Voters Aren't Going to Buy Biden's 'Freedom Agenda'

Biden’s conduct of foreign policy in the last few months isn’t going to win over any wavering voters.

One of Biden’s top political advisers thinks that focusing on a “freedom agenda” is going to deliver them a win in the fall:

Donilon’s mild demeanor can be misleading. Like Biden, he has firm beliefs—about politics, the public, the press—and a contrarian side. In 2020, he and his campaign team had to decide whether to emphasize the economy or the more abstract idea that Trump imperilled the essence of America. “We bet on the latter,” Donilon said, even though “our own pollsters told us that talking about ‘the soul of the nation’ was nutty.” That experience fortified his belief that this year’s campaign should center on what he calls “the freedom agenda.” [bold mine-DL] By November, he predicted, “the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.”

American voters are not going to pay much attention to this “freedom agenda.” To the extent that they notice it, I suspect they are going to see it as hypocritical or irrelevant to their more pressing concerns. Biden can try to wrap himself in the mantle of democracy, but it will either leave voters cold or it will make them angry that a president that has been treating many of his own core voters with contempt presumes to present himself as some sort of champion. The assumption that the attack on the Capitol is going to loom that large in voters’ minds in November is almost certainly a product of living in a bubble. Even if some voters are receptive to the message, the bigger problem for the president is that lots of Americans don’t think the messenger is up to the job.