Over at the old Bulwark, the Never Trumpers are trying to save their new party from themselves. And good luck with that.

Charlie Sykes: How did they not get this? James, I’m sorry… How do they not get this? You look at the states — like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio — what percentage of the population has college degrees? And yet you are asking all of those people who are experiencing high anxiety to pay for this transfer of wealth…. And then I’m sorry, I know that Twitter is not real life … but all of these folks saying, ‘This is a betrayal. Only $10,000? I have $50,000 in college debt. If the Democrats are only going to forgive $10,000, well, then I’m not going to vote for them.’ Suck it, Buttercup. I mean, seriously, where does Joe Biden think this groundswell is going to come from, except for this small group of highly-entitled college graduates who dominate the staffing and the inner workings of the Democratic party?

James Hohmann: I’ve asked, I’ve repeatedly asked people. And I’ve asked a lot of people in the White House this question, and essentially the answer is that this is the fault of Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock.

Charlie Sykes: What?

James Hohmann: Stacey Abrams has been browbeating the White House on this, and says that this is the only way she could win — that this is going to be a base turnout election. This isn’t about persuading people in the middle, it’s about getting the base to turn out. And the base isn’t going to turn out if they don’t do this, and that they have all sorts of stats about how a lot of graduates from HBCUs have all this debt. And so there are a lot of people very close to the president who privately understand that this is a complete disaster for them. But the president is being pulled really hard by these woke leftists who … believe it’s all about the base. 

That’s a chat between a WaPo reporter and a Bulwark Never Trumper. Not that it matters. The WaPo reporter, Hohmann, can blame Stacey Abrams, and no doubt she’s been pushing this agenda, but this is how Biden or rather his staffers have governed since Day 1. Deliver for the base, screw everyone else.

Can this work?

By doing it, Biden alienated most of the country while scoring wins for the Left like a political suicide bomber too dumb to realize the dynamite sticks on his belt aren’t sparklers. 

But it’s also important to remember that we have a broken two-party system. And the primary concern of the Biden people is to get through those in 2024. (Yes, I know, Biden’s not going to run, but he believes he is and a whole bunch of people around him would carry him around Weekend at Bernie’s style to get there.)

So we may have the extraordinary spectacle of nuking a general election to win primaries. It’s not so extraordinary at the legislative and state levels, but this would be a whole new epic response to a presidential election that we’ve never seen on this scale.

The other side of the coin is that while Biden can’t win if people turn out, the plan may very well be to create an even worse and bigger dumpster fire to prevent people from even wanting to vote. If the 2020 strategy was to flood the system with votes, in 2024, they may try to starve it.