Why Democrats Aren’t Really Worried About The 2024 Election

Recently, the Leftwing media, always hungry for headlines and clicks, has been awash in bold print screaming about how Democrats are panicking about the 2024 election.

The latest round of panicky headlines was set off by New York Times polls that show Joe Biden losing almost every swing state to Donald Trump, which prompted immediate comparisons to other one-term Democrat presidents.

NBC News reported, “Pick a metaphor: President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is a ‘five-alarm fire.’ It’s a cardiac case in need of a ‘defibrillator.’ Or a lemming on course to ‘slowly march into the sea and drown’.”

And David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama, argued Biden should weigh whether it is in his best interest or the country’s to run in 2024. He made waves Sunday with a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, suggesting that Biden drop out of the race, reported Brett Samuels and Alex Gangitano of The Hill.

Walter Shapiro of the New Republic spent a lengthy article explaining why Biden is not “Jimmy Carter 2.0,” claiming Carter’s woes “only have a cursory resemblance to the political winds buffeting Biden.”

While pundits and other click-seekers may be panicking, the Biden campaign is strangely serene. Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz said that the campaign isn’t worried about a poll a year out, citing the better-than-expected midterm results Democrats had in 2022 and the so-called MAGA Republicans on the other side of the aisle, reported Messrs. Samuels and Gangitano.

Perhaps the Biden campaign is so serene because it doesn’t matter who the GOP nominee is, they’ve looked at the opposition and seen the same three problems we see with the Republican Party.

The first problem is that, especially compared to the Democrats, the GOP is glaringly short of leadership.

The Democrats have a deep bench of ideologically committed leaders who have built effective organizations to motivate and turnout their voters. Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Valerie Jarret, the entire team at Arabella Advisors (most of whom you’ve never heard of), and a lengthy list of longtime consultants and strategists who are focused on minority outreach, digital strategies and election technology.

The last time Republicans had leaders of that caliber was 1992 when Newt Gingrich’s team took back the House with the Contract with America. Today, Republicans have no one who matches them in terms of ideological commitment, strategic vision, and grasp of election technology.

At the national level the GOP has outsourced the Party to rent-seeking consultants who run content-free campaigns designed to maximize their fees while staying away from anything remotely resembling the issues that motivate the Party’s populist conservative base and could attract low propensity center-right voters. (See the Youngkin operation’s hopelessly disconnected message on tutoring for an example.)

At the state and local level the GOP is hamstrung by aging chairs and precinct committee members who no longer lead, but stay on for the title, not the work, and inept amateurs more interested in fighting among themselves than leading their organizations to turn out the vote in the 21st century.

All too often those rare local leaders who do want to learn and work are starved of money by national and state organizations that have been captured by the consultants who have no interest in grassroots politics, because there’s no commission in organizing precincts, training volunteers and equipping them with election technology.

The second reason Democrats are not really worried about the 2024 election is that Republicans have no vertically integrated message.

Democrats, from Joe Biden down to the candidates they back for school board have a “tune you can whistle.” They have a vertically integrated message: Republicans are haters, MAGA extremists who want to overthrow elections, steal “our democracy,” ban books, takeaway a woman’s right to choose and oppress minorities – people of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ++.

No one ever stormed the Bastille demanding increased tutoring. So, what do Republicans stand for?

Well, ask any ten national Republican “leaders” and you will get eleven different answers as to what the Republican agenda is or should be: Cutting spending, not on Mitch McConnell’s watch. Closing the border, no way according to Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, and other GOP Senators. The right-to-life, not according to Joni Ernst, Dan Sullivan, Mitt Romney, and the other Republicans trashing Tommy Tuberville. How about keeping porn out of schools, or bills to protect children from pornography and sexual exploitation? Republicans can’t organize themselves to get the votes to pass such bills through both houses of Congress, even when there’s huge public support behind them.

Finally, Democrats aren’t worried about the 2024 election because they largely control the election machinery in the swing states any Republican needs to win the presidency.

This control gives them an advantage that goes beyond the potential for vote fraud, which is very real and which Democrats will use shamelessly to retain power and prevent Biden from losing.

And of course, there will machine problems to add chaos to the counting process, such as the “coding error” this year in Northampton County, Pennsylvania that caused votes to be flipped on a ballot question that asked whether a pair of incumbent state appeals judges should be retained and the machine “breakdown” in Arizona in 2022 that suppressed the vote in Republican precincts.

What’s more, Democrats will decide where precinct voting machines are located, and they will make sure there are lots of machines and short lines on college campuses, in minority neighborhoods and liberal precincts – and the opposite will be true in conservative suburbs and rural areas. Democrats will spend millions of taxpayer dollars reminding their low propensity voters to vote, they will place drop boxes in their key precincts and neighborhoods, mail millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots and then use taxpayer dollars to remind voters to return them – and it will all be perfectly legal.

So, when you see headlines saying Democrats are worried about Biden’s chances in 2024, don’t believe them. The only thing Democrats are worried about is that Republicans will finally wake up and address their leadership vacuum, content-free messaging and failure understand how the post-COVID election machinery works.

George Rasley is editor of Richard Viguerie's ConservativeHQ.com. A veteran of over 300 political campaigns, including every Republican presidential campaign from 1976 to 2004, he served as a staff member or advance representative for some of America’s most recognized conservative political figures, including Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin and Jack Kemp. A member of American MENSA, he served on the House and Senate staff and on the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle. Rasley is a graduate of Hanover College and studied international affairs at Oxford University's Worcester College.

• Arabella Advisors

• Barack Obama

• Eric Holder

• Democrat GOTV efforts

• 2024 election

• Joe Biden campaign

• campaign messaging

• illegal immigration

• crime

• abortion

• Election machinery