Frustrated exhaustion is an unfortunate mental state to be in while trying to make decisions as a voter. One candidate has promised to “improve” upon his previous four-year disaster by becoming a dictator, so it seems like this November will be yet another exercise in harm prevention that feels antithetical to what meaningful political involvement could look like.
According to a Reuters poll from November 2023 and a Data for Progress poll from February 2024, a supermajority of Americans support at least a temporary ceasefire in Gaza — a proposal to which the Biden administration has only recently opened itself. At the time of this article’s initial writing, Biden announced that his “hope” is for a temporary ceasefire to be finalized by the end of this upcoming weekend, five days after making the announcement. This means five more full days of Palestinian deaths, and many Americans are certainly not satisfied with the overwhelming need to include the word “temporary” among any of the State Department’s public statements regarding a ceasefire. Another week of simply having “hope” is excruciating after that hope has already been delayed for over four months’ worth of business days. [Note: at the time of this article’s final drafting, a week had passed since the date of the hoped-for ceasefire.]
So far, Biden’s campaign this year has copied all its homework from 2016.
Biden has obviously felt some pressure to start marketing himself to potential voters given his recent appearances on late-night television. Still, these interviews have served to promote his charisma, not his political efficacy. Being the candidate who is not planning to start a dictatorship is an absurdly low bar, but Biden seems content to lean on that bar and feel confident that voters will need no further motivation. This campaign strategy feels quite familiar for the Democratic Party — during Clinton’s 2016 campaign, her messaging was often oriented around the horribleness of a potential Trump presidency instead of the wonderfulness of her own.
So far, Biden’s campaign this year has copied all its homework from 2016. Instead of making significant progress towards a ceasefire, providing vanguards for reproductive rights, preventing gun violence, or another point on his list of campaign promises that got him elected in the first place, it seems like the plan now is to make people think about how terrible things were during Trump’s term and get them to the polls through fear. Leaning into the Dark Brandon meme is a more extended version of Clinton’s “Pokémon GO to the polls,” a one-note plea to not be seen as out-of-touch. If young people have been frustrated with Biden’s foreign policy, maybe he can win them back by co-opting their satire that was originally intended to point out his failure to act on many progressive promises made in 2020.
Perhaps surprisingly to Biden’s campaign (and also to quite a few voters), there is still a lot of time left before the election! April Fools’ Day still needs to happen; so does my birthday, the Paris Olympics, Halloween, and probably quite a few other holidays. Until November, Biden is fully within his rights to change his policies, stances, and promises in a way that reflects the demands that the American people are making of him. Progressive voters — really, any voters — are also entirely at liberty to withhold their support for Biden until he gives them enough reason to vote for him instead of simply defying Trump. For many voters — often those who are Muslim or Arab — that point may be, understandably, entirely out of reach by now. The threat of life getting worse under Trump seems extremely hollow when the idea of “worse” seems wholly inapplicable to the current state of affairs.
As voters, we are fully in our rights to strike … until our demands are met.
Voters have astonishing collective power. During the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike which began last year, Biden joined the picket line as the first sitting US president to ever do so; regardless of the political aesthetics behind that decision, Biden recognized the immense power and value that exists in communities of American workers. He met them where they were, and in January he received the endorsement of the UAW.
As voters, we are fully in our rights to strike — vote for a third-party candidate, not vote at all, or petulantly describe our voting status as ‘undecided’ until November 5th — until our demands are met. It is Biden’s responsibility to continue joining us on the picket line, not for us to be intimidated by another Trump presidency and lower our standards once more. If the Democratic Party continues to rely on the progressive vote to advance ultimately uninspiring — and in the case of foreign policy, actively repulsive and peace-destroying — policies, I am struggling to find a reason why we should continue providing that very vote while muttering under our breath: “this is the year, I can feel it, there’s just no WAY we can be disappointed for this many years in a row.”
Lawrence Hapeman ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. They can be reached at hapeman.l@wustl.edu.