year, on the first Tuesday of November 2024, a mere 10 months away.
We in Canada are not due for an election, officially, until the fall of 2025, which would be 20 or 21 months from now.
Since we have a minority government there is always a chance the Liberals could lose a confidence vote in Parliament before then, triggering an election.
Don’t count on that.
The agreement between the Liberals and New Democrats seems to be holding up. NDPers have achieved a lot of their legislative objectives, among them a dental plan and a federal anti-scab law.
READ MORE: Anti-scab legislation introduced in win for unions and NDP
Jagmeet Singh’s party has little incentive to trigger an election that, based on current polls, could usher in a big majority for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.
A year from now, if the numbers still look bleak for them, the Liberals might start thinking about replacing Justin Trudeau. But when you talk to Liberal insiders these days you don’t get the impression most are too anxious to dump their current leader right now, whatever the polls say.
South of the border it’s a different story.
Trump has stopped pretending he’s not a full-blown Fascist
In the US it looks like the Republicans will nominate Donald Trump as their presidential candidate for a third time in a row, something that party has never done in its entire history.
Trump seems to have turned the Republican Party into a personality cult.
Misadventures of many kinds, including multiple credible accusations of criminality, and obvious, flagrant defects of character – which, in the past, would have doomed any other candidate – only seem to strengthen Trump’s hold on what US pundits refer to as the Republican base.
During his first two campaigns, Trump was often outrageous by normal political standards. He advocated a ban on all Muslims coming to the United States, urged supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies, said Mexicans who entered the US were mostly criminals, and mocked people with disabilities. And that’s just a short list.
But those outrages were child’s play compared to the current incarnation of Trump.
These days, Donald Trump echoes Adolf Hitler when he says those seeking refuge in the US are “poisoning our blood”. He says, as president, he will be “a dictator” (but only for one day). And he promises to use the power of his office, if elected, to persecute his notional enemies, including the current US President and former Chair of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.
For the latter, General Mark Milley, Trump proposes the death penalty.
Milley’s crime is to have used a back channel to assure his Chinese counterparts the US was not planning an attack on their country during the chaotic transition period from Trump’s to Biden’s administration.
Former president Trump also faces multiple criminal charges.
Most notable among those are federal indictments for his role in inciting the January 6, 2021, insurrection, when Trump supporters violently invaded the Capitol Building in Washington DC in an effort to prevent both houses of Congress from formally certifying Joe Biden’s election victory.
Trump, in the words of former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, “summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack.”
“There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,” Cheney added.
US special prosecutor Jack Smith has charged Trump with: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; and obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding.
The district attorney of Atlanta, Georgia, Fani Willis, has also brought charges against Trump for his leading part in a conspiracy to “unlawfully change the outcome of the election in Georgia in favor of Trump.”
Joe Biden won the state of Georgia by 11,779 votes. Trump and his supporters never accepted that result, but did not limit themselves to contesting it in court.
They tried a number of tactics of dubious legality, the most notorious of which was a phone call Trump made to Republican state official Brad Raffensperger. Trump point-blank asked Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 votes.
All of this chaos and controversy has only, it appears, made Trump more popular. His current poll numbers are better than any he has enjoyed since he first became a candidate in 2016.
True, a majority of voters say they are not enthusiastic about either Trump or Biden. But the negative feelings toward Biden appear to be deeper and stronger than those toward Trump.
Biden trailing in key states
It is important to remember that the crucial number for US presidential candidates is not their overall popular support. It is rather their support in each state.
Twice in the 21st century the winning candidate for US president actually lost the popular vote. That’s because presidential elections in the US are conducted on a state-by-state basis.
Each state has a number of what are called electors, equal to the combined number of the state’s members of the House of Representative and the Senate. Those electors are all members of an arcane body called the Electoral College. The way to win a presidential election is to get a majority of the 538 electors in the College.
In all but two small states – Nebraska and Maine – it is a winner-take-all system. The candidate who gets the largest number of votes, even if it is only one vote more than the second-place candidate, wins all of the electors.
