After the Buffalo mass shooting, the Democrats and their media acolytes pushed a narrative that had helped them in previous elections. President Joe Biden politicized the killings and blamed Republicans and conservatives for promoting the “great replacement” theory. However, polls show that the strategy didn’t work as planned.
The Race Card
Democrats and the advocacy media have successfully used a strategy of painting whites and, by proxy, Republicans as racist. It worked in the 2012 Trayvon Martin case, where Hispanic George Zimmerman killed a young black man in self-defense. CBS edited an image of Zimmerman to make him look white, and NBC edited his 911 call to make him sound racist.
Dozens of blacks are murdered in America every day, but they are of no interest to the mainstream media. Only if the perpetrator can be cynically exploited for political gain does the killing of a black person become a national story.
The race-baiters were lucky in 2020 when George Floyd, who was black, died under the knee of a white police officer. It was only a few months before the presidential election, and the Democratic Party took full advantage of the opportunity to paint America as systemically racist. During the election campaign, Biden rhetorically asked, “What does President Trump think will happen when he continues to insist on fanning the flames of hate and division in our society and using the politics of fear to whip up his supporters?”
The Buffalo Shooting
When an 18-year-old radical environmentalist describing himself as an “eco-fascist” killed primarily black people in a supermarket in Buffalo, the race-baiting industry hit the jackpot. Since Democrats are not doing well in the polls, with Biden’s approval rating currently abysmal, the Buffalo shooter provided a golden opportunity to halt the red wave by smearing Republicans as promoters of the “great replacement” theory.
It meant leaving out inconvenient statements from the shooter’s manifesto, such as “there is no Green future with never-ending population growth.” Instead, Tucker Carlson, who was not mentioned once in the manifesto, was singled out as having radicalized him. When Biden visited Buffalo, he unashamedly used the event to politicize the acts of a deranged young man.
The Polls
Joe Biden (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
One must be careful not to tie single events to poll shifts. However, significant episodes make good opportunities to study people’s sentiments. Liberty Nation asked its readers in a poll the following pointed question: Are President Biden’s comments about MAGA extremism his “deplorable” moment? The result: 90% yes, 8% no, and 2% maybe.
Other polls show results consistent with this outlook. The week after the shooting, Republicans fell 0.5% in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate generic poll. The movement is too small to be statistically significant. In the same survey, generic Democrats did not profit. On the contrary, they also fell by 0.4%.
However, there was a significant movement in FiveThirtyEight’s aggregate approval rating for Biden. On May 15, 52.8% disapproved of his performance; by May 23, the number had risen sharply to 54.4%, the highest disapproval of his presidency.
Backfiring
The Buffalo shooting was Biden’s golden opportunity to be a unifying leader. He could have warned that the actions of a single mentally disturbed individual should not be used as a weapon against the other side. People of all political persuasions would have appreciated such a gesture. Instead, he went low, and the public appears to have recognized his undignified tactics.
However, the principal lesson is that race-baiting by the Democrats and the legacy media didn’t give them any measurable metrics, not even a short-term bump in the polls. It backfired and could mean the public is finally sufficiently inoculated against this form of political posturing by politicians and their disciples in the leftist media.
