Democrats need a new nominee

I was wrong about Biden, but all is not lost

Matthew Yglesias is my single favorite political writer. I have been a subscriber to his Substack account for over three years now. He has had more influence on my writing and thinking than anyone else. I highly recommend subscribing to his website.

I mention that because on Monday he wrote a piece acknowledging and explaining why he was wrong about Biden. He had supported his running for reelection and believed he was the best realistic option for 2024. After the debate flop, he changed his mind and argued for Biden to drop out. I held out on concluding that initially, but after the last 2 weeks, I, too, have come around to that view. Here, I will try to explain why I was wrong about Biden and now believe Democrats need a different nominee.

Unlike most political writers, I have long been a booster of Biden. I supported his decision to run for reelection and believe he has been a very good and effective president. I approve of the job he has done on domestic and foreign policy. He has been consistently underestimated and managed to accomplish an incredible amount with a bare majority in Congress. I don’t think any of the other 2020 candidates could have done what he has.

When it comes to his age, I never thought it was an asset or didn’t matter at all. I just didn’t think it was as big of a liability as it was made out to be. I based that on the fact that it was inflation that people were most unhappy about. That is true not just in the US, but globally. Almost every incumbent leader now is unpopular, regardless of their age, just look at the recent elections in the UK. I believed people complaining about Biden’s age were using it as a proxy for other things such as him being incompetent.

In addition, my belief about his age being overhyped stemmed from the fact that Trump is also old. With Biden, the problem was not his age per se, but that he seemed like someone his age. Unlike Trump or Bernie Sanders he has no fanatical following and is not charismatic in any way. If he gave off the vibes that Trump or Sanders does, I think concerns about his age would have been lower. I also believed concerns about his age would be lower if inflation wasn’t an issue.

I didn’t think Democratic voters were nearly as concerned about his age as polls showed. My reasoning was that if there was such a concern, Dean Phillips would have done much better than 2% in the primaries. I never expected him to come anywhere close to winning, but if there really was a large groundswell of discontent, he would have picked up some of it by default. Had he routinely done as well as Nikki Haley has in the Republican primaries after dropping out, that would have been a big red flag for Biden.

The debate changed everything. Biden flopped and validated every concern about his ability to campaign and serve another term. What changed my mind about wanting him to withdraw was not the debate itself, but how his team handled the fallout and the deluge of stories that came out afterwards. Prior to the debate, the Biden Administration almost never leaked. Since the debate, there have been leaks almost every hour. That is a telltale sign that morale is rock bottom.

The Biden team’s handling of the debate fallout has been nothing short of horrendous. They have lied, acted like everything is fine, contradicted themselves and have no credibility at all. Stories have since come out that Biden’s inner circle has been hiding his condition for some time.

Some will say his condition was always obvious, but it wasn’t, certainly not like what we have learned over the last 2 weeks. He had some senior moments, but he had plenty of great moments, too. There were many viral videos going around online supposedly showing him not knowing where he is or wandering off, but almost all were either edited or taken out of context. My inclination in general is to never put any stock in such videos.

My big mistake was trusting the Biden team. It’s true Biden has done very few interviews and press conferences compared to his predecessors. Plenty of political writers cried foul over it, but I didn’t. I believed his team knew what they were doing and had a plan to run a vigorous campaign in the summer and fall. I believed they were much more patient and farsighted than their chattering class critics were.

There were stories several months ago about Biden’s condition being poor, but they were mostly based on anonymous sources and people saying things privately. That doesn’t mean such stories are wrong, but it’s hard to evaluate them when you have no idea who is saying what. In the case of the report from Robert Hur, the investigator into Biden’s possession of classified documents, I thought his reporting on Biden’s memory and age was an abuse of power. I still believe that even if it was true. No party or administration officials had come forth to say his condition was poor and many disputed articles alleging that was the case. In the absence of direct, compelling evidence, I believed Biden was in good condition and up to the task of campaigning.

Part of why I trusted the Biden team over their intraparty critics was the track record of the two. Of all the well-known Democrats calling for Biden to not run again, very few of them were ever true supporters of his. They either didn’t support him in the primary or only supported him when it became clear he would be the nominee. In the general election, plenty were critics of his strategy.

When he became president, the same pattern held. Biden was criticized heavily for just about everything he did, whether that criticism was right or wrong. The problem I had with all those intraparty critics was not that they wrong about everything, but that they were totally predictable. Whatever Biden did, they found a way to criticize it.

