Democrats fear Biden is incapable of articulating their message

“I believe President Biden must do more to demonstrate he can campaign strong enough to beat Donald Trump,” Washington Democrat Senator Patty Murray, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement this month. “Our nominee must be able to articulate what Democrats have accomplished and everything we will do to make life better for American families and protect their freedoms – like making child care affordable and accessible for parents everywhere and restoring abortion rights for women in all 50 states.”

Biden has tried to ramp up his campaign after his poor debate performance, but those appearances have brought new headaches. (He has been self-isolating at home in Delaware since Wednesday after testing positive for COVID-19.)

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In a speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in Las Vegas this week, the president previewed a White House policy proposal to strip tax benefits from certain landlords who raise annual rent by more than 5 per cent. Democrats view the idea as a populist proposal to win over young voters stressed by high housing costs and a contrast to Trump, a billionaire real estate developer. Biden mischaracterised the plan.

“Look, folks, the idea – the idea that corporate-owned housing is able to raise your rent three, four hundred bucks a month or something – under what I’m about to announce, they can’t raise it more than $US55,” Biden said. (Biden’s plan would need congressional approval.)

Biden also appeared to run into trouble discussing his plans for drug-price cuts.

“It will save taxpayers, just what I did on the first round on deal… dealing with Medicare. It saves the taxpayer $US160 billion – because they don’t have to pay these exorbitant prices to these … anyway, I won’t,” he trailed off in his NAACP speech.

Biden’s struggles to explain his efforts to protect abortion access – an issue central to Democrats’ 2024 electoral hopes – also have frustrated allies and supporters. The president, a Catholic who once opposed abortion and often avoids saying the word “abortion” when asked about it, offered a convoluted response when pressed during the debate on legal limits on abortion.

“First time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. And a third time is between the doctor – I mean, it’d be between the woman and the state,” Biden said.

Biden inexplicably veered into talking about immigration in another abortion answer: “Look, there’s so many young women who have been – including a young woman who just was murdered and he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by … by … by an immigrant coming in and [inaudible] talk about that,” the president said, according to the transcript.

Reproductive rights activists characterised the comments as a major missed opportunity to draw a contrast with Trump, who appointed three of the five Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Taxes are another area where Democrats believe they should have an edge over Trump, who in 2017 signed into law a tax plan that disproportionately benefited the rich.

But in an interview with Univision that aired on Thursday, Biden veered from a discussion of his pledges to raise taxes on billionaires into comments about the nation’s education system.

“Look what’s happening in our schools,” he said, according to a Univision transcript. “What’s happening in schools, all the stuff about gay and lesbian children. Look how they’re being. Anyway. And so many things we could do.”

The president then alluded to his expansion of the child tax credit, which lifted millions of families out of poverty and expired at the end of 2021: “Everybody who had a child under, making under $US200,000, or if they’re making $US200,000, they got, they got a 38 … they got a write-off on their taxes.”

Biden’s actions on prescription drugs present a particularly challenging test: his accomplishments can be difficult to explain simply, such as the provision that requires pharmaceutical companies to negotiate the prices of their drugs with Medicare, a long-sought goal for policymakers. But the issues poll well when voters understand them, so Democrats are eager to bring them up.

Biden’s drug-pricing wins are “the No.1 testing proof point that I’ve seen in focus groups that I personally observed,” said a communications strategist at a major Democratic-aligned group, speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “Lots of people said they would rein in Big Pharma; he actually got it done.”

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But many Americans are unaware of Biden’s efforts, which include capping seniors’ out-of-pocket spending on drug costs at $US2000 per year. About one-quarter of voters said they knew that a federal law would limit out-of-pocket spending on prescriptions for Medicare beneficiaries, according to a poll released in May by KFF, a nonpartisan healthcare think tank. Only 36 per cent of voters said they knew that a law required the federal government to negotiate the price of some prescription drugs for Medicare.