Why Biden’s losing the young, Biden’s freezes are real and other commentary

From the left: Why Biden’s Losing the Young

“Disapproval of Biden is widespread among young voters” and not just because of “American support for Israel’s war against Hamas,” explains Jeremy Etelson at The Hill. “Beyond Biden’s personal cognitive challenges, his administration’s policies are having indefensible consequences.” “Rent prices are still above pre-pandemic levels”; homelessness “spiked from 2022 to 2023 to the highest level since 2006.” And “an imminent national security risk has been generated by the border crisis,” with perhaps “10 million undocumented immigrants” entering the country. Biden’s legislative successes, like the Inflation Reduction Act, haven’t “tipped the scale,” as inflation remains at an “historic” high. “The future looks dire for middle-class and low-income Americans”; “many voters in the younger generations are thinking about these various crises,” not “just one issue.”

From the right: A White House in Denial

“The White House and its media allies are in full defensive mode over videos of President Joe Biden” at recent events, observes The Washington Examiner’s Byron York. Some may be convinced by quibbles about the Normandy walk-away or how Barak Obama seemed to guide Biden offstage at that LA fundraiser, but that Juneteenth concert — where “Biden stood perfectly motionless, his eyes seemingly fixed on some distant point” — “was not a misleading video” created by Republicans: “Something was going wrong with the president, and it makes no sense to pretend that it wasn’t.” And if there is “some sort of problem with the president, it will happen again. The White House will not be able to say ‘This did not happen’ whenever something does indeed happen.”

Eye on the Economy: Joe’s ‘Job Growth’ Baloney

“Last year, countless polls showed widespread disapproval of the state of the economy, especially regarding inflation. In response, the Biden administration hung its hat on supposedly blockbuster monthly job gains. But new data show those numbers overestimated job growth by almost 800,000 in 2023,” chides E.J. Antoni at The Washington Times. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “monthly reports are subject to a variety of statistical problems that can sometimes produce significant errors,” but “many news stories don’t report on the downward revisions to previous months’ data.” Now the more-accurate quarterly census “is finally in for 2023, and it shows the previous estimates were off spectacularly, even after the huge downward revisions,” meaning “about 1 in 4 jobs that were supposedly added last year never existed.”