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      If the Democrats don’t shape up, Biden’s presidency will lead to a Trumpian sequel | Astra Taylor

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      If the Democrats don’t shape up, Biden’s presidency will lead to a Trumpian sequelAstra TaylorThe president has failed to capitalise on progressive sentiment: his party needs to stand up for the working class How should one feel about the first year of the Biden presidency?I can’t really say I’m disappointed, since I didn’t have high hopes going into it. But I do feel dread. This last year has felt a bit like being trapped in a nail-biting intermission between two horror films. The opening instalment consisted of Donald Trump’s first four years in office – it ended with the cliffhanger of a deadly plague and a surreal, poorly executed, but still terrifying ransacking of the Capitol. The sequel practically writes itself, as the man ascends to power a second time, even more emboldened and determined to hold on to power.Winter of peril and impossibility: Biden faces hard truth at anniversary press conferenceRead moreOf course, the script is not yet set in stone. If regular people in the US get organised, we can help push the political class toward a different ending. But to do this effectively, we need to tell a story that begins earlier. To continue with the bad movie metaphors, the prequels are what got us into this mess.For decades, senior Democrats tacked rightward, helping to create the social conditions that Trump and his cronies took advantage of to propel themselves to the White House. Instead of rolling back Reaganism and standing up to a swiftly radicalising conservative base, the party elite helped implement and further entrench an undemocratic, corporate agenda. Democratic functionaries slashed welfare, invested in the military and policing, deregulated the financial sector, increased fossil fuel production and lobbied for disastrous international trade deals.The people who did this are Biden’s natural milieu – and they want Americans to believe their problems began in 2016. Establishment Democrats are desperate to paint Donald Trump and the Covid-19 pandemic as aberrations to an otherwise agreeable status quo. Thus a speedy “return to normal” is all it will take to cure what ails us.The problem, however, is that “normal” was a crisis.The political scientist Corey Robin recently pointed out a core paradox of the Biden administration. On the one hand, Biden has some important accomplishments under his belt: two enormous spending bills and crucial federal appointments, including dozens of judges. But, as Robin notes, they are tainted by an awareness of their fundamental inadequacy. These perilous times require more than generous spending bills and staffing tweaks – Americans need to restructure the economy, stabilise the environment and democratise the political system, before it’s too late.Though never the progressive candidate, Biden briefly appeared to be willing to break with tradition and embrace a bolder approach. “When President Biden took office, he promised to make ending poverty a theory of change,” Shailly Barnes, policy director at the anti-poverty group, Poor People’s Campaign, told me. “While we saw glimmers of what that might have been, we have yet to see this implemented in practice. The 140 million people who are poor or one emergency away from economic ruin … need more than short-term or temporary assistance programmes.”Consider one area I know well: the fight for student debt cancellation. Short-term assistance is all these borrowers have received, despite Biden’s promise of mass relief. Student debt cancellation is an interesting litmus test for the administration. While other proposals he campaigned on – such as raising the minimum wage and securing voting rights – require legislation to pass, the president has the power to cancel all federal student loans with a single signature. But instead of picking up the pen, the president has balked and backtracked, misleadingly focusing on the few Ivy League graduates who would benefit from write-offs. At the end of last year, his administration publicly declared that turning student loan payments back on was a high priority for the administration. Why? A concern about optics: his advisers worry that further relief programmes would undercut messaging about the economy’s good health. Given this intransigence, activists like myself have had to fight the White House tooth and nail just to get it to extend the student loan payment pause to 1 May.Here, the folly of Biden’s first year is on full display. Student debt cancellation would be a win for the American people and the administration. The more loans are cancelled, the more the economy is boosted and the more the racial wealth gap narrows. It is also incredibly popular with young voters, Black voters, and even Republicans. Given that it is a midterm year, delivering on this promise should be a no-brainer. Reform of the criminal punishment system is another area where progress has stalled, despite Biden having come to power after a wave of historic racial justice protests. Members of the dominant, corporate wing of the Democratic party like to marginalise progressives and activists while presenting themselves as savvy and responsible realists. This strategy is both insulting and absurd: there’s nothing naive or irresponsible about wanting a decent and equitable society where people aren’t buried in unpayable debt and don’t have to live in fear of the police.But the strategy is also self-defeating. “They think they are pissing on the left, but what they are really doing is failing to fight visibly [and] vocally for millions of everyday working people,” rural Pennsylvania organiser and author Jonathan Smucker told me. “There is no world in which that is good politics.”The Biden administration has instead been engaged in a dispiriting saga of insider negotiations – negotiations that make an already restive public feel even more frustrated and abandoned.Where the build back better bill is concerned, the president should have instructed his allies in Congress to load it up with extra investment that would mollify opposition and make it harder for his party’s obstructionists, like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, to hold it hostage. As the organiser Will Lawrence, a co-founder of the youth-led environmental justice-focused Sunrise Movement, put it on Twitter: include a “buyout of coal industry shareholders, and a generous lifetime pension for every miner in West Virginia. Blanket the airwaves promoting it for two weeks in West Virginia. Then put it to a vote and dare Manchin to vote against it.”If you are going to lose because a coal-baron senator is determined to derail your entire agenda and doom millions to deepening poverty and climate chaos, you may as well go down with a real fight. This fight should clarify for the public where the real problem is – not in culture war distractions, but the corruption of our political system by corporate interests – and it would make clear that the Democrats were firmly on their side.President Biden’s first year has ultimately demoralised people, while also providing an opportunity for Republicans to appear poised to seize power. Last spring, a strategic memo by Representative Jim Banks, leader of the largest bloc of House conservatives, was leaked: “URGENT: Cementing GOP as Working-Class party.” It laid out one plot for the second feature of the horror film I keep imagining. Of course, reactionaries will never actually defend working people. But they’re busy crafting a deceptive and destructive script. And if the current administration doesn’t act, we’ll all be watching it soon.
      Astra Taylor is a writer, organiser and documentary maker
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      After Democrats’ historic defeat on voting rights, what happens next?

