Dems should be careful what they wish for as it pertains to replacing Joe Biden in 2024.

There is a growing buzz that Joe Biden is in political trouble and people may be pushing to have him step away.

David Axelrod is maybe the most prominent Democratic strategists out there willing to suggest out loud that Joe Biden is likely to lose in 2024. I sort of believe that many others probably believe that Joe Biden is in trouble, but that belief is being tempered and silenced to some degree. The rhetoric right now is to suggest that the current polling is not real and that there is plenty of time for Biden to recover.

But the larger problem here isn't Joe Biden, but the actual Democratic brand in general. Certainly the Biden administration has shown it's fair share of incompetence, starting with the disasterous Afghanistan withdrawal and a complete lack of strategy strategy for dealing with the Israeli Hamas conflict. But when it comes to the core issues that really concern people, those issues are increasingly becoming issues where the public trusts Republicans rather than Democrats. When you talk about inflation, the economy, crime, and immigration, these are seen as problems with Democratic policies as much as they are a problem with Joe Biden and his administration.

But hey, don't believe me? Check the most recent polling that tosses in people like Gavin Newsom in place of Joe Biden and you will see that the California Governor polls well behind the President. In those two polls referenced in the charge (Cyngal, and YouGov) Biden runs seven points ahead of Newsom in one poll and five points ahead of him in the other. This is not a lack of people knowing Newsom or something easily corrected. With the exception of Kamala Harris, Newsom is going to be the best known of any alternative candidates and the one that most of those anti-Biden strategists believe would give them the best chance to win.

But there is a good reason why California is bleeding citizens at a historic rate. How does Newsom convince voters that the rest of the country should follow in California's lead? Perhaps when they were running surpluses and pushing ever liberal policy out there, there might have been an argument for all of those pie in the sky liberals. But all that did was turn a surplus into a $68 billion deficit that neither Newsom or the Democrats in California have a good idea at how to fix. High taxes are pushing businesses and high income earners out of California at historic rates. Crime is running rampant, homelessness is out of control, they have their own border problems, and every other day it seems that half the state is literally burning due to some forest fire.

So while a Gavin Newsom might want to turn a Presidential election campaign into a referendum on liberal vs conservative policies, the enormous problems in California make that an almost untenable argument. So where does he go with a campaign? I destroyed the great state of California, now let me destroy the rest of America too? Or how about... my policies didn't work in California, but I think they might work for the country as a whole?

The "Trump" card that Trump can play over and over in the 2024 campaign is to simply remind people that during his tenure that we saw three years of peace and prosperity prior to the Covid epidemic. Since Biden and the Democrats took over, we have seen almost nothing go right. There is no peace (we are currently witnessing and involved in two full scale wars with more looming). There is no prosperity as can be seen by record inflation, record debt, record interest rates, and what has become a crashing housing market (always a major key to our economic status).

Moreover, Trump is winning right now even as he is making his campaign about everything but. I believe much of this is largely about solidifying his hold on the GOP and some personal antics regarding all of the civil and criminal prosecutions he is facing by partisan liberals in charge of our judicial communities in various parts of the country. But for whatever reasons, his excessive talk about Jan 6th, judicial favortism and such might be 100% justified as a citizen and it would likely help him with his base, but eventually I would expect that he makes a broader argument about his Presidency that will appeal to everyone. After all, most successful reelection campaigns had most everything to do with some form of "peace and prosperity" argument. That is going to be an argument that Trump wins every time.