Vulnerable Democrats Distance Themselves From Biden, Party

President Joe Biden speaks at a rally for New York incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul and other state Democrats in Yonkers, New York, on Nov. 6, 2022. Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

In the final stretch of midterm season, some vulnerable Democrats are distancing themselves from President Joe Biden and other elements of their party.

Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) has become the latest Democrat to criticize Biden, portraying herself to voters as a senator who isn’t afraid to pressure Biden on certain choices.

“I’m pushing Joe Biden to release more of our oil reserves,” she said in a recent television advertisement.

For Republicans, this election cycle has been about one overriding message: Biden’s handling of executive power during his first term in office.

But because this term has been marked by record-breaking inflation, burgeoning federal interest rates, unprecedented crime in America’s major cities, and illegal immigration at the southern border, some Democrats are now—in the last leg of their campaigns—trying to send Biden and the party a message to stay away.

Biden, according to Rasmussen’s daily presidential tracking poll, is currently sitting at 42 percent approval, compared to former President Donald Trump’s 51 percent approval at the same point in his term.

Michael Johns, a co-founder of the tea party movement and former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush, told The Epoch Times that while Democrats have sought to back off from their president before, “2022 is different because Biden’s failures are so glaring, so clearly attached to his actions and inactions—and his very presence is a vivid reminder of that.”

Johns believes this election will in part be a referendum on Biden, who Johns thinks isn’t doing enough to address Americans’ concerns about the direction the nation is heading.

“Every American has a sickening sense that we are at a very dangerous and dark moment for this nation, and he comes across as being either oblivious to that reality or, worse, ok with it,” Johns wrote in an email, calling Biden an “empty suit.”

“That’s the image, and that’s the reality,” he said. “Aside from amassing personal power and riches for himself and his own family, what has the man accomplished in half a century in the swamp? He cannot answer that—so it’s understandable that a typical American can’t either.”

Democrats Lack Strategy, Says Congressman

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), the Democrats’ pick to replace outgoing Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), went so far as to denounce his party’s capacity to politically strategize.

“You know, the national Democratic Party has never been really good at strategic political decisions,” Ryan said on “CNN This Morning.”

He continued, “So you know, it is not a surprise here, and thank God that I have enough experience that I’ve built this campaign not needing them and we really don’t want them at this point. We’re gonna do this thing with all the grassroots people we have here.”

“If they don’t recognize that we got a real shot to win this thing and we’re going to shock the world, then that’s on them, not on me,” Ryan added.

Ryan is not favored to win his race against author and attorney J.D. Vance, the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee in a state that has increasingly trended red in recent years.

Ryan also suggested that his party hasn’t taken economic issues that are important to American families seriously enough.

During his comments to CNN, Ryan said: “People are tired of the hate, tired of the anger, tired of the fear, tired of the division, but you need leaders who can go into an environment like a Fox News town hall, as a Democrat, and say ‘Look, we’ve got to love each other. We need to care about each other. We need forgiveness, we need reconciliation.’ … It starts by leaders going into those environments and saying, ‘I understand you have concerns, let’s talk about them.'”

“We have so many two-time Trump voters who are not for the insurrectionists and aren’t for all the craziness and insanity. But they are voting for me because I am talking about the pocketbook issues that they care about,” he said.

Democrats Talk Tough on Biden

Hassan and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) have also struck rhetorical strikes against both Biden and their party.

Hassan, who in 2016 defeated Republican incumbent Kelly Ayotte by a mere 0.16 percent margin, is in another battle for her political career this year against Don Bolduc, a Trump-endorsed former military leader.

Though she has voted with her party on every single important issue that has come to the Senate for a floor vote, Hassan in a recent TV spot tried to project an image of being a moderate with center-of-the-road politics.

“I’m taking on members of my own party to push a gas tax holiday,” Hassan said in the ad. “And I’m pushing Joe Biden to release more of our oil reserves. That’s how we lower costs and get through these times.”

The ad emphasizes continued high gas prices, an issue for which Republicans have blamed Biden’s energy policies.

In North Carolina, Democrat Senate candidate Cheri Beasley emphasized inflation and criticized the current Congress for inaction on the issue.

Congress and the White House, Beasley said, “could work a whole lot harder” to address rising prices.

Kelly has also tried to project distance from Biden and the Democrats.

During one appearance discussing national security and illegal immigration, Kelly said: “When I got to Washington, D.C., one of the first things I realized was the Democrats don’t understand this issue. And Republicans just want to talk about it, complain about it but actually not do anything about it. They just want to politicize that.”

For instance, Kelly pointed to his opposition to the Biden administration’s plans earlier this year to lift Title 42, a Trump-era program that allowed for the speedy deportation of foreign nationals on public health grounds. Biden wanted to end the program but was prevented from doing so by federal courts.

