Election Day 2024 is a Year Away. What Do Last Week's Election Results Tell Us About Biden's Chances?
PLUS: A review of "Higher" by Chris Stapleton
It was a great week for Democrats and an unsettling week for Democrats.
The great: Incumbent Democratic Governor Andy Beshear easily won re-election in deep red Kentucky. A solid majority of voters in Ohio—a state that has swung hard toward Republicans over the past decade—approved a ballot measure enshrining abortion rights in its constitution. For political observers, though, the most significant win was in Virginia, where Democrats not only (barely) held on to their majority in the state Senate but (also barely) gained control of the House of Delegates.
Those wins in Virginia are a big deal because, despite sliding to the left over the past couple decades, Virginia still retains a bit of a purple streak, as evidenced by Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the state’s gubernatorial race two years ago. Youngkin is an amiable governor who keeps MAGA at arm’s length, suggesting to some he may be the future of a more sensible, post-Trump GOP. Youngkin put himself front and center in this year’s midterms, running hard against Democrats on crime while offering a compromise aimed at winning over suburban voters on abortion: A ban on the procedure after fifteen weeks.
Given the nation’s sour mood, few would have been surprised to see the president’s party lose seats across the board in Virginia. A Republican victory would have also suggested the GOP had found a way to defuse the abortion issue in toss-up states (although I think that ultimately would have set up a showdown within the Republican Party between anti-abortion advocates and electorally ambitious party members, since over 95% of all abortions occur prior to the fifteenth week of pregnancy already. What was the point of overturning Roe if Republican lawmakers won’t pass laws to severely restrict abortion?) Yet despite their dissatisfaction with the country’s direction and Republican attempts to make crime rather than abortion the decisive issue in the election, Virginia’s voters still sent Democratic majorities to Richmond.
It’s worth taking stock of just how well Democrats have performed in elections since 2016. They regained control of the House and Senate in 2018 and the presidency in 2020 (although they should have done better in that year’s congressional elections.) The off-year 2021 elections were disappointing, but while Democrats lost control of the House in 2022, they overperformed in those elections and gained a seat in the Senate. They’ve also been overperforming in special elections this year, and ballot measures concerning abortion have not only been winners at the polls but have activated voters as well. I don’t want to say the Democratic brand is good with voters, but these signs suggest it is faring better than the Republican brand.
But those election results were preceded by some not-so-great news: That New York Times/Siena poll of six battleground states showing President Joe Biden struggling against Donald Trump in a potential 2024 showdown. Its main findings:
Biden is trailing Trump in five of the six states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) surveyed. He’s down anywhere from four points in Pennsylvania to ten points in Nevada. Biden had a two point lead in Wisconsin.
Seventy-one percent of respondents think Biden is too old to be president (compared to 39% for Trump) while 62% think Biden is not mentally sharp enough to be president (compared to 44% for Trump). Almost equal numbers think neither man has the temperament to be president. Even 54% of Democrats think Biden is too old to be president.
Trump has a 17-point advantage on the question of whether his economic policies helped or hurt them personally, while Biden has an 18-point disadvantage on the question. Voters trust Trump over Biden 59% to 37% on the economy.
Trump has a 12-point edge on Biden when it comes to who voters trust on foreign policy.
Biden held a miniscule 3-point lead over Trump on who was better for democracy.
Biden is the preferred candidate by one point (47-46%) among voters aged 18-29, a demographic that should heavily favor the Democratic candidate. Only 7% of these voters rate the economy as good or excellent. The same group also trusted Trump over Biden when it came to economic issues by a 28-point margin.
Trump’s support among Latinos has grown over the past seven years from 29% to 43%. His support among Black voters stands at 22%, unprecedented for a Republican candidate.
Perhaps most critically, Biden’s margin of support among non-white voters under the age of 45 is +6 (49%-42%), down from +39 (68%-29%) in 2020.
The only real positive note for Democrats from the survey is that about 6% of voters would switch their votes to Biden if Trump is convicted of a crime. That would probably be enough (but barely) to tilt the election in Biden’s favor.
