Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
A batch of new polls from the New York Times, Siena College and the Philadelphia Inquirer has very bad news for President Biden: He's losing. Among registered voters, he's significantly behind in five of the six battleground states that are most likely to decide the election. He does slightly better among likely voters but remains behind in five key states.
It's a snapshot, but it's consistent with the overall trend of this campaign -- which is, again, he's losing.
Biden and many of his supporters seem to think the solution is to get right with the issues -- the economy, the Israel-Hamas war, student loans, pot legalization, the threat to democracy and so on. If he can just find the sweet spot on policy, they believe, voters will come home.
That might be true to some extent. But I think focusing on the issues misses Biden's real weakness: vibes.
"Vibes" is just a trendy word for "mood" or "feelings." Whatever you call them, the relationship between attitudes and issues is not always as rational as some think.
People who care passionately about issues think issues are really important. On one level, this is a fairly ridiculous tautology. But what I mean is that people who are really engaged in politics -- activists, journalists, donors -- believe issues drive everyone else's engagement with politics.
Politicians take popular positions on issues based on the understandable assumption that they will be popular as a result. Obviously, it often works this way. But sometimes the causality goes in the other direction. Some people start as rabid partisans or super-fans of a politician, and that drives their views of the issues.
In 2012, for instance, when Barack Obama endorsed gay marriage, millions of Democrats suddenly switched from opposition to support. In 2017, when Donald Trump made protectionism a centerpiece of his agenda, many Republicans changed their positions. (They also changed their position on "character," but that's another story.) I suspect that at least some of Biden's low approval ratings on many issues have less to do with people's policy preferences than with their starting assumption that he's wrong.
The Biden campaign wants to leverage the issue of abortion. That's smart. After the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, abortion really is an issue that can overpower vibes. But consider that a constitutional referendum to legalize abortion has 61% support in Florida, while Biden is polling around 37% in the state. When abortion rights out-poll a Democratic candidate nearly 2 to 1, vibes are an issue.
The best analogy is to 1992. While some partisans and ideologues convinced themselves that they hated George H.W. Bush, the truth is most people were just exhausted with him, Republicans or the status quo.
The Bush economy wasn't great, but the relatively mild recession of 1990-91 was far from the depression portrayed by many in the media, the Democratic Party and the electorate. But Bush, who hated campaigning, often helped his detractors paint him as "out of touch." It's difficult to describe the reaction to the moment the president looked at his watch during a debate question about the recession, allegedly signifying his aloofness, or seemed impressed by a new supermarket checkout scanner, supposedly revealing that he didn't understand how normal people live. In any case, many voters agreed with the worst interpretations.
The mainstream media isn't remotely as hostile to Biden, but that's not the advantage it seems to be. In a populist age, elite media support feels like establishment wagon-circling, not just to the Trump-friendly but also to disillusioned young and progressive voters. Even when the press thinks it's helping Biden, it perpetuates the out-of-touch vibe.
Voters resent the idea, pushed by many pundits, that they should wake up to the fact that the economy is actually doing much better than they think. Biden is exacerbating the problem by constantly boasting about the economy rather than emulating Bush's successful opponent and emphasizing his empathy for what people are experiencing.
The economy really is better than vibes suggest, although inflation and high interest rates tend to overwhelm all other indicators. The other problem is that, as political scientist Seth Masket notes, "Presidential approval is largely untethered from economic growth these days." That's vibes.
Obviously, it would help if Biden could fix inflation and interest rates. But he can't. Moreover, his vibe problem extends beyond the economy.
His desperation to fix his problems with poll-driven policy and rhetoric underscores the sense that he's flailing and can't keep up with the demands of the job. This both fuels and is fueled by his age problem. Biden seems exhausted, and people are exhausted with him.
First posted May 14, 2024. (C)2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.