Biden's Speech Was Not the Win the Political Class Thought It Was
As Biden touched on a laundry list of political promises, Seagraves said she thought his details were slim and that she still had no sense of what his plans were for the country, and at the end of the speech remarked she was left feeling it was an hour of her life she was never going to get back.
Five years ago, the Democrats took control of this suburban county for the first time since the Civil War when the five-member council went from an all-Republican panel to an all-Democratic panel.
Much of that flip was blamed on Trump, although Delaware County voters have voted Democratic for president since Al Gore, so the flip is more nuanced and had an equal amount to do with the flight of liberal voters to the Philadelphia suburban counties over the past 20 years.
Trump is not going to win Delaware County. Nonetheless, the sentiments of some of the college-educated suburban voters who live here, who own small businesses or who commute to work in the city of Philadelphia are important in understanding if Biden is hitting his audience.
This is the challenge of 2024 and is very similar to what people experienced in 2016 when everyone who turned on the network news or the cable networks spent the whole summer and up until Election Day believing that Hillary Clinton was going to win.
Yet those of us reporting about what we heard and saw and experienced on the ground thought, "Wait a minute, the liberal media aren't telling the entire story nor focusing on the voters who would decide the election."
In the rare times the liberal media did focus on those voters, the voters were treated as caricatures, such as that they were all without a college education. Not true. College-educated men and women did vote for Trump, the reporters were just looking in the wrong counties. Reporters focused on counties with a high education propensity such as Delaware County and ignored college-educated voters where the education achievement was mixed, as in Washington County.
The impression left after the post-State of the Union coverage was that Biden was back.
But polling done by ABC News after the speech showed 29% said that he had done better than they expected, 12% said it was worse than expected, and 24% said it was exactly what they expected.
A whopping 35% said they did not read, see or hear about the address.
...continued
Copyright 2024 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