Other polls reinforced the results of the New York Times poll. A CBS News poll found Trump leading Biden nationally 51%-48%. That same poll found voters believed a Trump presidency would leave them better off financially than a Biden presidency, and that a Trump presidency would be more likely to keep the U.S. out of war than a Biden presidency. Trump led in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania anywhere from four points (in Pennsylvania) to eleven points (in Nevada). A CNN poll found Trump ahead of Biden nationally 49%-45%. That poll found Trump ahead of Biden among voters younger than 35 (48%-47%) and independents (45%-41%). Biden led among Black voters 73%-23% and among Latino voters 50%-46%. Biden’s overall approval rating one year out from election day is 39%, two points lower than Trump at this point in his presidency and seven points better than Jimmy Carter. Both Trump and Carter were one-term presidents.
That New York Times poll had Democrats wetting the bed until the results from Kentucky, Ohio, and Virginia began rolling Tuesday night. It’s hard to get worked up over hypothetical polls when you have real electoral results to celebrate. The White House worked overtime to amplify that message. But is it wise to dismiss those polls? What should we make of this week’s crossed signals?
Fortunately for Biden, we are still a year removed from Election Day, so there is plenty of time for the president to turn these numbers around. Voters may be using these polls to express their frustrations with the state of the nation rather than render a definitive verdict on Biden.
A lot is also bound to happen between now and Election Day 2024. Trump is going to go on trial, and there’s a good chance he’ll be convicted of trying to steal an election. Campaigning will ramp up, as well, which will put Trump and his outrageousness back in the spotlight. The Biden campaign will be sure to highlight everything most Americans dislike about Trump. The MAGA brand has not played well in competitive elections since Trump became president in 2016. It’s easy to see how a Trump campaign could damage Republicans up and down the ballot.
Looking at the poll numbers, it also appears Biden’s problems really boil down to one thing: Young voters, particularly young minority voters. For the most part, older voters are sticking with him. If the Biden campaign finds a way to re-engage and turn out the youth vote, he should be fine.
A year out, though, I’m more pessimistic about Biden’s chances. At this point, Biden and Trump are well-known quantities. Voters know what to expect from either man when presented with a choice between the two. Picking the alternative to Biden in a poll when that alternative is Trump isn’t just registering a desire for a generic alternative to Biden, but a conscious choice to embrace Trump. That makes a supposedly hypothetical poll much less hypothetical.
Sure, a lot can happen in a year’s time. Biden has been counted out before but has proven remarkably resilient. The Republican Party is a hot mess. Trump’s toxicity may finally wreck his prospects. But Trump also has a built-in base of support that will be highly motivated to return him to the White House, and his scandalous behavior has yet to end his political career or even disqualify him as a potential president in the minds of most Americans. Consequently, Democrats must turn-out every part of their coalition—including young voters—to counter Trump’s coalition.
Perhaps the economy will improve further, but then again, it already has, and Biden isn’t getting credit for it. Democrats have time for perceptions to change. But even if wages continue to outpace inflation and consumers grow accustomed to higher prices as inflation subsides, the choice in 2024 will be between the guy who was president when a two-liter of a Coca-Cola cost $2.00 and the guy who was president when that same two-liter cost $3.25.
Biden has been a good president. Considering the microscopically slim margins he had to work with, his legislative record is impressive: The American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act (which includes provisions to battle climate change and lower the costs of prescription drugs), and a modest gun control bill. Inflation hit consumers hard but has fallen. Unemployment is low and GDP is high. Biden has managed the war in Ukraine well, and while I am less enthusiastic about his handling of Israel’s war with Gaza, his actions align with American popular opinion. The president has a solid record to run on. He’s waiting for that to sink in, though, as voters seem unmoved, even unaware of his accomplishments.
Biden is an old school politician who understands policy gets made not in front of cameras but out of the public eye. You can credit his success to that. I wish more Americans had an appreciation for that side of politics. But politicians can’t neglect the public-facing side of their jobs, and when it comes to that, it’s pretty clear Biden just isn’t connecting with the American people. Most would probably chalk it up to his age. As a Democrat who honed his political skills in the 1970s and 1980s, he just isn’t on the same wavelength with younger voters. More broadly, though, when Americans see Biden on TV, he often comes across as tired, slow, disengaged, or off-kilter. My guess is people feel Biden is always a step behind or not quite on top of things. They don’t want a leader who has to play catch-up but who gets what’s going on in their lives and around the country right now, who isn’t at risk of being overwhelmed by the job but who has the energy and vigor to fight on behalf of the American people.