“When the president decided he’s going to do something dumb on this and change the rules, that would create a bigger crisis, I told him he was wrong,” Kelly said.

However, Preston Huennekens of the Federation for Immigration Reform told The Epoch Times that Kelly’s and other Democrats’ opposition to lifting Title 42 at the time was largely politically-motivated.

“These Democratic officials only care about the lifting of Title 42 because they understand it will be a political disaster for Democrats,” Huennekens said in an email at the time. “None of these Senators cared about the administration’s destruction of immigration enforcement in this country. None of them protested the new ICE guidance that makes it nearly impossible to arrest and deport illegal aliens. None of them complained about the ending of the Remain in Mexico program, which successfully ended the 2019 border crisis. None of these Senators cared about the situation at our Southern border until it became politically expedient for them to do so.”

Grover Norquist, founder of the nonpartisan “Americans for Tax Reform” and one of the authors of the 1994 “Contract With America,” said that the shift should be taken seriously, as it suggests that Democrats are “admitting publicly that they cannot win a majority of the House and Senate campaigning as who they are.”

“Now, that is a phenomenal admission: ‘We do not deserve to govern a country running on the issues we’re running on. We would love to have gotten elected talking about other things than what the American people cared about. But we weren’t able to make that happen.’”

However, like Huennekens, Norquist said that the efforts to distance from Biden now are disingenuous.

“Every one of [these] people ... voted for Joe Biden’s policies,” Norquist said. “Senator Hassan voted for the inflationary spending. She voted for the taxes. What do you mean she distanced herself from Biden?”

The same goes for all the other Democrats who are either already known as moderates or who are marketing themselves as such, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Norquist said. Manchin will be up for reelection in 2024.

Mistakes

Norquist told The Epoch Times that one of Democrats’ biggest mistakes was running on abortion so strongly, which he said was an issue based on misdirection by the Democrats.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Democrats suggested that the decision would mean the end of abortion nationwide. While such an eventuality likely would have been distasteful to voters, the claim was false: in fact, all that the decision did was return the power to regulate abortion laws to the states.

Still, Democrats hoped to use the issue to prop up their chances against the GOP.

When voters realized that they had been misled on what the end of Roe v. Wade meant, Norquist said, the tide turned against the Democrats.

“I think for a while it was possible to convince people that abortion would be illegal everywhere in the country because that’s what they said,” Norquist said.

The draft decision of the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade leaked in June, months before the election.

“The Democrats made a mistake leaking this early,” Norquist said. “People realize state by state that the state legislators will decide, not the Supreme Court—which is not the same thing.”

They lied to people for months about what had just happened, he said.

“Democrats say, ‘Oh, we peaked too soon, too soon,’” Norquist added. “You told people something that wasn’t true. And once they figured that out, they said, ‘Well, I’m not with you on the anytime, nine months [late-term abortion].’”

Abortion wasn’t the only issue Democrats over-marketed, Norquist said. The same, he opined, was done with gun control and the Jan. 6 Capitol breach. But compared to issues like inflation, Norquist said, these Democrat pet issues just don’t appeal to voters.

He explained: “They ran on three things that either weren’t true or, to the extent they were true, didn’t matter a lot to many people, [things] that were going to lose an election.”

Republicans, by contrast, “ran on opposition to inflation, which affects everybody, including Democrats and independents. It is a known reality because everybody pays things every day, buys things every day. The cost of the Democrats’ war on energy and driving up its cost, and crime, which people see every day in the real world.”

Johns struck a similar tone in his comments to The Epoch Times, placing the blame for a series of crises and concerns squarely on Democrats’ doorstep.

“On January 20, 2021, none of these national crises existed,” Johns wrote in an email, naming the border crisis, fentanyl trafficking, flights of illegal immigrants to various states, the jump in inflation, issues with domestic energy, the Russia–Ukraine war, and the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“None of these things existed. Biden arrived—and now they do. And that’s the politics of his presence,” he said.

“His image is a very acute reminder that the current hardships we confront are not the product of bad luck or a president trying hard and falling short. Each of these has all the markings of a conscious design, which makes them even more enraging. And then he talks—and it only inflames the situation more because it becomes immediately obvious that he has no serious interest in doing anything to reverse the crises he alone created.”

In view of the situation on the ground, Johns said, “this is a watershed election.”

Johns said that the only way forward is “changes of leadership and accountability,” including a more active Republican Congress that “takes its Constitutionally-charged oversight duties seriously.”

“These Democrats are not ever going to do that—and that is why Americans in even deep blue districts in New England, New York state, and the Upper Pacific Northwest realize they must go and go now and Republicans must be given the gavel.”