Joe Biden is past his sell-by date. So is "Scranton Joe."

According to E.J. Dionne, two paradoxes will shape the 2024 election.

First:

It’s the paradox of Bidenism: The president sees himself as the champion of the working class but can’t rely on its support to win reelection. To prevail, he’ll need a mountain of ballots from college-educated voters in metropolitan areas.

Second:

The flip side is the paradox of the Republican Party, which now depends on White working-class votes, especially in small towns and the countryside. Yet its economic policies remain geared to the interests of high earners and investors, many of whom have fled the party.

The first is a problem for Biden, but not much of a paradox. Biden may see himself as “Scranton Joe,” champion of the working class, but the working class doesn’t see him that way. I suspect the only people, who do, other than Biden and possibly his immediate family, are liberal pundits and retired Amtrak conductors.

The second “paradox” gets Trump and MAGA wrong. Whatever may be true of the so-called Republican establishment, Trump’s economic policies aren’t geared to the interests of the wealthy.

Yes, during his first term, Trump did push some traditional GOP economic policies, tax cuts for example (I would argue, however, that from JFK, through Reagan, the second Bush, and Trump, tax cuts have helped working class voters, and these voters certainly believe Trump’s policies as a whole helped them). Deregulation can be viewed as another example.

But Trump’s signature economic policies related to immigration and trade. These policies were geared to the perceived interests of working class voters, not the wealthy. Rich people generally love the cheap labor illegal immigrants supply and the lower-cost goods free trade makes available.

If anything, a second Trump term would likely see an even greater emphasis on economic policies intended to cater to the working class.

Accordingly, I don’t see Dionne’s second paradox shaping the upcoming election. However, Trump will need to win GOP voters outside of the MAGA base and a healthy share of independents. Right now, the polls show him doing both.

As for Biden, he doesn’t need to win the working class vote. He defeated Trump in 2020 without carrying that cohort.

But Biden can’t afford much more erosion of working class support. And polls suggest that he’s facing just that prospect, in part because blacks and Latinos seem to be defecting.

Dionne argues that Biden deserves working class support because his economic policies, such as “investments in infrastructure, technology and clean energy,” have benefitted these voters. He points to a study by the Brookings Institution that concluded “economically distressed counties are receiving a larger-than-proportional share of that investment surge relative to their current share of the economy.”

Dionne acknowledges, however, that Biden’s (allegedly) pro-worker policies “have yet to produce the working-class resurgence Democrats hoped for.” And he questions whether they will in time for the election.

The good news for Biden is that he can pose as “Scranton Joe” all he wants without turning off his base of upscale voters. The bad news is that few take the “Scranton Joe” pose seriously these days.

In the end, Dionne pins his hopes for a Biden victory on the abortion issue and on “Trump’s sheer vulgarity.” The good news for Biden is that, seemingly, there’s an endless supply of Trump vulgarity. The bad news is that when a president seeks reelection, the race normally is a referendum on the incumbent, not on the personality or even character of his opponent.

Michael Tomasky, an old-school leftist, hopes that Biden can begin to turn things around with his State of the Union address. He writes:

[Biden] needs to emerge from this speech with working people thinking, OK, I guess that guy is on my side. Then he needs to keep talking that way, and every Democrat needs to fall in line.

Here, the news is almost entirely bad for Biden. First, election year State of the Union addresses rarely have had a perceptible impact on presidential contests. Second, Biden has had three years to prove that he’s on the side of working people. With his immigration policies and his general adherence to woke leftism, he has convinced them of the opposite.

Finally, Democrats are unlikely to fall in line with a message tailored to the concerns of today’s working-class, if by that Tomasky means singing from that hymnal. They are uncertain of the words and don’t know the tune.

Nor are they eager to learn them.