I personally don’t think that’s a fair assessment of Biden. My sense is he is much more in touch with the times than most Americans think even they are. Furthermore, “energy and vigor” don’t necessarily translate into good leadership, as an unhinged Donald Trump demonstrates on a regular basis. Yet that’s the perception of Biden that’s sunk in, and unless the mood of the country begins to lighten and some of that newfound optimism gets reflected onto him, he’ll have a hard time reversing it.
Biden ran for president in 2020 because he felt he was the right candidate for the moment: A steady, trusted hand who could unify the Democratic Party and win the votes of independents and Republicans exhausted by Trump. Biden and his fellow Democrats need to ask themselves now if he is the right candidate for 2024. There is too much at stake for Democrats to simply defer to the tradition of re-nominating the incumbent president.
I can’t say with any certainty I know the answer to that question. There are good arguments on both sides. The political environment should favor Biden. Democrats should have more confidence heading into this election than Republicans.
But after watching the results come in on Election Day this past Tuesday, my gut tells me it would be wise for Biden to step aside. Again, it’s not because I think Biden hasn’t earned a second term. It’s that the Democratic brand works against both the MAGA and MAGA-adjacent brand, yet the Biden brand has consistently lagged the Democratic brand. In fact, the New York Times poll found a generic Democrat would defeat Trump in those six toss-up states 48% to 40%. Maybe that’s a sign Biden will soon surge in the polls; after all, think how much more challenging things would be right now if Democrats generally polled as poorly as Biden. But the same poll reported voters are dreading a 2020 rematch. Why not find a younger, mainstream Democrat acceptable to party stalwarts who can energize young voters, who has demonstrated her ability to win elections in a battleground state, who can run hard on the abortion issue and latch on to the energy that has fueled high turnout on state ballot initiatives, and who can provide a fresh break from the post-retirement generation that has dominated politics for the past eight years?
There is always the possibility that a presidential candidate who looks good on paper will end up having skeletons in their closet or bomb on the national campaign trail (see “DeSantis, Ron”). And new candidates are blank slates for the media and the opposition to define. There’s a tremendous risk in abandoning the advantages of incumbency for someone voters will have to take time learning about. There also may not be enough time this late in the primary game for Democrats to figure out who the best candidate to take on Trump might be.
But I also think a majority of Americans are ready to move on to something new in their politics. They want to break with Trump and the past and get on with the future. Joe Biden can take credit for bringing the United States to the doorstep of this new era and saving democracy. That’s a solid legacy. What Biden and the Democrats need to quickly figure out, however, is if Biden is the best person to preserve that legacy. There’s too much riding on this election to get this wrong.
Further reading: “Tuesday Was Great for Democrats. It Doesn’t Change the Outlook for 2024” by Nate Cohn of the New York Times
Signals and Noise
David Leonhardt of the New York Times offers an important reality check for Democrats: “Nationwide, not a single Republican governor or senator has lost re-election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That pattern might seem to conflict with this week’s election results, but I don’t think it does. Most Americans support widespread abortion access and will vote for ballot initiatives that protect or establish abortion rights. Yet in an election between two candidates, only a tiny slice of people is likely to vote differently because of any one issue, including abortion.”
According to an AP poll, nearly half of Democrats disapprove of Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Biden won Michigan by less than 3% in 2020. The state has one of the nation’s largest Arab American populations. A new poll has found Biden’s support among Michigan’s Arab American voters has cratered since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war.
In other Michigan political news, former Republican Rep. Peter Meijer—who voted to impeach Trump after 1/6 and then lost his primary to a MAGA Republican in 2022 who would go on to lose that fall’s election to a Democrat—has announced a campaign for Michigan’s Senate seat. The Senate GOP campaign arm doesn’t want anything to do with him, arguing his impeachment vote will turn off base voters (true, but proof the GOP is unprincipled when it comes to the defense of American democracy.) But then Meijer said he’d support the Republican nominee for president in 2024, even if it is Trump, claiming Biden has done far worse. Pathetic. (For more, see my article “Don’t Count on Moderate Republicans to Save Us” from a couple weeks ago.)