The vast majority of the states are solidly in either the Republican or Democratic camp. That is true, for instance, of the six most populous states. California, New York and Illinois are overwhelmingly Democratic. Texas, Florida and Ohio are solidly, if not overwhelmingly, Republican.
Only a handful of states are considered swing states, winnable by either side, and presidential campaigns focus almost exclusively on those.
The swing states are not always the same. They change over time. Until recently, Democrats had a chance in Ohio and Florida, for instance. Barack Obama won both twice. Both states have since become more solidly Republican.
On the other hand, Arizona and Georgia were once considered to be bedrock Republican territory, but both went for Joe Biden last time, in 2020.
In addition to those two, the current group of swing states includes Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. That’s eight states out of 50, overall. The next presidential campaign will happen almost exclusively in that handful of states.
Biden won all but one of the swing states last time. But this time polls taken at the state level show him trailing Trump in most of them.
Especially distressing for the Democrats is Michigan, which Biden won by more than 150,000 votes in 2020. One poll released just a few days ago shows Biden now trailing Trump by eight percentage points in Michigan.
Worse, the poll says only 17 per cent of respondents say Biden deserves another term. The results are not exactly glorious for Trump. Only a third of the respondents say he deserves a second term. But that is close to twice the approval rating for Biden.
Biden’s record not resonating with voters
Democrats scratch their heads in puzzlement that voters are so disaffected they are willing to choose the multiply-indicted candidate of chaos over a president whose record, on paper, looks good.
The US economy is cruising along, with low unemployment, inflation coming down, and investment in the green and high-tech jobs of the future going up.
Biden’s legislative achievements include a major infrastructure bill and the oddly named Inflation Reduction Act, the centrepiece of which is massive investment in environmentally responsible energy.
And you can add to those positive economic indicators the record number of Americans signing up for the federally-regulated health insurance benefits Barack Obama put in place with the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare. Trump promises to scrap Obamacare if elected. (He tried, but failed, to do so while he was president).
Talk to average Americans, however, and many do not seem to feel the positive results Biden and the Democrats have achieved.
As one voter in Iowa told the New York Times: “Everything is extremely expensive. Everything you do in life. It has people holding on to their money. There is so much uncertainty, because so many people are afraid of what’s next, what rules are going to pop up.”
Oddly, Trump is benefiting from this nagging sense of economic malaise (not justified by the facts) – even though he rarely mentions the economy.
There is something in the free-enterprise-drenched US psyche that impels Americans to believe billionaires have near-miraculous economic wisdom, and that they know better than the rest of us how to make the economy hum.
Still, when Trump talks about anything other than himself and his desire for vengeance against all who wronged them, he gives short shrift to the economy.
Instead, the former president focuses almost exclusively on two issues: the US’s southern border, where the number of asylum-seeking migrants has reached its highest number ever, and crime.
The border is a legitimate headache for Biden, although the surge in desperate would-be refugees has little tangible impact on the lives of voters in Iowa or elsewhere in middle America.
The issue of the crime rate, however, is something of a canard. Overall, the rate of violent crime in the US, for 2023, was down by nearly nine per cent, and the murder rate down by 15 per cent, vis-à-vis the previous year.
Those facts do not stop Trump from yoking crime and so-called “illegal” migrants together. Apart from his enemies, crime and migrants are Trump’s favourite rhetorical punching bags.
It is classic scapegoat politics, of the sort people should, by now, be inured to. But targeting scapegoats seems to be working for Trump – at least for now.
If all of that were not bad enough for Biden and the Democrats, there is the impossible-to-change issue of Biden’s advanced age.
The current US president was born during World War II, in 1942, the year the classic film Casablanca hit the big screens.
Biden is 81. According to the most up-to-date data from the US Centres of Disease Control and Prevention the life expectancy for the average US male is almost 8 years less than Biden’s age.
