Biden Needs to Govern Like He’s Probably Going to Lose

For President Biden, 2024 began much like 2023: with new polling data indicating that he is on track to lose his presidential reelection effort. The most recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll found Biden trailing Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, by two points nationally. A CBS News poll conducted the second week of January showed him losing in a hypothetical matchup to Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Nikki Haley.

If Biden’s topline numbers are bad, his demographic cross-tabs look even worse: The president’s support among young voters, Black voters, and Hispanic voters, all critical constituencies, all seem to be cratering. Another late-2023 poll pegged Biden with record low favorability marks—which members of Bidenworld countered by telling the press they felt “deep frustration,” but, critically, that the White House feels no panic about the 81-year-old’s prospects.

It’s perfectly fine for Biden and his campaign staffers to feel that way. But it’s not OK for his administration to act like this is no big deal. Yes, polls are flawed, and we’re still a ways out from Election Day. But they’re not that flawed. Trump just trounced the field in Iowa, just as polls predicted. And there’s a pattern here, a steady drumbeat since early last year of bad vibes, miserable polling numbers, and rock-bottom favorability figures for Biden.

There’s only one thing left to do, legislatively. The president and his cabinet need to start governing like there’s no tomorrow—or rather, with the urgency of a team with only 10 months left to live (politically). They need to use the relatively tiny window of the remaining year to push through whatever remains of the Democratic agenda and to take the necessary preparations to minimize the damage of another Trump term.

Troublingly, we haven’t seen enough of that. In November, the president pledged that he was “committed to filling every judicial vacancy,” a capstone to one of the greatest successes of the first Biden term. But he looks to be off-pace to get that done. There’s blame to go around—many of the nominees are hung up on Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin’s insistence on outmoded procedural niceties that Republicans are using to slow the confirmation process—but there are currently about 60 vacancies, most of which the White House hasn’t even nominated for yet, and most of which will be subjected to a long, grinding confirmation process. Without a change of course, the Biden administration is on track to hand over numerous judicial vacancies to a possible President Trump.

The White House’s ongoing deliberation over immigration reform—the inaptly named “border deal”—is even more jarringly shortsighted.

In negotiations with a bipartisan group of senators, the president has been pushing for a radical rewrite of the current immigration and asylum process, supporting some of the most punitive policy changes the Trump administration championed and sought in vain.

The deliberations are still ongoing, but, according to a report in the Messenger, the package is expected to contain “new expulsion authority to rapidly turn away migrants without hearing their asylum claims; other restrictions to asylum and parole that would limit legal pathways of entry; expanding an authority that allows expedited removal of undocumented immigrants near the border to the interior of the country; and talk of mandatory detention for those who are allowed to remain in the country and have their asylum claims heard.”

Most alarming is the proposed abrogation of humanitarian parole, which would limit the executive office’s authority to grant temporary protected status to immigrants fleeing conflict or acute instability: Ukrainians fleeing the war, for instance. Humanitarian parole has been the legal standard in place for 70 years; Biden has now signaled a willingness to overhaul it.

Some of these policies seem ripped straight from notorious Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s wish list. The policy would expand detention at the border, which would almost certainly enable more family detention and/or family separation, re-creating those dire scenes of large-scale jail beds and tent cities that scandalized MSNBC anchors (and anyone with a heart) just six years ago.

It would also restart Title 42, re-empowering the executive office to limit immigration unilaterally, so long as there are “exigent circumstances.” Title 42 was the Holy Grail for Miller, who has sometimes been referred to as “one of the most evil people to have worked for Donald Trump.” Miller searched tirelessly for a justification to implement Title 42, and finally got one when COVID hit. The authority expired in Biden’s term, but now the president is reportedly open to bringing it back. Reinstated under far less “exigent circumstances” than a global pandemic, this move would lend political legitimacy to the policy that it never had under Trump, and empower subsequent presidents to use and abuse it in various new ways.

But forget talking about “subsequent presidents” in the abstract. Trump is, after the Iowa caucus, the undisputed front-runner of the GOP primary. Which means that Biden’s immigration bargain is essentially implementing much of the astoundingly cruel, international law–defying Trump policy program, supercharging the executive office’s authority, and then …potentially handing the reins back to Trump himself. At the very least, this agreement would empower a future Trump administration to go hog-wild on Day 1.

Some Biden watchers have said this is merely the price of getting further military aid for Ukraine, which the president desperately desires; others have said the president is motivated by his own desire for an immigration deal. It seems the one element of these miserable polls the president has chosen to pay attention to are questions of who voters trust to handle immigration and the border, where Republicans have a huge advantage after three years of harping on the issue tirelessly while the Democrats have mounted no defense and articulated no alternative.

It’s still possible, if not likely, that this deal will fall through. Republicans are more fractious than ever, especially in the House, where their majority will soon be down to two votes and Speaker Mike Johnson looks to be on the ropes. Republicans’ in-house intransigence and refusal to let Democrats accomplish anything may be the only thing saving Democrats from themselves on this. Sen. Chris Murphy, one of the Democratic masterminds behind this negotiation, seemed to indicate last week that the likelihood of passage was slipping away, while a partial shutdown looms and House Republicans line up in opposition to any actual governing.

Biden, now out on the campaign trail, is running strongly on the threat of another Trump term. But his team’s lack of urgency and preparation for what Trump might do back in office indicates that Biden is still not taking that threat seriously enough. And that would be irresponsible even if Biden himself were leading in the polls.