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      After Democrats’ historic defeat on voting rights, what happens next?In an extremely bruising loss for Biden, Republicans used the filibuster to block the sweeping bill from passing Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterFor a little over a year, America has faced a democratic crisis unlike any it has seen in recent history.As Republicans have spread lies about the 2020 presidential election, confidence in it remains staggeringly low and about 1 in 3 Americans now believe Joe Biden was not legitimately elected. Republicans who claim the election was stolen are trying to grab key election administration roles, prompting unprecedented alarm that a future election could be overturned.And after an election with record participation, Republicans have pushed a wave of new laws making it harder to vote, placing new restrictions on longstanding policies that went unquestioned for years. “We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the civil war,” Biden said in July.On Wednesday night, Democrats’ biggest hope of blunting that threat failed in a historic defeat as Republicans used the filibuster – a technical senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation – to block a sweeping voting rights bill from passing.For months Democrats had offered the legislation as an antidote to the anti-democratic sickness that is plaguing America. The bill would have been the most dramatic expansion of the right to vote in a generation. It would have outlawed partisan gerrymandering, protected election officials from partisan interference, required early voting and same-day registration, and restore the pre-clearance provision at the heart of the Voting Rights Act.Politically, the loss was extremely bruising for Biden, who has spent an enormous amount of his political capital in recent weeks only to end up on the losing side. And – even worse – though the measure was blocked by 50 Republicans who refused to even negotiate around it, the moment was one of clear weakness for Democrats. The party has control of both chambers in Congress yet appeared helpless as two of its conservative senators joined with Republicans to preserve the filibuster and doom the legislation.But the deeper stakes of the failure go far beyond politics.It was a moment in which an American government system, crippled by deep partisanship and an arcane rule, turned its back on a rising threat of a dangerous anti-democratic tide. It’s a moment that future historians will be mystified by, a group of scholars warned in November.“To lose our democracy but preserve the filibuster in its current form – in which a minority can block popular legislation without even having to hold the floor – would be a short-sighted blunder that future historians will forever puzzle over,” they wrote.What happens next isn’t exactly clear.Biden suggested the 2022 elections could be illegitimate absent congressional action, a claim the White House quickly walked back on Thursday. “He was explaining that the results would be illegitimate if states do what the former president asked them to do after the 2020 election: toss out ballots and overturn results after the fact,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, tweeted.Cliff Albright, a co-founder of the group Black Voters Matter, said the vote Wednesday was “disappointing”, but said that his group would continue to push for significant voting reforms. He noted how successful pressure from his group and others had been in getting Biden and other Democrats to support changing the filibuster and pointed out that historic past campaigns to pass the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act required continued pushing after setbacks.“Those debates and those votes were important, to put them on record. So that’s a victory for movement,” he said. “I don’t think this moment will be forgotten.”Tiffany Muller, the president and executive director of Let America Vote/End Citizens United, similarly pledged her group would “regroup” and “keep going” to push voting reforms.