I'm Not Ready to Call for Biden to Drop Out, But I Probably Will Be Soon
I still need an answer to the biggest question: If Biden goes, who replaces him?
Dear readers,
As I told The New York Times in the immediate aftermath, Thursday’s debate was a disaster for President Biden and his candidacy for re-election. He needed to demonstrate that he still has the capacity to do his job as president. He failed at that completely.
I share Sam Stein’s concern: How do you possibly win a presidential election when 72% of the voters think you lack the mental and cognitive capacity to serve as president? Biden was already on track to lose, the polls appear to be breaking a bit against him post-debate, and he’s not going to get any younger or sharper between now and the election. And Thursday’s naked display of frailty and confusion makes it a lot harder for partisans and elected officials and commentators — including me — to make a convincing case to voters that he’s really prepared to serve as president until 2029.
As you know, I’ve been resistant all along to the idea that Biden should not seek re-election because I’ve never seen a satisfactory answer to the most important question: Who would be the replacement nominee, and is that person actually more likely to win?1
It has been hard to envision a route to Biden’s withdrawal that does not end up with Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, and the polling has been consistent all along: Her numbers are even worse than Biden’s, and she’d be less likely to win. Whatever reservations voters have about Biden’s age, they seem to have even bigger reservations about the vice president. And all the theories of how someone other than Harris might be nominated instead (as Ezra Klein suggested might happen a few months ago) have struck me as very half-baked.2
Matt Yglesias, writing to urge Biden’s withdrawal, simply declares that the debate has changed matters and Harris is now a stronger candidate than Biden. That might be right. What little information we have now comes from a post-debate Data For Progress poll — a poll the Biden campaign is touting as a reason he should stay in the race — that shows Biden and Harris putting up exactly the same performance against Trump (that is, trailing by three points). It’s not hard for me to imagine that Harris could run a much more vigorous campaign than Biden between now and November and do more to improve her standing (or at least be less likely to put up highly costly performances like Biden did on Thursday).
Still, I’d like to see some more data before deciding.
I also think, if we’re going to go through all the turmoil that’s involved in changing the candidate at this late stage, we ought to at least try to find a way to put up a stronger candidate than Biden or Harris. As I’ve written, Harris’s political acumen and swing-voter appeal leave much to be desired. (The only competitive general election she’s ever run is one where she beat a Republican by less than a point statewide in California.) But her biggest problem as a replacement nominee has nothing to do with her skills or personal characteristics. The biggest problem is that she is the sitting vice president, and therefore she has less ability to run away from Biden’s unpopular record on the economy and immigration than any other possible replacement would. If Harris replaces Biden, we won’t even get one of the key benefits we’d want from replacing our nominee: cleaning the slate and having less responsibility for the incumbent’s record.
As I say, lots of people are now urging Biden to drop out. But if he dropped out tomorrow, the result would be a mess. Harris is not ready to launch her own campaign. There has not been the requisite planning about what to do next, and the details are important: Is Biden going to endorse Harris? Will there be an open nominating process at the convention? Will party graybeards try to coalesce support around Harris or someone else?3 If there’s going to be a private campaign to talk Biden into the extraordinary step of dropping out, could she maybe also be talked into not running? Given the enormous stakes in this election, it seems like it would be at least worth a shot for Barack Obama and Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer to have the same kind of sit-down with her that we’re all imagining them having with the president, to talk her out of putting her personal ambitions ahead of the interests of the party and the country. Those conversations should be had before Biden drops out, so the party can move to the “what’s next” stage with the minimum amount of turmoil and a strategy that aims as effectively as possible at maximizing the odds of winning.
After all, that same DFP poll that shows Biden and Harris as equal performers also shows lots of potential candidates with much lower name recognition also polling at very similar deficits to Trump, even before they’ve had a chance to introduce themselves to voters — once nominated, they’d have the opportunity to make a positive pitch to voters who don’t know them, without Biden’s obvious frailty or Harris’s perceived extremism. And the fundamental task for a replacement nominee is to run a little better than Biden would in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. I think it’s obvious a Gretchen Whitmer-Josh Shapiro ticket4 would be better positioned to do that than Harris would, given their prior experience of outperforming “generic Democrat” in the Rust Belt. And since the convention is not for two months, I think it’s worth taking a little time to explore whether the convention delegates — a group of 4,000 party insiders who constitute the closest thing to a smoke-filled room that we have these days5 — could find a way toward nominating a totally new ticket.
