BYRON YORK: The damage Biden has done.
Joe Biden will be president for the next 47 days. That’s enough to make anyone nervous. The 82-year-old president had to be forced, by his own party, to withdraw from the 2024 race because he is no longer mentally and physically up to the job. But, of course, he is still in the job. With a world full of dangerous conflicts, that Biden is in charge for 47 more days, especially with Vice President Kamala Harris in a deep post-defeat funk, is deeply worrisome.
The immediate problem will end on Jan. 20, 2025, when Biden leaves office. But the United States, and the Democratic Party, will be dealing with the damage Biden leaves behind for years. There is a reason voters, for 40 years, were never interested in electing the openly ambitious Biden president of the U.S. — until the bizarre circumstances of the 2020 election. They knew for decades that he would not be a good president. And he has proven them right.
Leave the damage Biden has done to the U.S. — the massive migrant influx, the decline in the standard of living for millions of people, and the chaos abroad — for another day. Right now, a new analysis shows the damage Biden has done to his party, and it is immense.
Exit polls show that in the 2024 presidential election, 35% of voters identified as Republicans, while 34% identified as independents, and 31% identified as Democrats. In addition to a big jump in the number of self-identified independents, the news is that in 2024, Democrats slipped to third place in party ID.
“For the first time since the Watergate era, independents surpassed one of the major political parties to rank second in terms of party identification,” writes Republican pollster David Winston, who has just finished an in-depth study of the election results. “In this presidential election, the percentage of the electorate that self-identified as Democrats came in behind independents. … This means that, in this election, Democrats are de facto more a third party than a dominant party in the electorate.”
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