“We’ve become a party of losers.”—Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, during the Republican presidential debate
By Nate Silver: “The GOP is a Trump Trap” (“It’s also not as though Republicans have struck out. Trump won in 2016 in a historic repudiation of the established political order. And they have a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which overturned Roe v. Wade and could persist for decades. Those are some big wins to savor. But it’s been one hell of a devil’s bargain: a choice between mediocre results with Trump on the ballot or outright poor results without him. And without a lot of other models of electoral success — John McCain and Mitt Romney lost; George H.W. Bush was a one-termer, and George W. Bush ended his tenure as an extremely unpopular president — it’s not clear how the GOP breaks out of the trap.”)
🚨🚨🚨 From the Washington Post: “Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.” 🚨🚨🚨
“If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.”—Don Trump, during an interview with Univision
And from the New York Times: “Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.”
Tom Nichols puts it bluntly in an article for The Atlantic reflecting on Trump’s plans for political vengeance: “If American democracy falls in 2024, the chief culpability will rest with Trump, his aides, and the elected Republicans who enabled him (either out of fear or venality or both). But if Trump manages, one last time, to squeeze 271 electoral votes out of a distracted and sullen American electorate, much of the blame will also rest with voters who couldn’t be bothered to put aside their petty beefs and particularistic interests long enough to link arms at the ballot box and defend the American system of government.”
By Philip Bump of the Washington Post: “A Lot of Americans Embrace Trump’s Authoritarianism”
By Margaret Sullivan of The Guardian: “The Public Doesn’t Understand the Risks of a Trump Victory. That’s the Media’s Fault”
Trump took the witness stand in his civil fraud trial in New York. Aaron Blake of the Washington Post has 4 key takeaways, including the key one: Trump treated his testimony like a campaign event.
This Washington Post article is helpful in understanding how federal prosecutors in the election fraud case intend to counter Trump’s argument that everything he said, including the falsehoods, were protected by the First Amendment, particularly since he believed the “Big Lie” to be true. In summary, prosecutors will argue that even if Trump believed the election was stolen, he spread lies he passed off as factual evidence to support that claim. Furthermore, he knew those lies were false but repeated them anyway in an effort to undermine the election.
“They indicted me! Can you believe? My father and mother are looking down. ‘Son, how did that happen? We’re so proud of you, son. How did that happen?”—Don Trump, reflecting on how his parents would be proud that he’s been accused of a crime. And if you want to know “how did that happen,” here’s an article he could share with his parents. It involves hording state secrets in an unsecured bathroom, inciting a riot at the Capitol building in an attempt to subvert American democracy, and an affair with a porn star.
By Rich Lowry, for Politico: “What If Trump is Convicted, and Nobody Cares?”
Catie Edmondson and Carl Hulse of the New York Times report House Republicans are no closer to finding a way to fund the government than they were before Kevin McCarthy lost the gavel a month ago. In fact, with less than a week to go until the government runs out of money (and after they spent three weeks trying to figure out who their leader should be) Speaker Johnson adjourned the House for the weekend. Said one House Republican: “We’re still dealing with the same divisions we always have had. We’re ungovernable.” (NOTE: Yes, you’re “ungovernable,” but what I think you meant to say is “we can’t govern.”)
DEVELOPING: Speaker Johnson has endorsed a two-step “laddered” stopgap to avoid a shutdown. It feels too clever by half and is already meeting with some resistance from Republicans, but who knows how much opposition GOP House members really feel like putting up at this point.
Meanwhile, as Johnson dithers, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer plans on jamming the House with his own funding bill.
Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer, who is leading the House investigation of Joe Biden, has raised hell over a $200,000 loan Biden gave his brother in 2017. But guess who else loaned his brother $200,000?
You’ll be so surprised: James Comer.
As Roger Sollenberger of The Daily Beast reports, “Comer and his own brother have engaged in land swaps related to their family farming business. In one deal—also involving $200,000, as well as a shell company—the more powerful and influential Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing. Other recent land swaps were quickly followed with new applications for special tax breaks, state records show. All of this, perplexingly, related to the dealings of a family company that appears to have never existed on paper. But unlike with the Bidens, Comer’s own history actually borders a conflict of interest between his official government role and his private family business—and it’s been going on for decades.”
If Republican Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville doesn’t relinquish his hold on military promotions, it appears many Republican senators are prepared to join Democrats for a one-off mass confirmation resolution. Republicans want it known they’ve bent over backwards to accommodate Tuberville before heading down that path, though. MORE: Has Tuberville blinked?