“We’re going to take that fight to the states. And we’re going to continue to elect champions down the ballot who will prioritize our democracy, and we’re gonna make sure that we’ll hold Republicans accountable at the ballot box in 2022,” she said. “There is no doubt about it that last night’s vote makes the best option on the federal level not available to us anymore. But we’re still gonna look at ‘are there ways to get other pieces of legislation passed on the federal level?’”Politically, Democrats have pledged to fight on.Previewing what could be a midterm message to frustrated voters on Thursday, Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said the failure in the Senate was evidence for why there needed to be more Democrats in the US Senate.“We can send more Democrats to the US Senate and give President Biden and Vice-president Harris the votes they need to pass voting rights legislation. We can show those who stand in the way of voting rights that their actions have consequences,” he said in a statement.Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who laid out a plan for a talking filibuster, said in a statement he would continue to push to reform the rule.“We fell short. But this is not the end of the story,” he said. “When I came to the Senate, 48 senators voting to change the filibuster seemed like a distant dream, something that would never happen. We’re not there yet, but we’re closer than we’ve ever been.”With broad voting reform stalled, there appears to be some bipartisan appetite in congress for changing the Electoral Count Act, a confusing 19th century law that sets out the procedures for counting electoral votes. Trump’s legal team planned to use ambiguities in the law to try and overturn the election, and election scholars for years have said that it needs to be fixed. “There’s a good win there,” Manchin said after the vote on Wednesday. “I mean, my goodness, that’s what caused the insurrection.”But Democrats have rejected fixing the law alone as an acceptable solution, saying it’s unacceptable to fix the way votes are counted if the rules of voting are rigged. It would be a bit like deciding to fix an unreliable scoreboard in a game of basketball where the rules are rigged against one team. Muller also said she was skeptical of how sincere Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, was in his wish to change the law.“We are supportive of reforming the act. But that’s not going to be nearly enough to protect voters in all of these states. It does nothing to fight back against these voter suppression laws,” she said.Meanwhile, congressional inaction is also likely to encourage those seeking to undermine democracy to be even more aggressive, Sherrilyn Ifill, the director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told Congress on Thursday.“In 2021, we saw a repeat of history – a steady drip of old poison in new bottles. Whereas in a bygone era, discriminatory intent in voting restrictions was dressed up in ideals such as securing a more informed and invested electorate, the new justification is fighting imaginary voter fraud, a phantom conjured only to attack,” she said, according to prepared remarks.“With no pushback from Congress, those intent on subverting the next election by continuing to raise doubts about 2020 are becoming more brazen, not less,” she added.Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia who studies the Reconstruction era in US history, said it was difficult to predict how future historians would remember this moment. He said there were parallel moments in history when congressional efforts to protect voting rights were thwarted by the filibuster, such as in 1890 when federal voting protections backed by Henry Cabot Lodge were defeated after a filibuster in the senate.“​​Historically, the filibuster has been used for one reason: that is to prevent legislation supporting the rights of Black people,” he said. “Let’s not try to glorify the filibuster as having any reasonable reason for existence other than allowing a minority to rule over a majority.”TopicsUS politicsThe fight to voteDemocratsRepublicansBiden administrationanalysisReuse this content More

