Joe Biden has seemingly surrendered 56 percent of the American electorate to President Donald Trump, saying that those who perceive that they’re better off under the current administration probably shouldn’t vote Democrat.
The comment came during an interview on Monday with Kyle Inskeep, a reporter for Cincinnati television station WKRC, who confronted the Democrat presidential candidate with a Gallup poll from last week which showed that 56 percent of Americans considered their families better off than four years ago. That was by far the highest reading since Gallup began polling on the question in 1984. Only 32 percent said they were worse off under Trump, and the 56 percent was considerably higher than the 45 percent of respondents who thought they were in a better financial position after the Obama-Biden administration’s first term in 2012.
Asked why those 56 percent of Americans who benefited from Trump’s economic policies should vote Democrat, Biden said, “Well, if they think that, they probably shouldn’t. They think 54 percent (sic) of the American people are better off economically today than they were under our administration? Well, their memory is not very good, quite frankly.”
The Obama-Biden administration is reported to have presided over the slowest US economic recovery from a recession since the Great Depression. Trump has been able to claim the lowest US jobless rate in five decades, including record-low unemployment for black and Hispanic Americans. He also saw 500,000 manufacturing jobs added during his first three years in office, after President Barack Obama said many of the blue-collar jobs lost during his two terms “are just not gonna come back.” However, those gains came crashing down when the Covid-19 pandemic devastated the US economy this year.
Biden, who said on Friday that voters “don’t deserve” to know whether he will expand the Supreme Court, has shown a knack for dismissing those who find fault with him or his politics. For instance, the 77-year-old former vice president told reporters in August 2019 that voters who are concerned about his age shouldn’t vote for him. When an immigration activist pressed him last November in South Carolina about the Obama-Biden administration’s deportations of illegal aliens, he said, “You should vote for Trump.”
In December, when an Iowa farmer accused Biden of getting his son Hunter a job at Ukrainian gas company Burisma, he called the man a “damn liar,” “fat,” and said, “You’re too old to vote for me.” A month later, he told an Iowa voter who was critical of his climate policies, “You have to go vote for someone else,” at one point poking the man in the chest and grabbing his jacket with two hands. He then said in an MSNBC interview in May that those who believe the allegations of Tara Reade, a former staffer who accused him of sexual assault, “probably shouldn’t vote for me.”
Also in May, Biden dismissed undecided black voters by telling a radio host, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
WKRC’s Inskeep used his five minutes with Biden fruitfully, even getting the former vice president to give his most forthcoming answer yet on expanding the Supreme Court. When pressed on the issue on Monday, Biden told Inskeep, “I’m not a fan of court packing, but I don’t want to get off on that whole issue,” saying he wants to keep the focus on Trump’s effort to fill a court vacancy before the November 3 election.