Virtually everyone in the Democratic Party chattering class had shit on Biden from the beginning only for him to come out ahead. His pledge to restore bipartisanship was dismissed as naïve. His agenda was going nowhere. The midterms were going to be a red wave. Each time, Biden came out on top. I believed that same pattern would follow when it came to concerns about his age and ability to campaign.

To be clear, my reasoning was never, “Biden’s critics think X, so I think the opposite.” That’s a terrible pathology and I don’t want to become afflicted with it. Having said that, it was hard not to notice how wrong conventional wisdom had been about Biden and his prospects, both electorally and legislatively. For that matter, conventional wisdom about much of anything having to do with politics or the economy has been consistently wrong since 2020. It’s not good to automatically think that will continue, but there are worse lines of reasoning to follow.

So, yes, I was wrong and Biden’s critics were right. I owe an apology to all those I dismissed as promoting Aaron Sorkin-like convention drama. We’re at the point where I now agree with Ezra Klein that a bunch of candidates duking it out before and at the convention would be a better option than nominating Biden. I think straight up nominating Kamala Harris would be better, too. Which one of those options would be the better one, I don’t know, but they’re both preferable to the path we’re currently on.

I don’t think it’s accurate to say Biden can’t win. We’re months away from election day and lots of things can and will happen between now and then. Biden’s chances now are not good, but are well north of 0%. As I mentioned in my piece 2 weeks ago, the heavy polarization we have ensures both candidates will have a high floor of support.

The problem is that can cut both ways. Things could get better for Biden, but they could get worse and I’m afraid they will. The debate flop wasn’t a one-time screw up that can be fixed. It has made his age and condition a centerpiece of the campaign, if not the centerpiece.

At every appearance he makes going forward, any stumble of his will be all that’s talked about. For example, his press conference on Thursday went well overall, but he mixed up Putin and Zelensky and referred to Vice President Trump. That’s all anyone is talking about. Those are classic Biden gaffes and not a sign of any decline, but it doesn’t matter. Such gaffes will be seen as evidence that he’s not up to the task of campaigning, let alone serving another term.

The only way Biden could combat that problem is to hold daily press conferences and interviews that are unscripted and not pre-planned. He could have done that after the debate, but has largely stayed hidden. That is what has convinced me he’s not up to the task of campaigning and is too much of a risk to be the nominee.

It’s true, there are risks to nominating Harris or anyone else. The good news is she or any other nominee would have much more upside than Biden. Another nominee would be able to campaign hard and do multiple events each day, something Biden (and Trump) has not been doing. Biden is unable to make the case for himself and, more importantly, is unable to make the case against Trump. Given the importance of defeating Trump, being able to make the case against him is a must.

We’re not helpless

Two past examples of party actors making significant decisions that put their party’s interest over their own demonstrate well that things aren’t fixed. The situation Democrats are in now is not good, but it doesn’t have to be this way. They aren’t stuck with Biden, but getting another nominee will require party actors to get off their asses and get to work. That has happened before.

In early 2020, things looked bad in the Democratic primary. Bernie Sanders didn’t have a majority of the vote, but he did have a plurality and could get the most delegates with everyone else splitting the vote. Many candidates who looked good on paper, including Harris and Cory Booker, had gone nowhere and dropped out. The remaining candidates such as Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, had done well in Iowa and New Hampshire, but hadn’t been able to show any strength elsewhere. Biden had flopped in Iowa and New Hampshire while coming in a very distant second place in Nevada.

The race looked like Sanders’ to lose. That was not something any major actor in the Democratic Party wanted. It looked like Democrats were going to have their own version of 2016 where nobody with any influence wanted Trump to be nominated, but they didn’t work to stop it and so it happened. It could have gone that way, but it didn’t. That’s because party actors took action.

Leading up to the South Carolina primary, Jim Clyburn, who had previously been neutral, endorsed Biden. Very quickly, his support surged and he won the primary handily. After his win there, Klobuchar and Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed Biden. Virtually every party official who had remained neutral or supported another candidate endorsed him, too. Right after South Carolina, Biden killed it on Super Tuesday. He killed it again a week later and the primary was over. What looked like a Sanders win or a contested convention became a Biden rout in less than 2 weeks.

None of that was inevitable. The other candidates could have remained in the race even though they had no chance. Party officials who didn’t want Sanders to be nominated could have stayed quiet and resigned themselves to it while griping about it privately. They chose differently and we’re all better off for it. In 2020, Biden was the beneficiary of people putting the party’s interest over their own. Now, it’s his turn to reciprocate.