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      Senate Democrats fail to pass voting rights bill: Politics Weekly Extra

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      As Joe Biden marks his first year in the White House, Democrats will be reeling from their loss to Republicans in the Senate, after Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema chose to let an important voting rights bill fail over a technicality. The Freedom to Vote: John R Lewis Act would have helped bolster voting rights for many minorities who have felt disenfranchised by recent legislation.Jonathan Freedland speaks to Errin Haines of The 19th about how black voters – who were instrumental in getting Biden elected in 2020 – think the president has done in his first year.

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      Winter of peril and impossibility: Biden faces hard truth at anniversary press conference

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      Winter of peril and impossibility: Biden faces hard truth at anniversary press conference President touts accomplishments but acknowledges failure to foresee Trump’s grip on Republican partyJoe Biden spent decades in Washington, striving to reach the White House. When he achieved the goal a year ago on Thursday, at the age of 78, he spoke of a “winter of peril and possibility”, of cascading crises as an opportunity to think big and aim high.It turns out the Washington he knows so well has proved more foe than friend, offering more peril than possibility. The 46th US president discovered that not being Donald Trump isn’t enough to get things done or make people love him.Biden held only his second solo White House press conference on Wednesday – a testy and at times rambling near two hours – with his social and environmental spending agenda and push for voting rights laws foundering on Republican rocks.02:04Biden arrived with sepia-tinted nostalgia for the Senate of his youth, promising that he could still work across the aisle for the greater good. The Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, a grandmaster of obstruction, had other ideas.“One thing I haven’t been able to do so far is get my Republican friends to get in the game at making things better in this country,” Biden told reporters in the East Room, flags and shiny gold curtains behind him. (Note that he still refers to them as “friends”.)Joe Biden says his administration has ‘outperformed’ in bruising first yearRead moreBiden went on: “I did not anticipate that there’d be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn’t get anything done.”The president insisted: “I actually like Mitch McConnell. We like one another. But he has one straightforward objective: make sure that there’s nothing I do that makes me look good, in his mind, with the public at large. And that’s OK. I’m a big boy. I’ve been here before… I think that the fundamental question is, ‘What’s Mitch for?’”The man who in his inaugural address declared, “We must end this uncivil war that pits red versus blue,” suggested that his biggest mistake had been underestimating the radicalisation of a party still tethered to Trump.“Did you ever think that one man out of office could intimidate an entire party where they’re unwilling to take any vote contrary to what he thinks should be taken for fear of being defeated in primary?” the president asked.Biden told the story of five Republican senators who privately told him they agreed with him but admitted: “Joe, if I do it, I’ll get defeated in a primary.” He turned the tables on reporters, asking if they thought we’d ever get to a point where not a single Republican would diverge on a major issue.Biden will be praised for speaking plainly about one of America’s two major parties having gone off the rails. He was asked if he should have expected this after eight years as Barack Obama’s vice-president, in which he witnessed the Republican party organising around the principle of “no”. “They weren’t nearly as obstructionist as they are now,” he insisted.This attempt to reframe the narrative by shining a light on Republicans instead of self-inflicted wounds was somewhat undercut because, at that very moment, a member of his own party was holding court in the Senate.Joe Manchin of West Virginia was busy explaining his opposition to reform of the filibuster, a procedural rule that is standing in the way of the voting rights bills in an evenly divided Senate. As a symbol of presidential impotence, the split screen was hard to beat.Manchin and his fellow holdout Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, seem determined to upstage the Biden presidency at every turn. Biden promised to unite the nation but has not even united his own party.Biden has restored civility to the White House – even at its weirdest moments or even when he snapped at reporters, this event had nothing on insult-hurling Trump – but has conducted the fewest press conferences in his first year as president since Ronald Reagan.Wearing a dark blue suit with handkerchief in top left pocket, white shirt and yellow and blue striped tie, Biden naturally began with some chest-thumping about his record. “I didn’t over-promise but I have, probably, outperformed what anybody thought would happen,” he claimed.He fired off a barrage of statistics – more than 20m Americans vaccinated, more than 6m jobs created – that show him in a favourable light.“It will get better,” he insisted from a lectern on a rug spread out on the shiny wood floor. “We’re moving toward a time when Covid-19 won’t disrupt our daily lives, where Covid-19 won’t be a crisis but something to protect against and a threat. Look, we’re not there yet, but we will get there.”It was hardly “Morning in America” but it would have to do.The president took question after question in a press conference that ran longer than any given by Obama or Trump. Biden admitted that more coronavirus testing should have been done earlier. He insisted that his Build Back Better agenda was the best antidote to inflation but conceded it would have to be broken into “chunks” to get through Congress.He caused a diplomatic kerfuffle by seeming to imply that a Russian “minor incursion” into Ukraine would not be such a big deal, forcing the White House to clean up and clarify. Towards the end, he appeared to meander, drifting into talk about the cable news industry “heading south”.One question, harking back to that inaugural address on a chilly day at the US Capitol, asked if the nation was less divided now than it was a year ago. “Based on some of the stuff we’ve got done, I’d say yes,” Biden said, “but it’s not nearly as unified as it should be.”As for the year-two relaunch that many feel is now required, Biden promised to get out and talk to the public more often, bring in more academics, editorial writers and thinktanks for expert advice, and get “deeply involved” in the midterm elections.He did not say he would expending his energies on wooing McConnell or other Republicans. “My buddy John McCain’s gone,” Biden admitted. Washington is a difference place now. The year of living naively is over.TopicsJoe BidenThe US politics sketchUS politicsBiden administrationRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Schumer insists Senate will vote on voting rights bill ‘win, lose or draw’ – live

