I scanned social media Friday morning to see what top Virginia Democrats might have to say about Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in last night’s presidential debate.
Crickets chirping.
Radio silence.
The Twitter accounts of U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine and Fourth District Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan live-blogged the debate, and stuck to the party line – Trump big liar, Trump bad for country, et cetera.
And we got a statement from Susan Swecker, the Democratic Party of Virginia chair:
“This election is a choice between President Biden’s vision for America, where freedoms are protected and every Virginian has a fair shot, versus Donald Trump’s pledge to serve as a dictator on day one, give tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy, and attack women’s fundamental freedoms at every turn,” Swecker said in the statement.
“Virginians see Trump for what he is: a convicted felon on an increasingly unhinged and dangerous quest for power, who fuels political violence and called the extremists who marched on Charlottesville ‘very fine people.’ We’re ready to stand together and defeat him, just like we have every time he’s run here,” Swecker said.
What we don’t see out of anybody from the top rungs of the Virginia Democratic Party: any semblance of recognition that Biden’s dismal showing in the earliest-debate-in-history that the Biden team had asked for now has disgraced ex-president Donald Trump very much in the driver’s seat in the general election.
A CNN flash poll conducted late Thursday had just 39 percent of Democratic voters who watched saying they have “a lot of confidence” in Biden’s ability to lead the country, a 15-point drop from the pre-debate number on that point.
You wouldn’t think these folks are going to now just switch and vote for Trump, but it’s a fair question if a fair number of them peel off from voting at all, which is a problem in itself for Democrats, and for the country.
It would be nice for some of our local Democratic leaders to weigh in on the next steps, one way or the other, really – that they think it’s time to dump Biden, time to rally around him, despite the obvious, either way.
Stand up and be counted, basically.
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Chris Graham