One has to wonder what standing athwart Joe Biden’s social policy agenda and yelling “Stop!” did for Democratic Independent West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who announced he will not seek re-election to the Senate. His seat will almost certainly be won by a Republican (as it probably would have even if he had sought another term.) Manchin appears to be considering a run for president with the No-Labels ticket. It’s unlikely a third party run would land him in the White House (more likely, it would probably help Trump) so the U.S. will be spared Manchin’s political presence after 2024, just as he made sure it is still spared a national child care program and paid leave and many other reforms.
A.B. Stoddard of The Bulwark calls on Mitch McConnell to go rogue: “Is McConnell prepared to endorse Trump a third time next spring? If Trump wins next year McConnell is toast. And if Trump loses it is hard to imagine House Republicans won’t object to certifying a Biden 2024 victory—and the MAGA caucus in the Senate will follow suit. McConnell owes himself a better legacy than being run out of town by J.D. Vance, Ron Johnson, and Donald Trump. He can help the country, and democracy, and himself, by abandoning the needs of his party to do what is right.”
Michele McPhee of Los Angeles Magazine dishes the former Democratic Los Angeles City Council president caught on tape hurling racist and bigoted comments at fellow politicians has resurfaced in Arizona and has apparently made the only move that can keep her political prospects alive at this point: She’s become a Republican.
For the first time in American history, the United States’ population is projected to shrink. The population is expected to peak at 370 million in 2080 and then decline to 366 million by 2100.
As Israel’s ground forces completely encircled Gaza City, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told ABC News Israel would have “overall security responsibility” in Gaza following its war there. He also rejected a ceasefire.
Zack Beauchamp of Vox writes about the uptick in violence directed at Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers over the past month: “Radical Israeli settlers, who intentionally build communities in the West Bank, routinely harass and assault their Palestinian neighbors. The settlers attack their herds, burn their property, beat them, and even kill them. This violence, paired with many more subtle techniques to pressure Palestinians to give up their land, has reached unprecedented levels in the month since the terrorist group Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel on October 7. At least 15 Palestinian communities have been fully displaced.”
Yair Rosenberg of The Atlantic looks at members of Israel’s left who have mobilized to defend their nation and support the victims of the war and, as critics of Netanyahu, could emerge as a new generation of national leaders.
Nahal Toosi of Politico reports State Department staffers are circulating dissent memos critiquing the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict. In particular, the memos argue the U.S. should be more willing to call out the actions of the Israeli government.
By Daniel Kurtzer for The Atlantic: “Why a Gaza Cease-Fire is Unrealistic”
By John Aziz for The Atlantic: “All My Life, I’ve Watched Violence Fail the Palestinian Cause”
Top 5 Records Music Review: Higher by Chris Stapleton
Someone told me 15-20 years ago that if someone wanted to listen to current rock and roll, they needed to tune their radio to a country music channel. That was when you could still hear guitar-driven post-grunge and indie rock bands in fairly regular rotation on pop and pop-adjacent stations. This person’s point was that the “classic rock” aesthetic associated with the late 1960s and 1970s was migrating from pop to country.
At first, the touchstones were country adjacent rock acts like Creedence Clearwater Revival, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Eagles, and John Mellencamp, all of whom had an appreciation for rock and roll’s musical roots. The comparison, however, only drew attention to how much more adventurous rock and roll had been in its day than country music was currently. Eventually, country musicians began to draw from heavier acts: Aerosmith and AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses and Bon Jovi, even Nickelback. But with the exception of Eric Church, it felt like a sellout. For the most part, it didn’t make sense for musicians working in a genre noted for its stylistic traditions to link their music to the sounds of late-era classic rock, which had buried its connections to rock and roll’s roots beneath a more generic, stadium-ready “rock” sound. By connecting themselves in this way to classic rock while reveling in country music clichés, it was as though these bro-country musicians were saying they actually loathed country music.
Country musician Chris Stapleton, however, has always stood apart from this pack. When he first began racking up CMA and ACM awards eight years ago for his debut album Traveller, Stapleton was heralded as a breath of fresh, authentic air, someone whose debt to musicians beyond the country tradition deepened rather than cheapened the country aesthetic. He was already poised for a massive breakthrough at the 2015 CMAs (he would take home trophies for Album of the Year, Male Vocalist of the Year, and Best New Artist) but his performance with Justin Timberlake of David Allen Coe’s “Tennessee Whiskey” (included on Traveller) instantly earned Stapleton nationwide recognition and turned him into one of country music’s most cherished artists.