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      Key events

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      White House launches ‘beta’ version of website to order Covid tests

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      Senate will vote on voting rights ‘win, lose or draw,’ Schumer says

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      Schumer files cloture on Democrats’ voting rights bill

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      Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer argued Democrats have an obligation to do everything possible to pass voting rights legislation, despite the high likelihood of failure because of Republican filibustering.
      “If Republicans choose to continue their filibuster of voting rights legislation, we must consider and vote on the rule changes that are appropriate and necessary to restore the Senate and make voting rights legislation possible,” Schumer said in his floor speech.

      CSPAN
      (@cspan)
      .@SenSchumer: “If Republicans choose…their filibuster of voting rights legislation we must consider and vote on the rule changes that are appropriate and necessary to restore the Senate and make voting rights legislation possible.” pic.twitter.com/gbmNQZKMS9

      January 18, 2022

      But as of now, Schumer does not have the votes necessary to change the filibuster, as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema remain opposed to doing so.
      Because of the 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, Schumer needs the support of every member of his caucus to reform the filibuster.

      4.39pm EST

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      White House launches ‘beta’ version of website to order Covid tests

      The Biden administration has launched the “beta” version of its website to order free, at-home coronavirus tests.
      The site, CovidTests.gov, includes a link to a US Postal Service form that allows Americans to request four tests to be shipped to their homes.
      White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said the site will officially launch tomorrow morning and noted there may be some glitches until then.
      “CovidTests.gov is in the beta phase right now, which is a standard part of the process typically as it’s being kind of tested,” Psaki said at her daily briefing.
      “Every website launch, in our view, comes with risk. We can’t guarantee there won’t be a bug or two, but the best tech teams across the administration and the postal service are working hard to make this a success.”
      The Biden administration has already ordered 1bn free at-home coronavirus tests to be distributed to Americans as the country confronts the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

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      Trump’s attorney general Barr to publish book

      Martin Pengelly

      William Barr, Donald Trump’s second attorney general and perceived hatchet man until he split from the former president over his lies about election fraud, has a book deal. More

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      Joe Biden’s low point: can the president revive his sinking popularity?