In the meantime, I see little option besides the public appearance of wagon-circling around Biden. After all, it’s entirely possible that Biden will refuse to step aside. And for him to seek re-election in a situation where much of his party’s leadership has publicly repudiated him would be even worse than one where he limps out of the debate with his party’s full support.6 But even some of the statements of support for Biden have been tellingly tepid, and I hope people like Obama and Jeffries and Schumer are talking behind the scenes about how Biden might be pressured out of the race and what the party would do after he steps aside. Because it’s increasingly clear the party’s best chance of winning will involve getting him to do so.
Very seriously,
Josh
I wrote a few months ago about Kat Rosenfield’s metaphor of this election being between “a large bowl of lukewarm watery gruel” or “a flaming hot cheeto someone dropped under the couch in 2014 that has been slightly nibbled on by mice.” This comparison made a lot of people mad but I think it’s a worthwhile way of thinking about how this election will be decided: by less-engaged, less-ideological voters who don’t like Biden or Trump, and who think the former is too weak and old and the latter too crazy and lawless. I have been inclined to think of that comparison as breaking favorably for Biden in the end, but this debate — and the coverage that’s likely to ensue after it over the next four months — just makes it way too difficult to sell Biden to these voters as plausibly up to the job.
I wrote nine months ago that Biden should pick a new running mate (specifically, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer) for his re-election. That would have caused a painful rift in the party. But if Whitmer were his announced running mate right now, one upside would be that it would be a lot easier for him to drop out in a way that wouldn’t lead to Harris being nominated.
There is one concern I keep seeing people float that I think is not a real problem. People keep arguing that the Biden-Harris re-election campaign’s money can’t be transferred to a new candidate other than Harris, meaning any other candidate would end up at a huge financial disadvantage to Trump. But candidates for federal office can make unlimited transfers to party committees, and therefore if Biden dropped out, he could give his campaign war chest to the Democratic National Committee, which could spend it on efforts to elect the replacement nominee.
Obviously, both candidates on this theoretical ticket are white. I’ve seen a lot of hand-wringing among Democrats — and a lot of self-serving arguments from Harris loyalists — that not having a black candidate on the ticket would be a big problem for black voters. I think this idea is vastly oversold. First of all, as Jonathan Chait notes, it doesn’t appear that Harris’s presence on the ticket is doing anything to stop Biden from underperforming with black voters. Secondly, the campaign doesn’t even need to put up a strong performance with black voters nationally — it needs to put up a strong performance with black voters in swing states, especially Pennsylvania and Michigan, where Whitmer and Shapiro have already demonstrated their ability to perform strongly with black voters. If a Whitmer-Shapiro ticket underperforms with black voters in Los Angeles, who cares?
I often see people talk about the delegate slates as being Biden ultra-loyalists, but I examined the list of delegates from the six congressional districts that include parts of Manhattan or the Bronx, and at least in my corner of the world, that’s not accurate. About half the delegates are elected officials (mostly members of the city council or the state assembly) and others are local party officials, senior aides to the likes of Gov. Kathy Hochul, union leaders, operatives, or lobbyists. These are New York Democratic Party people, likely to be far more interested in the opinions of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries than Kamala Harris. If a similar situation holds for the other delegations, I think people may be underestimating the extent to which the delegates could be convinced to be ruthless about putting the party’s institutional interests ahead of individual politicians’.
I should note that, if Biden stays as the nominee, I will certainly still vote for him. My view is that, even if he’s only reliably in good form between 10am and 4pm, Biden is performing adequately as president because he has an adequate team around him and they are helping him make good decisions. I also think it’s fairly likely that, if re-elected, he would step down long before January 2029 and Harris would succeed him as president, and she would also do an adequate job. Of course, there are a couple of problems with this as a campaign message. One is that the marginal voter has a lot less faith than I do in the Democratic Party apparatus that is propping Biden up. The other is that, if “a vote for Biden is fine because it’s really a vote for Harris” becomes a widespread argument, Democrats will be effectively having to defend Biden’s and Harris’s deficiencies simultaneously; at that point, you might as well make Harris the nominee and take the age issue off the table.
"One of the strongest voices imploring Mr. Biden to resist pressure to drop out was his son Hunter Biden, whom the president has long leaned on for advice,"
When Hunter is telling you to do something you should probably do the opposite.
I have been very aggressively staying out of the news cycle since Thursday night, in a pre-emptive posture, on the theory that I actually *do not* need to give a crap about each and every hiccup as a voter. The responsibility of the news-media industrial complex is to give me the jist of all of this stupid noise.
This article is good. 10/10.