The great debate in the left-of-center political world is underway. Should Joe Biden stay on the 2024 ticket, or should he quit the race?
The Biden doubters argue that the president, already trailing Trump, demonstrated during last week’s debate that his age will likely doom his candidacy. They say his polling has been bad for years and he has proved unable to turn it around, so if Democrats want to win — if they want to prevent the dangers of a Trump second term — they should nominate someone else.
The Biden defenders respond: Not so. While Biden may be the underdog, he still has a real chance of winning, they say. So switching him out in favor of an untested candidate, via an elite-dominated process with little recent precedent, could turn out to be a total disaster, ensuring the Trump victory it’s meant to prevent.
Naturally, not everyone is making up their minds for purely disinterested reasons. Career incentives, personal loyalties, ambitions, grudges, inertia, or agendas on unrelated issues all help explain why some people are backing or opposing Biden.
For instance, the loudest “dump Biden” voices have been media commentators, who have very different career incentives than the elected Democrats, nearly all of whom are so far backing him publicly. Meanwhile, resentment and suspicion against Biden’s top aides and family have risen due to a belief they’ve been hiding his condition.
So this is not exactly a high-minded debate in which everyone is reasonably weighing arguments to determine the best path forward for the party and the country.
But if you are torn on whether replacing Biden would be a good idea, here are three questions that could help clarify your thoughts.
1) How wounded is Biden politically?
The Biden doubters view the debate as a catastrophe but believe the president’s political problems long predated — and will postdate — that event.
They point out that Trump has narrowly led most national polls since last fall and that he has an Electoral College advantage on top of that. Those polls could well get worse after the debate; it’s too early to say for sure (some so far have shown real damage while others have shown little change).
But the Biden doubters fear that the voters’ perception of the president as an aged, declining, doddering incompetent has been cemented by the debate and that it will be very difficult for Biden to turn that around.
Biden’s defenders, in contrast, believed he was not in such a bad polling position before the debate. Though he trailed, it was not by an overwhelming amount, and he still had a plausible Electoral College path to victory by winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Election forecast models varied between giving Biden about a 1 in 2 shot to win, or a 1 in 3 shot. They point to stronger-than-expected Democratic performance in the 2022 midterms, and in recent special elections, to argue that the polls might be missing something.
As for the debate itself, they’ve argued that it was a fluke: one bad night, optimistically pointing to Biden’s vigorous speech at a rally the following day as a contrast. Even if his polls decline afterward, the election is still months away and, they hope, Biden has ample time to turn things around.
Yet the doubters respond with the worry that Biden lacks the capacity to turn things around. They point to the White House’s longtime avoidance of placing the president in unscripted adversarial settings — which, they now suspect, reveals a belief that the president likely can’t sustain scrutiny in such settings because his age really has affected him. Why, they ask, hasn’t he done an interview or press conference since the debate to put the doubts at rest?
2) How politically risky is the process for replacing Biden?
Biden’s defenders typically lean very heavily on the argument that, whatever the president’s flaws, ditching him would likely result in a worse outcome.
They argue that the obvious choice to replace Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, would herself be a weak nominee as stories about Harris’s political struggles as veep have been legion. However, they say, passing over Harris, a woman of color, to anoint someone else would be highly controversial. Throwing open the nomination process at the convention would invite chaos and intra-party fights, forfeiting one of the party’s best opportunities to message its case against Donald Trump, and likely leaving Democrats embittered rather than united. Better to close ranks, stick with the plan, and make the case for Biden.
These fears are exaggerated, the dump Biden camp claims. Some recent polling has shown Harris performing better than Biden. Any ambitious Democrats who weren’t picked would eventually unite around the greater goal of stopping Trump. An open convention might be messy, but it would also bring attention and excitement to the party. A new nominee could get a burst of good feeling from voters who dislike both Biden and Trump. And in any case, even if the fears of chaos are well-founded, perhaps they’re still preferable to sticking with Biden given his diminished chances.
Polling evidence on how Biden substitutes would fare against Trump has typically shown only minor differences. In my view, such polling isn’t worth very much. The replacement’s prospects would depend on many things that haven’t happened yet, such as how their nomination process plays out and how they hold up to attacks from Trump and the right.
But there is an interesting implicit disagreement here. The Biden doubters believe that the Democratic Party is politically strong, that it’s the president who’s the problem, and that if they replace him with somebody else, they have a good shot of being fine. Biden’s defenders, in contrast, seem to think that the president is the only one holding the party together.
3) Will Biden hold up to a second term?
All of the above has been framed under the assumption that the most important thing is to defeat Trump. That’s of a piece with how the discussion has generally unfolded in Democratic circles.
But is there reason to worry about Biden himself in a second term? Is replacing him with another Democrat not only the politically wise thing to do but the morally right thing to do for the country?
Many Democrats have long viewed the Biden “age issue” as overstated and, to the extent they were concerned about it, those concerns were about perception and politics, not governance. Biden had, they believed, been a good and effective president. Sure, he wasn’t the best communicator, but he’d passed major new legislation, rallied the defense of Ukraine, and put the nation on a path to economic recovery.
Among some, there was even an unspoken assumption that perhaps Joe Biden’s condition doesn’t matter that much because he’s appointed good people. Basically, that the Democratic coalition and foreign policy establishment are in charge and they’ve got things under control, so how bad would it be?
But that debate may spur some reexamination of those premises. Will the candidate who was on that stage hold up through four and a half more years in the Oval Office? Would his ability to manage foreign and domestic crises be limited? How would foreign leaders view him? Isn’t communication part of the job of being president? Might it be better for the country to have a different Democrat in charge?
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