Why Does the Media Freak Out About Biden’s Electability, But Not Trump’s?

The white identity party is always seen as more legitimate

The post-debate Democratic nomination freak out grinds on. And it’s not like I don’t understand. Biden’s debate performance was terrible; his poll numbers are ugly. Democrats are desperate to beat Trump and aren’t sure whether Biden can. Should they choose someone else? Should they stay the course? Predicting the future is hard; anxiety leads people to thrash about.

Still, though, the contrast with the approach to the GOP contender is striking and bewildering. Yes, Biden is struggling against Trump. But it’s also true that Trump is struggling against Biden, who is a stunningly unpopular incumbent. After about the worst week a politician could possibly have, Biden is still ahead in some polls, and only a couple points behind in 538’s polling aggregator.  

Biden and the Democrats have self-immolated, and Trump is still only barely in the game. Why aren’t there hundreds of panicked stories about how Trump is a weak candidate who can’t win? Why wasn’t there this kind of media frenzy when Trump was held liable by a jury for rape? Why wasn’t there this media frenzy when he was convicted of falsifying business records? Trump is a very weak candidate who has literally never won a popular vote; why isn’t the MSM constantly obsessing about Trump’s weakness and lack of electability?

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There are a few answers here, I think. One is that the mainstream media leans towards Democrats, both in terms of who journalists vote for and in terms of who reads those journalists. So journalists themselves worry more about Biden losing…and they know that they’ll get a lot more panic clicks if they write about Biden losing. Writing about how Trump isn’t electable doesn’t have the same juice; far right voters are all reading Fox and Newsmax in their own perfect bubble of reassurance. That could be why the right is itself so blasé about electability; their own media constantly tells them they are winning, and they just don’t believe it when polls or pundits tell them their orange rapist asshole isn’t electable.

Another issue, perhaps, is that—thanks to Senate bias, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and electoral college bias—Republicans can and do often win despite being unpopular and losing the popular vote. The media doesn’t really make this clear often enough, but Republicans are unpopular, and yet can win anyway because of systemic white supremacy (and some just plain structural bad luck with the weird electoral college.) Democrats need to be not just electable, but super electable. Republicans can be literally un-electable (they get fewer votes!) and still win.

 This creates panic among Democrats, and strange incentives among not necessarily reflective journalists, who keep seeing Republicans doing okay despite unpopular positions and assume that the GOP must therefore be immune to political gravity because of some magic charisma, rather than because they systematically keep Black people from voting, or because white rural people in Wyoming are vastly (times a billion) overrepresented in the Senate.

That “magic charisma” might also be referred to as “whiteness.” The GOP is the party of white identity—and thanks to structural racism, unconscious racism, and just plain racism, people tend to think that white identity is legitimate, natural, American. That’s why everyone is so interested in interviewing Trump voters in diners, rather than talking to Biden voters in barbershops. It’s why Democrats saying rural voters are bitter is a national scandal, while Republicans calling for the extermination of urban voters is just another day on Fox. White people represent everyone—even if they just actually tend to represent the GOP. In contrast, Black voters, and for that matter Democrats, are in contrast considered parochial, illegitimate, not representative.

Democrats and the media are obsessed with finding some Democratic candidate who is legitimate and electable—which is why Biden seemed perfect in 2020. Here was a white guy who had been in Democratic politics for generations. He was as white and male as Trump; he looked like he could be a Republican, really. You don’t get more legitimate and electable than that. (Black Democratic voters, and for that matter white Democratic voters, were thrilled with Obama, but Trump has I think reset many people’s optimism about who their fellow Americans will place in the highest office.)

Now, though, Biden has gotten older, and his stutter is more prominent than it was. There’s a reason that presidents like FDR and JFK hid their disabilities; Presidents are supposed to be “normal” and therefore electable. Biden seemed “electable” (ie, not marginalized in any way) in 2020; in 2024, less so. Wouldn’t someone else be more electable? Wouldn’t someone be able to overcome all structural issues and the ugly bigotries of the American electorate by being just that perfect person against whom no bigotry could be directed, or contemplated?

I’m not saying that everyone criticizing Biden is in bad faith; people are genuinely worried about whether he can beat Trump, and for good reason given the polls. At the same time, I do think that a lot of the media frenzy, and to some extent Democratic self-agonizing as well, is tied to the fact that, by virtue of being the party of multicultural democracy, Democrats are always seen as borderline illegitimate, and not just by the GOP.  

“Electability” means “seems like other people who were president” and the bulk of those other people were not just white men, but white men catering to white voters. Democratic candidates, by that standard, are always going to seem not quite presidential enough. That’s at least part of why Biden’s failures lead everyone to question his legitimacy as a candidate, while no matter what Trump does, he’s always considered electable.