It’s important to remember what the goal here is. It is not to elect Biden, but to defeat Trump, just as it was in 2020. Biden was the right candidate to take on Trump then. Given how close the electoral college was, I don’t think any other Democrat would have won.¹ In 2024, I don’t know who the right candidate is, but it is not Biden.

The other example of sacrificing one’s own interest to prevent an undesirable outcome happened last week in France. A little background is necessary for those not familiar. The far-right National Rally (NR) had done very well in the EU parliament elections held in early June. In response to that, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, called a snap election for the French parliament. His goal was to see how much people really wanted the NR to have power.

The way elections in France work is there is first a general election. In races where nobody gets a majority, runoffs are held a week later. In the first round of voting, the NR did very well, getting more votes than any other party. It looked like the NR was going to have the most seats in parliament, if not a majority. Had that happened, they might have been able to have one of their own serve as prime minister and have a big influence on policymaking.

There were 3 main parties/coalitions running for seats in the general election and runoffs. There was the NR, the centrist party led by Macron and a coalition of left/far-left parties. Many races that went to runoffs featured the NR, Macron’s party and the left/far-left coalition. There was a risk that the center and left/far-left would split the vote and allow the NR to win seats.

Both the center and left/far-left didn’t want the NR to win. They could have thrown up their arms and accepted the inevitability of an NR win. They chose differently.

During the week before the runoffs, the center and left/far-left came to a grand bargain, for lack of a better phrase. In races where the center had no chance of winning, they agreed to withdraw from them and give their support to the left. In races where the left/far-left had no chance of winning, they agreed to withdraw from them and give their support to the center.

The results last week stunned almost everyone. Rather than coming in first, the NR came in third. The left/far-left came in first followed by the center in second.

Despite keeping the NR at bay, France is hardly out of the woods. It’s unclear what will happen since no party has a majority. A coalition could be formed, but it’s not obvious how that will happen. The center and left/far-left don’t necessarily share much in common other than disliking the NR. They may wind up with a hung parliament that’s unable to do much of anything. Snap elections could be called again, but not for another year.

More worryingly, much of the left coalition is terrible. On economics, their ideas are arguably even worse than the NR. If the next presidential election is between the NR and the far-left, Robespierre might start to look good. Still, that is 3 years away and nobody knows what will happen before then.

The last thing I will note about the French elections is how similar the reactions to it were to all the other elections held this year. The NR was unhappy that they didn’t win and decried the deal between the center and left. What they didn’t do was say the election was rigged and try to overturn the results. That is how bad Trump is. He is unique in the democratic world in his refusal to accept election results not to his liking.

I cite those two examples not because they’re identical to the Democrats’ situation, but because they are evidence that things aren’t set in stone. There are many things in life that are beyond anyone’s control, but not everything is. Luckily, the situation Democrats, and by extension the country, are facing is not determined. The nominee won’t be official until August 22, the last day of the Democratic National Convention. 5 weeks in politics is an eternity.

I believe Biden will withdraw, but only if he is prodded. It’s up to all those with influence in Democratic Party circles to take action. In particular, it’s imperative that they speak out clearly and publicly if necessary. So far, around 20 Democratic members of Congress have publicly said Biden needs to withdraw. I have no doubt that is just the tip of the iceberg.

The rest will need to speak up. Ultimately, it will require Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Jim Clyburn and Nancy Pelosi to tell Biden what he needs to hear. If they need to tell it to him privately, that is fine and likely preferable. If they have to go public with it, so be it.

Why do I believe Biden will withdraw if Democrats in Congress prod him to do it? Because he is a good, decent person by any measure. He cares about his party and country. He cares about what he will be remembered for and he doesn’t want to be remembered as another Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

My hope is that explicit efforts are already being made to convince him to step aside. His own team may even be aware of the need for it. He has no reason to be ashamed. If he steps down, he will be remembered for ending his presidency with a selfless act of humility and putting his party and country first. It will be a great capstone to a long and successful career.

1. I wish Biden had been nominated in 2016 because I think he would have beaten Trump. If nothing else, he didn’t have any problems with emails, his personal foundation or giving paid speeches to banks. Pushing him aside for Clinton was a major blunder, but it was likely a decision made all the way back in 2008. After the Democratic primary, Obama needed to heal divisions with the Clintons and I’m sure clearing the field for her in 2016 was part of it.