I HAVE NO IDEA IF BIDEN'S DEMOCRACY TALK WILL WORK IN 2024

Old pundit hotness: Joe Biden is a washed-up loser. New pundit hotness: Maybe Joe Biden is smarter than we think.

From Politico Playbook just prior to Biden's Valley Forge speech:

... Democratic strategists ... are in the middle of the same electoral debate they had in 2022: Should the party emphasize Jan. 6 and the threat to democratic norms, or should it focus on traditional policy issues?

There was a cottage industry of pundits ahead of the midterms who argued Biden was making a mistake by emphasizing the former, which was allegedly not as important to voters, at the expense of the latter.

But post-election analysis suggested that Democrats prevailed in places where they convinced voters to take “the MAGA threat” seriously, and suffered in places where that message didn’t break through.

After the speech was delivered, New York magazine's Gabriel Debenedetti wrote essentially the same thing:

One moment, from about a year ago, still plays on a loop in the minds of many people close to Joe Biden. It was the final days before a midterm election that nearly everyone assumed would hobble his presidency. The president was putting the finishing touches on a speech he wanted to give about the imperiled state of American democracy, and the cacophonous second-guessing was coming not just from media critics and Republicans but even from fellow Democrats — including the former top political advisors to both Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. To this crowd, it was obvious that Biden was missing a chance to talk to undecided or unmotivated voters by not focusing on topics like the economy or crime; to Biden, whose aides still sometimes reminisce about that week’s MSNBC segments and tweets, it was clear the political class was simply missing the moment. In the aftermath of that speech and that election — in which Democrats outperformed expectations, beating dozens of election deniers — the president made no secret of his sense of vindication.

So does this mean Biden has the winning strategy for 2024?

Maybe, maybe not. First, we can't be sure Biden's emphasis on Trump and MAGA was the deciding factor in 2022 -- undoubtedly it was one factor, but the MAGA candidates who lost also tended to be dogmatically anti-abortion, despite the fact that it was clear many voters were outraged at the Dobbs decision.

Beyond that is the question of who needed to be motivated in 2022 and who needs to be motivated in 2024. Midterms tend to be low-turnout, but wealthier voters usually show up to vote. The Dobbs decision motivated financially comfortable suburbanites to vote Democratic. It's likely that a wish to vote against Trumpism also motivated these voters.

But the presidential election will have a higher turnout. Democrats will need their occasional voters as well as their frequent voters. I don't think we know whether those occasional voters care about democracy.

Those occasional voters probably care about abortion rights -- but they also care about gas and grocery prices, and probably about crime and immigration and other issues on which many of them fault Joe Biden. My fear for 2024 is that a significant percentage of voters like Democrats but don't like Biden. The fact that talk about the dangers of MAGA helped turn them out in 2022 doesn't necessarily mean that the same talk will persuade them to vote for Biden. Polls suggest that many voters have soured on Biden, even though they liked Mark Kelly and John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro and other midterm Democratic candidates.

So Biden needs to talk about the positive things he's done (and acknowledge areas where he's still trying to make things better) -- and he also needs to warn voters that Trump will change course on issues they care about. Under Trump, there'll be more restrictions on abortion. There'll be more book banning. The rich will get more tax cuts. We'll reverse progress on climate change.

Or maybe I'm wrong and stressing the threat to democracy will be a magic bullet for Biden. I have no idea.