Any Democrat Could Beat Trump in a Landslide Right Now

The president has never looked weaker. So why is the left content with Biden?

David Walsh
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Photo: The Washington Post/Getty Images

Absent massive electoral fraud, Joe Biden will very likely beat Donald Trump — and beat him pretty badly.

This has absolutely nothing to do with Joe Biden.

Biden’s campaign presence — even before he sealed up the nomination — can be charitably described as anemic. Even Biden’s campaign advisors have tried to keep him out of the public eye. He has been dogged by low voter enthusiasm, especially among young people. Most damagingly, Biden has been accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault by former staffer Tara Reade.

Nevertheless, Biden is in a strong structural position against Trump. Pundits, political consultants, and even activists tend to focus on voter enthusiasm, TV ads, social media campaigns, and get-out-the-vote ground games, but as Biden himself proved in the primary, a winning candidate does not necessarily need any of those things in order to win. And for all of Donald Trump’s supposed political genius, he is an incumbent president with a decidedly mixed record who is presiding over an economic catastrophe. This is not a structural situation that tends to lead to an incumbent’s reelection.

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David Walsh
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Writer for

David Austin Walsh is a PhD candidate at Princeton University. His dissertation is on the connections between the far right and the conservative movement.