It should have been nothing but champagne and roses at CNN Tuesday night.
Democrats had a successful off-year election by any measure, scoring a win in Ohio’s referendum on abortion and a governor’s re-election in Kentucky, among other victories.
But the liberal network’s political director was looking ahead to the truth of 2024, and pouring cold water on the celebration in the process.
“Tonight is undoubtedly a good night for the Democrats. There’s no doubt about it,” Chalian said after news of the Ohio referendum broke as well along with the re-election of Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andrew Beshear, according to the New York Post.
No, there was no doubt about it.
But what Chalian said next provided plenty of doubt for Democrats about the presidential election — and the man who now holds the White House.
And he used CNN’s own poll results to make the point.
Check it out here:
“The country has soured on Joe Biden,” Chalian said, before presenting numbers that should have been a buzzkill to any Democrat getting high on Tuesday night’s results.
Biden’s job performance has the approval of only 39 percent of those polled versus 61 percent who disapprove.
Seventy-two percent of Americans think things are going badly in the U.S., versus only 23 percent who think they’re going well.
And on a personal level, 74 percent of those polled don’t think the octagenarian Biden has the physical stamina to do the job of the presidency, versus only 25 percent who think he does.
Those are numbers that matter now, and they’re not likely to look much better for Biden 12 months from now when they’re going to matter a lot more — assuming he’s the Democrats’ 2024 nominee.
Now, whether Biden is actually going to be the 2024 nominee isn’t yet set in stone.
Similar poll numbers published Sunday by the liberal Democratic newsletter known as The New York Times raised similar concerns — showing former President Donald Trump beating Biden by five swing states that will be crucial to the 2024 Electoral College vote.
Former Obama campaign guru David Axelrod caused a major stir in political circles on Sunday when he used that poll to publicly hint that Biden should step aside now, for the good of his party.
That would suit the argument at CNN, where Chalian declared, according to The Hill that, “What we’re seeing tonight is, the Democratic brand is not in trouble here. Joe Biden is in trouble.”
But that’s questionable — and it’s the question that the 2024 election is going to be decided on.
For all of his many, many faults, Joe Biden is not the master of the Democratic Party, he’s a creature of the Democratic Party. And since winning the 2020 primary race as the “moderate” in a pack of raving leftists, he’s been a creature of the ever more progressive left wing of his party.
A nearly religious zeal for the “right” to an abortion, open borders, an obsession with race, a willingness to sacrifice the country’s economy and energy independence on the altar of climate change, a literally insane insistence that the bodies men and women are born with do not determine which are women and which are men.
All of these are hallmarks of the Biden presidency not because of Joe Biden’s beliefs, but because they’re the beliefs of the leftists who have taken over the Democratic Party. Changing the figurehead won’t change the direction of the ship.
And on all of them, with the major exception of abortion, it’s conservatives and Republicans who can win the argument today, tomorrow and in 2024 — on objective evidence.
Illegal immigration is swamping the country to the point where even liberal New Yorkers are furious. The progressive insistence on electric vehicles, banning gas stoves and the like are unpopular, unwieldy and unrealistic. As to the trans debate, men are not women, and women are not men, and everyone with honest eyes knows it. (Besides that reality, one Riley Gaines is worth 1,000 Lia Thomases. If there’s going to be an election on that, the right’s victory is assured.)
That leaves abortion, which has always been a generational struggle — as Ohio’s referendum on Tuesday proved, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling didn’t change that. If anything, it made it even more intense by moving the issue back to the states.
Winning American hearts and minds on that is going to be a question of decades. The reality is that the country’s culture has marinated in a half-century of warped jurisprudence and establishment propaganda in a culture infused with the idea of “rights” and repulsed by the thought of “responsibility.”
Successfully making the argument that each and every life is precious is the challenge of American conservatives at the beginning of the 21st century. It will likely still be the challenge at the end of the century, too. But that’s what life in a democratic Republic means.
The mission is to convince a majority of Americans — state by federalist state — that having a decent economy in a secure environment in a country worth living in is more important than an invented right to destroy a human life in embryonic form, for whatever reason.
That’s no small task in the world we live in, but if it’s any comfort, those never-ending Democratic ads that all seem to feature a scolding voiceover from the same shrewish white woman — or one of her sorority sisters — will have to start losing their effectiveness at some point. Even feminists have to get tired of being shrieked at at some point.
CNN might be an odd place for conservatives and Republicans looking for reasons to be optimistic after Tuesday’s election results, but the numbers are there.
The disaster of Biden’s presidency isn’t going to turn around in 12 months. If anything, Tuesday’s results are just going to embolden him.
Chalian, Axelrod and other progressives are seeing the truth: That Americans have “soured” on Biden.
But there’s more to it than that. Souring on Biden means souring on the Democratic agenda.
And that’s the real truth.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