Worse than the age number for Biden is that he seems old. He was never an articulate speaker, but his speech is now increasingly muddled and almost incomprehensible.
To launch his 2024 campaign Biden gave what most say was a great speech – for him. Biden ably listed all that is terrifying about his putative Republican opponent, and he did so with few of his usual stumbles.
Biden did his best on that day. But nobody would mistake him for such skilled rhetoricians as Winston Churchill or John F. Kennedy, or the president for whom Biden served as vice-president, Barack Obama.
And that well-received speech has not seemed to move the dial at all in terms of public approval for Biden, not so far, at any rate.
It is true that Trump is no kid either, at 77. But he looks and acts a lot livelier than the current president.
What Trump has to say might be in large measure hateful nonsense, but he says it comfortably and confidently, without Biden’s awkward pauses and garbled phrases.
Could there be another candidate?
All of this makes for a pretty discouraging picture, and we in Canada have to worry about it almost as much as the Americans. When a re-elected Trump decides to take revenge on his many enemies, we can expect Canada’s Trudeau to be on that list.
In the US a growing chorus of commentators and even some Democratic Party insiders are saying it is time to contemplate changing horses before the November election.
But if it were possible to get Biden to step aside, there are not, as of now, a whole lot of great options for the Democrats.
Vermont socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is older than Biden and the up-and-coming, and high-profile progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) is too young, below the constitutionally-prescribed minimum age for the presidency.
Another member of the House, Ro Khanna, like AOC a member of the progressive Congressional caucus, has attracted a lot of attention for his effectiveness as a legislator, and he is the right age. The left-of-centre magazine The Nation has touted Khanna as a candidate to watch for the future. But as of now he is virtually unknown.
Then there is Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris. For reasons that are a mystery to many, Harris has failed to impress. Indeed, her rhetoric often seems as confused and muddled as Biden’s. And her polling numbers are no better than her boss’s.
The names most frequently mentioned as alternatives to Biden are two governors, California’s Gavin Newsom and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer.
Gavin is a slick, handsome politician – probably too slick for many US voters. Whitmer, on the other hand, seems like a just-folks kind of person.
In the Michigan governor’s first campaign for governor in 2018 she did folksy ads, featuring herself standing by a rutted highway promising to “fix the damn roads!” In 2022 Whitmer won re-election with a bigger margin than the first time, 11 per cent.
Whitmer might be just the sort of candidate to appeal to disaffected voters in the U.S. heartland who feel economically insecure. She is a youthful 52, and would provide a refreshing contrast to paunchy Donald Trump.
Gretchen Whitmer is the dream candidate for Democratic supporters who despair of Biden’s chances, and, rightly, fear the kind of disaster a Trump Mark II would wreak on the US, its neighbours, and the whole world.
Getting from here to there, however, is no easy feat.
And so, some have taken to hypothesizing about changing vice-presidential candidates (former First Lady Michelle Obama is a popular choice), or, failing that, proposing Biden re-tool his campaign.
Robert Kuttner is an economist, author and journalist, and editor of the venerable progressive publication The American Prospect. He says, first of all, that Biden “needs to stop touting his economic successes and make the campaign about Trump.”
Biden made a good start with his campaign-opening speech, says Kuttner.
But then Kuttner turns toward the world stage, where, he says, Israel’s Netanyahu is “making a fool of Biden”, and the Ukraine war, dragging on endlessly, is wearing Americans’ patience thin.
“The U.S.,” says Robert Kuttner, “needs to use its leverage to set explicit humanitarian conditions and move Israel to an early cease-fire and peace plan. Even the most pro-Israel Jewish voters (and donors) are fed up. There is also a deal to be had to end the Ukraine War. The deal is some land in exchange for a cease-fire and NATO guarantees of Ukrainian sovereignty.”
Kuttner adds:
“Biden will always be an aging leader who is at risk when he is off-script. But at least he can be a better version of himself.”
The overarching message, from Kuttner and many others, is:
The time to feel sick with worry about the prospects for the US is now.
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