Bloomberg: '2024 is the year of elections and that's a threat to democracy'

Opinion writers at Bloomberg and other liberal publications appear to share at least one thing in common with President Joe Biden: a sense that democracy is safe only so long as the right candidates are winning. It turns out, the right candidates happen to be establishment liberals.

Return of the 'unthinkables'

On Sundays, Bloomberg Opinion senior editor Tobin Harshaw cobbles together the various opinions his publication spat out over the course of the previous week and attempts to pull at the threads common among them. This Sunday, in a roundup entitled "2024 Is the Year of Elections and That's a Threat to Democracy," Harshaw exposed his team's disdain for democratic processes that yield results unfavorable to the liberal status quo.

India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, Mexico, Iran, the U.K., South Africa, Austria, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, and possibly Ukraine are among the 64 countries set to hold elections this year, along with the European Union.

"41% of the world's population is having major elections this year. Yay democracy! Right?" wrote Harshaw. "Not really, what with extremist populist parties — mostly right-wing — on the rise everywhere from the European Union to the Pacific rim."

Harshaw referenced a weekend piece by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, which cast the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the restoration of British sovereignty via its Brexit break with the European Union as "unthinkables," then suggested the world in 2024 "is almost a mirror image of 2016."

"In this year of elections, voters in countries representing 41% of the world's population will go to the polls — and in a terrifying number of cases, candidates who would have been seen as extremist wild cards in 2016 look the strongest," wrote the Bloomberg duo.

"The long-shot unthinkables from eight years ago are now the firm favorites, or even just the accepted status quo," wrote Micklethwait and Wooldridge. "Bookmakers give Trump a 40% chance of winning November's presidential election. His closest rival, Joe Biden, is an 81-year-old prone to gaffes and memory lapses, exactly the rival that Trump would want in the grueling marathon that is a modern presidential race."

Not only is a candidate loathed by establishment Washington and the liberal media poised to win the 2024 presidential election, but right-leaning populists farther afield — such as Dutch prime ministerial candidate Geert Wilders and France's Marine Le Pen — are also ascendant, to the chagrin of liberal onlookers in the media.

The Bloomberg duo suggested optimists might be satisfied to know there's a 10% chance of "more benign possibilities" seizing the day. In the case of the U.S. election, they floated the names of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and Nikki Haley as so-called "benign" options.

After insinuating that the basic requirement that things turn out "alright" in 2024 is that "somebody other than Trump wins the US presidency," Harshaw noted that voters may also threaten democracy in the island nation of Taiwan, where "another victory by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party may bring the territory closer to a Chinese invasion."

The head of the DPP, current Vice President Lai Ching-te, has been called a "complete troublemaker" by the Chinese regime.

To deliver the Bloomberg opinion team a "surprisingly good year," voters will have to make sure that "America will be celebrating its first female president; Trump and Netanyahu will be spending more time with their lawyers; the US and China will be devoting more time to mending their economic relationship and less to shadowboxing over Taiwan; [British leftist Keir] Starmer will have begun [reunification] negotiations with the EU; the Israelis and Palestinians will be talking to each other seriously, for the first time in decades; and one or another of the world’s nastier dictatorships will have fallen."

Birds of a feather

The Atlantic is another liberal outfit that has fearmongered over the possibility that voters may not provide establishmentarians with what Harshaw called a "good year."

Brian Klaas, a contributing writer for the Atlantic, suggested Saturday that "even with all this voting, democracy is under severe threat, endangered by predatory politicians who rig elections and disgruntled voters willing to hand over power to autocratic leaders." Klaas even came up with a term to denote the tendency for democratic elections to produce results he doesn't like: "counterfeit democracy."

The decision to seek remedy for bad leadership at the ballot box is emblematic of democracy's erosion, according to Klaas.

Rather than lean into the kind of "stolen election" rhetoric failed Democratic candidates Stacey Abrams and Hillary Clinton have deployed in recent years, Klaas suggested that democracy is failing because of a "toxic cycle: Governance is dysfunctional, so politicians fail to deliver for voters—and voters respond to those failures by contemplating whether authoritarian rule might be better."

"Billions of ordinary people around the world will vote this year," wrote the Atlantic contributor. "If they make the wrong choice, 2024 may be remembered as the year the world embraced elections without democracy."

Campaigning on theme

The democracy rhetoric deployed in the Atlantic and Bloomberg pieces has been central to Biden's re-election campaign.

Within hours of a Democrat-aligned group getting his top rival removed from the primary ballot last month, Biden tweeted, "Trump poses many threats to our country: The right to choose, civil rights, voting rights, and America's standing in the world."

"But the greatest threat he poses is to our democracy," continued Biden. "If we lose that, we lose everything."

In his first major campaign event of 2024, Biden said, "America, as we begin this election year, we must be clear, democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot."

While he claimed that "democracy is about being able to bring about peaceful change," Biden also insinuated that voters' decision to change the man in the White House could mean democracy's end.

The Biden campaign has also capitalized on this suggestion in the decrepit candidate's new 2024 campaign ad.

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