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      Joe Biden’s low point: can the president revive his sinking popularity?After a week of setbacks, some analysts say time is running short to impress voters ahead of the November polls Even for a White House familiar with roadblocks and frustration, Thursday’s setbacks on vaccine mandates and voting rights came as hammer blows.Aside from the immediate derailing of two key policy tenets of Joe Biden’s administration, the vaccine ruling by the supreme court, which quickly followed Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema’s public assassination of his voting reform efforts, prompted a new round of questions over whether his presidency was doomed.Crucially, serious agonizing is now going on about what Biden’s woes might mean for the Democratic party’s fortunes in midterm elections later this year, when Republicans are tipped to seize back control of both chambers of Congress.‘Democracy on the line’: Biden under pressure to act on voting rights nowRead moreWith Biden’s public popularity sinking – in one poll this week to a new low of 33% – and with another centrist Democratic senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, having already capsized the president’s flagship $1.75tn Build Back Better domestic spending plan, some analysts say time is running short to impress voters ahead of the November polls.“The whole first year is gone. And in the end, nothing,” said Larry Sabato, founder and director of the University of Virginia’ Center for Politics, referring to the lengthy but fruitless discussions with Manchin over the make-up of the plan. “Manchin led him down the rosy patch then threw him into the briar patch. ‘Would you change that? You changed that, well, I don’t like this thing over here. Oh, you changed that, well, there’s these two things …’”Sabato added: “But the voting rights debacle is the worst of all because why was Biden elected other than that people wanted to get rid of Trump? It was because he was seen as experienced and competent. What’s the experience gotten us exactly? I just don’t understand how we got here.”Several of Biden’s misfortunes, Sabato said, are not directly of his own making. He has made repeated efforts to change the minds of both Manchin and Sinema, most recently in seemingly unsuccessful late-night talks at the White House on Thursday in an attempt to salvage his agenda.01:50But Sabato also believes that the president’s handling of various situations, and poor direction from advisers, particularly over the Covid-19 pandemic, runaway inflation, and last year’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, have combined to leave Biden exposed.About inflation, Sabato says: “Biden’s team simply missed it badly, they got it very, very wrong, and they’re continuing probably to get it wrong. They’re downplaying it and they’re going to tame it by mid-year. Maybe, but I’ll be surprised.”On Afghanistan, Sabato said, Biden “threw it away again”.“It could have been a big plus had it been handled correctly because just about everybody – Democrat, Republican – was more than willing to get out of Afghanistan. It was a very bad performance by his team. They couldn’t know what was gonna happen? He’s responsible for his advisers, so he can be blamed for it.”On Friday, the White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced that the president would hold a rare, formal press conference next Wednesday to mark his first year in office. As well as answering difficult questions about the administration’s failures, Biden will talk up its successes, namely the $1tn infrastructure bill he signed in November, and the $1.9tn Covid relief plan from last spring.Having appeared fatigued by Thursday’s rejections, a more buoyant Biden followed up with his own briefing on Friday afternoon, accompanied by Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor he appointed to oversee the implementation of the infrastructure act.“There’s a lot of talk about disappointments and things we haven’t gotten done. We’re going to get a lot of them done, I might add,” Biden said. “But this [infrastructure] is something we did get done, and it’s of enormous consequence to the country.”Some analysts suggest the touting of past glories displays a lack of confidence in what can still be achieved in the almost 10 months until the midterms, something Biden seemed to acknowledge on Thursday when he said: “I don’t know whether we can get this done,” after a Capitol Hill meeting with Democrats over voting rights.0The obstacles ahead of Biden are certainly substantial. They range from Democrats’ internal divisions between progressives and moderates, stonewalling by Republicans in Congress and the Donald Trump-created conservative super-majority on the supreme court that has already delivered several blows, and appears poised this summer to overturn five decades of abortion rights.Yet Biden is committed to trying to salvage what he can from what promises to be a testing few months. “Like every other major civil rights bill that came along, if we miss the first time, we can come back and try it a second time,” he told reporters about voting rights efforts.Similarly, he is also likely to attempt to get through Congress individual elements of the Build Back Better plan that are acceptable to Senate moderates, including universal pre-kindergarten education, subsidized child care and a number of climate provisions.“They may try to get pieces of Build Back Better, or build back something as we now call it, but everyone’s going to describe it as crumbs from the table,” Sabato said.“If they’d started with that, people would say, ‘Wow, that’s incredible, pre-K for everybody’, or whatever piece they decided to pick, it didn’t really matter which one. But now it will appear to people as this tiny piece of what the president started out with, [and] tremendous disappointment in Democratic ranks. By the end of the story you won’t even know what passed.”In November last year, Biden, who will be 81 at the time of the 2024 presidential election, announced his intention to run for a second term.Publicly at least, he retains the support of his party, but the Washington Post reported in December rumblings of discontent in Democratic circles about his leadership. An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal this week, citing the unpopularity of both Biden and Vice-president Kamala Harris, even floated the idea of a comeback for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee beaten by Trump in 2016, to fill what its authors called a “leadership vacuum”.In the wake of this week’s disappointments, the possibility of an alternative Democratic ticket for 2024 emerged again, the Washington Post columnist and political analyst Perry Bacon Jr suggesting there were “plenty of strong candidates” if Biden or Harris do not run.“Biden hasn’t cracked some magic political code. Despite his white maleness and appeals to unity, Washington is gridlocked, Republican voters hate the president and his party is poised to do poorly in the midterms,” Bacon wrote on Friday. “It seems entirely possible that Biden runs in 2024 and loses to a Republican challenger. Democrats simply might be better off with someone new.”TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More