As you can tell, Stapleton has soul. And the blues. He can rock, too. Yet his music is always identifiably country. He’s proof all these strands of music come out of the same well and can speak to one another across the racial barriers that too often keep them from one another.
Stapleton’s voice is so American that if he didn’t exist, the American gods would have had to create him. He sounds so familiar, but it’s hard to identify a precedent. Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes is a close approximation, but there’s more shading and emotional nuance in Stapleton’s vocals. Because his voice is so soulful, Stapleton is often compared to Ray Charles, who did, after all, release a few country albums in his time and could slide effortlessly between genres over the course of a single verse.
More than anything, though, he seems like a throwback to the late 1960s/early 1970s, when rock, blues, and soul artists were busy making a gumbo out of all the ingredients that had gone into rock and roll. The rawness of Stapleton’s music and the way he draws out his lyrics owes something to the roster of artists at Memphis’s Stax Records, specifically Otis Redding. There’s a bit of Leon Russell to him, too, but without the eclecticism or zaniness. Had Stapleton been active in the early 1970s, there’s no doubt he would have been mistaken for an Allman brother. The song for me, though, that best captures where Stapleton is coming from is “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City” by R&B singer Bobby “Blue” Bland.
Like Redding, Bland came out of Memphis, the Mississippi River town sitting at the intersection of three different states where the blues, country, and gospel music came together to make rock and roll. Musicians in Memphis spent over two decades in the middle of the twentieth century experimenting with those different styles, turning up the rhythm and blues elements on one hybrid track, perhaps, while trying to find the right balance between country and soul on another. It matched the gritty working-class spirit of the city, a crossroads blend of rural and urban and black and white. The music was electric but elemental, chameleonic but timeless. It sounded like a recently recovered ancient truth America had long denied. Stapleton sounds like Memphis.
Stapleton is out with a new album this weekend called Higher. It’s his fifth in eight years. As on previous albums, Stapleton fashions himself a modern day cowboy rambling through the wide-open spaces of the American West. (He may be from Kentucky, but there’s more western than country to his persona.) This isn’t the land of Manifest Destiny, though. The way he sings about “South Dakota” (just north of Nebraska, I ought to note) would make Dante proud:
Rugged individualism isn’t a romantic notion in a Stapleton song; instead, it’s a way to wreck a man’s soul. Out in the middle of nowhere, it’s easy for a solitary man to get lost, waste away, numb his pain with alcohol, and get himself in trouble. The creed of self-reliance reveals itself to be a creed of self-destruction. “I can't stay, but I can't leave,” he sings, “Or get myself away from me.”
The solution is companionship, specifically with a woman who can love and ultimately redeem him. It’s a sincere sentiment, but one that gets overdone a bit on Higher. By swaddling the album in bliss, Stapleton ends up lowering the stakes. I’d like to hear more inner turmoil. Does that man who was lost and lonesome on the South Dakota plains have doubts about whether he can settle down? Does he feel like he’s lost something? Does life in a community grate on him? Are the Black Hills calling him back? The album’s final song, “Mountains of My Mind”, raises these questions, suggesting South Dakota is more than a place but a psychological condition. Similar themes are also found on the album’s first single “White Horse” (see Exit Music), the sort of blistering rock song I was told I could find on country music radio.
As I mentioned earlier, Higher is Stapleton’s fifth album. It’s also his fifth good album. Audiences are still waiting for Stapleton’s album-length conceptual masterpiece (even though he’s got enough tracks to fill out what would be a fantastic “Best of” compilation.) In the meantime, let’s not take the work Stapleton’s voice is doing for granted. Every Chris Stapleton record is a reminder a song’s meaning isn’t discerned by reading its lyrics but by listening to it. Stapleton’s voice is a mighty instrument that challenges listeners by wringing unexpected and sophisticated emotions out of the most straightforward of lyrics. At the same time, it taps into something fundamental about the American experience. If Higher strives to be an album about how a lonely man’s demons can be soothed by community and companionship, one can hear that drama working itself out in every inflection of Stapleton’s timeless and soulful voice.