November is coming into focus

“Elections are decided by the issues on voters’ minds, not the issues many of us might wish were on voters’ minds.

This lesson was brought home forcefully by the juxtaposition of the Federal Reserve’s big rate hike on Wednesday with the victory of Trumpist “big lie” candidates in primaries the day before — and the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection…

If Republicans up and down the ballot win this fall because so many voters choose to punish Biden and the Democrats for high prices, the GOP sweep would carry into office outright election deniers as well as politicians too timid or too opportunistic to challenge them. As Amy Gardner and Isaac Arnsdorf reported in The Post, more than 100 GOP primary winners backed Trump’s false claims of election fraud…

A revolt against Democrats at the top of the ballot could put management of the 2024 elections in the hands of the same sorts of people the Jan. 6 committee is exposing as dangerous frauds.

The potential for an economy-led GOP landslide is high… ​​This points up the need for Democrats, especially Biden, to try to cut their losses on inflation by arguing their proposals to reduce costs are more credible than anything Republicans are offering. It won’t be an easy sell, but Biden took a decent shot at this with a rousing speech to the AFL-CIO on Tuesday.

But there is no substitute for trying — however hard it will be — to make the preservation of democracy a much higher priority for voters. Their ballots won’t cut prices at the pump or what they pay for groceries. But they will determine the future of our experiment in self-government.”

“Here's an apparently unpopular opinion: Joe Biden is not failing or flailing. His presidency is not in peril…

Everyone needs to take a breath: It's been one year. These headlines could just as easily read, "Joe Biden Fails to Fix Every Problem in the World in 365 days."

What drives much of the "presidency in peril" coverage is Biden's approval ratings…

Low approval ratings are used as a proxy by various political and ideological factions to argue that the president needs to do more of what they want and if he doesn't, he won't get reelected. (Spoiler alert: nobody will cast their vote in three years based on how they feel today about Biden). Progressives argue ratings are low because Biden is not progressive enough and moderates and "Never Trump" Republicans argue it's because Biden is too liberal. It's become conventional wisdom in the media that Biden's approval ratings started dropping because of how he handled the Afghanistan withdrawal. But Gallup's senior editor Jeff Jones told Politico in November that his declining poll numbers began before that, during the Delta Covid-19 variant surge.

Low approval ratings are used as a proxy by various political and ideological factions to argue that the president needs to do more of what they want and if he doesn't, he won't get reelected. (Spoiler alert: nobody will cast their vote in three years based on how they feel today about Biden). Progressives argue ratings are low because Biden is not progressive enough and moderates and "Never Trump" Republicans argue it's because Biden is too liberal…

Ultimately, we need to remember that Biden entered the White House during one of the most difficult periods this country has ever faced..

It seems that whatever Biden's flaws, the country is in a better place than it was when he took office, something that was not a given considering the challenges he was up against. Like all presidents, he is clearly absorbing the lessons of the first year and recalibrating for the next.”