Biden Faces Electoral Peril From His Left, From His Support From Israel, But Mostly From Himself

President Biden seems to sink deeper and deeper into a dark hole every day. It's become apparent that the primary challenge his re-election effort faces is the man himself, but for some reason, Politico's Jonathan Martin is more concerned with Biden's (tepid) support for Israel as well as candidates on Biden's left, like Cornel West and Jill Stein. Mr. Martin would do better to spend his efforts urging the Democrats to find some better candidates.

Memo to Democrats: It’s not Nancy Jacobson who’s disrupting President Joe Biden’s speeches most every time he appears in public and it’s also not Nancy Jacobson floating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. $15 million to help him get on general election ballots.
I don’t write this to downplay the threat that Jacobson’s group, No Labels, poses to Biden’s reelection. A center-right candidate able to secure ballot access could claim thousands of voters Biden needs, namely those Americans who grudgingly voted for him to oust Donald Trump in 2020 and are dreading doing so once more.
Yet the collective Democratic fixation on No Labels increasingly looks misplaced — or at least disproportionate given how the 2024 political landscape is taking shape.

Just for a moment, let's set aside the ridiculous notion that Jacobson's "No Labels" group would support a center-right candidate. A center-left candidate, like Joe Manchin, perhaps. But not center-right, and the use of this term referring to "No Labels" says more about Mr. Martin's political leanings than anything else. On this note, however, Mr. Martin is correct; "No Labels" isn't the primary thing those working for the puppet President's re-election need to worry about. There are a lot of things they should be worried about, but "No Labels" isn't one of them. To his credit, Mr. Martin does mention a couple of those issues:

It’s the left that presents the most acute peril to the president.
If Kennedy claims the Libertarian Party line, which he’s warming to, Jill Stein is the Green Party nominee and Cornel West gets on any battleground state ballots, they would combine to drain far more votes from Biden than from Trump. You wouldn’t think Democrats need much reminding of this scenario, given how many in their professional ranks lived through two campaigns, 2000 and 2016, in which they lost the electoral vote in part because of leftist spoilers.

In this, Mr. Martin has a point. Were I Ralph Nader, even now, 24 years on, I would think very hard about showing my face in Florida. And both Jill Stein and Cornel West, while being perfectly ridiculous as candidates and as proposed elected officials, would siphon votes from Democrats, while appealing to no one to the right of Leon Trotsky. And, of course, the very idea of the failing President seeking another term, given his visible decline and horrible policy decisions, is also perfectly ridiculous. But then a good segment of the American electorate has shown they are willing to vote for the perfectly ridiculous; the fact that Jill Stein is still mentioned anywhere as a serious candidate is proof enough of that.

Greg Abbott Lays Down the Facts About the Border and Biden's Failure to Protect It

But wait! There's more!

Democrats are still catching up to the possibility of their coalition unraveling over Israel’s offensive in Gaza. Are the well-organized hecklers bird-dogging Biden at nearly every speech going to turn to a candidate who once proposed a Muslim ban? Of course not. Yet this White House race, like the last two, is bound to be won on the margins, and Biden is at risk of losing critical younger and left-wing voters to third-party candidates or apathy.

While it's tempting to dismiss this as pandering to a fringe, consider Michigan; Joe Biden won Michigan over Donald Trump in 2020 by only 154,000 votes, after Trump's carrying that state in 2016. Would Biden's support for Israel, milquetoast though it is, imperil him in places like Michigan? It's possible. Will they imperil him beyond the reach of any electoral shenanigans in that state? That's also possible.

What Jonathan Martin doesn't mention, of course, is the Democrat's candidate himself. If the Democrats wish to have any chance in November, they should worry less about appeasing idiots and more about trying to re-gain the blue-collar workers of America, which they have gradually lost over the last several election cycles; a big part of Donald Trump's 2016 victory was due to his siphoning a lot of what would once have been called "Truman Democrats" (my father was one) away from the Democrat Party. They should also worry about, somehow, finding a candidate who is not obviously, sadly impaired, and maybe a running mate who, unlike the current VP, has enough brains to pound sand.

I mean, honestly - does this inspire confidence?