Would you prefer a side of arsenic or cyanide with your meal?
By 
This is a long post. You can skip to the end and get a summary. Also, I’m sure it’s full of typos.
I’ve been extremely resistant to the idea that we should replace Biden.
Even if he’d bowed out before the primaries, it would have meant giving up the myriad advantages of incumbency. Biden did, as he takes pains to remind us, already beat Trump. Regardless, once Biden decided to run he, as the saying goes, stuck a fork in it. He was going to be the nominee.
The conventional wisdom holds that even serious intra-party challenges to incumbent presidents a) invariably fail but b) mange to weaken the party’s ability to hold the White House. It’s more likely that such challenges are, as we nerds like to say, endogenous: they’re driven by the same factors which cause the incumbent to eventually lose in the general election. But what matters here is what people think, and no viable Democrat wanted to commit political suicide by running against Biden.
This is a terrible time to change horses. It will give a lot of ammunition to ratf••••••. Harris is the only candidate who can seamlessly transition to the head of the ticket, but her 2020 campaign doesn’t inspire confidence. And, let’s face it, a lot of people think it’s a bad idea to run a black woman against a candidate whose ‘bread and butter’ is divisive racial appeals.
But any other choice is not only logistically complicated—it would include donating the Biden war chest to either the DNC or a PAC, which places limits on coordination—but may alienate the most reliable Democratic voters, i.e. black women.
Is “the party” even capable of managing a switch? It seems like we’re about to find out.
Like Cheryl, I think that the writing is likely on the wall. Biden’s not going to be the nominee.
Unlike Cheryl, I think that may be a good thing. I’m going to indulge myself by explaining why—or more accurately, what combination of arguments I’ve found persuasive.
I want to be clear that I think that Biden can win. The national polling is close, and it’s July. Experience suggests the dynamics of the election have plenty of time to change.
Moreover, the fundamentals—the U.S. economy is doing well, household income is rising, and very few Americans have died in overseas conflict—are very favorable. However, the variable that points toward a loss, his approval rating, is all kinds of awful.
I think that’s one reason why the “debate shock” proved particularly intense.
- Before the debate, Biden was gaining in the polling aggregators. That kind of regression to the mean is what we’d expect if “the fundamentals” theory is correct. It wasn’t terribly strong evidence for the theory. It might have reflected Biden’s total dominance of the airwaves in swing states. It might have been random movement. But it was something.
- The most important reason is the obvious one. Biden and his advisors had been assuring everyone that everything was copacetic. Those stories about his decline were “hit” pieces. Yes, the polling data showed that Biden’s age was likely a big drag on his numbers. But his performance in the campaign would bring people around.
Biden has done “okay” since then, he hasn’t been good. As in, “he clearly knows what he’s talking about but man, he doesn’t sound great” when he’s not reading a speech; and when he reads, he still has moments of frailness.
The thing is, Biden’s never been a great communicator. There are good reasons that he never secured the nomination prior to his stint as vice president, and one of them is that he’s a gaffe machine. Some of those “gaffes” are evidence of Biden’s “refreshing” honesty: his tendency to say what he thinks, even if he shouldn’t. I think most of us remember his comments about Obama during the 2008 primary. But my favorite example is when he explained, in a press conference, that it would be difficult to secure a united NATO front if Putin continued with salami tactics in Ukraine. This was true. It also not something you generally tell reporters.
Anyone who does a lot of public speaking slips up. I routinely refer to “the Soviet Union” in lectures when I mean the Russian Federation. I’ve “blanked” on students names, or called them by the wrong name, hundreds of times. Unlike Biden, I don’t have to contend with a stutter.
Biden’s communication skills have clearly gotten worse in recent years. He was a better speaker in 2012 than in 2020. He was better in 2020 than he is now.
Is that evidence of cognitive decline? I don’t know.
Is it fair that every “normal” flub or gaffe gets treated as evidence that he’s not fit for office? That Trump gets a pass for the same verbal tics because he’s loud and speak in word salad? Obviously not. But politics isn’t fair, and the frame is fully baked in at this point.
This presents two related challenges. Democratic officials have clearly lost confidence that Biden can function as the party’s standard bearer. He seems incapable of consistently articulating a coherent, effective political message. Even when he does succeed, the message is now totally overshadowed by the “fitness to serve” questions.
Democratic officials have simultaneously lost confidence in the White House itself as evidence accumulates that Biden’s staff was “managing him”—not just in terms of avoiding situations where he might fall, for example, but they’ve been doing the kinds of things that we’d expect them to do if Biden is in cognitive decline. It’s hard to shake the conclusion that they “covered” for Biden and, in doing so, misled democrats, democratic officials, and the American people about Biden’s declining communication skills. That’s bad enough in of itself, but it undermines Biden’s advantage (if it still exists) on honesty.
We may “know” that a vote for Biden is, in a lot of ways, a vote for his appointments But that’s not how most Americans think about the presidency and presidential leadership.
The fact is that a large percentage of voters, even people who intend to vote for him, do not believe that Biden can be an effective president—and certainly not for four more years. How can someone who looks that frail and confused, even if only some of the time, be given the awesome power of the presidency, including the authority to launch a nuclear strike?
This sentiment is incredibly dangerous; it makes Trump seem like the “safer” choice, Sure, you might dislike the guy, but he exudes strength and assurance. Yeah, we might roll our eyes at this argument. But consider that his “leadership” scores in polling generally trounces Biden’s—and that’s been true for months. This comparison is at the heart of Trump’s campaign strategy, and Biden provided them with the caricature they needed.
Here’s “the test” I put to Cheryl on Bluesky: if you’re talking to an undecided voter, and they express concerns about Biden’s fitness, how would you answer? Remember that being a successful president doesn’t address the fear that he’s in decline. My guess is that you’d quickly pivot to discussing how Trump would be a disaster.
For plenty of voters, that’s enough. But I don’t think fear and loathing of Trump is sufficient to win the election, especially now that the Trump campaign is professionalized.
Now consider that Biden is underperforming the “fundamentals.” We can talk about “vibes” all we want, but Biden still needs to change those vibes, and commercials alone may not be enough. At the same time, the polling appears to show that Biden’s age is a big negative for voters. Since Biden can’t make himself younger, he needed to convincingly demonstrate to voters—as Trump has apparently done—that he remains a ‘strong and effective leader.’ He didn’t.
I’m using the past tense deliberately: He’s already squandered any chance he had to “undo” the debate performance. Anyone who does that math already knows that his odds of serving an entire second term are poor; the worst-case scenario is serious cognitive decline, which might also make it hard to sideline him. The 25th amendment really isn’t designed for this kind of contingency.
As I noted above, Biden can still win. He has a lot of advantages. The question is whether he’s more likely to win than Harris, let alone someone from the bench. (I promise that I’m not going to go down the “baseball” metaphors and analogies route). The public polling is ambiguous.
The case for Biden stepping aside is more or less as follows:
- He comes with a major liability, one that he cannot successfully address.
Yes, any candidate is going to get “Swift Boated” (by the same guy, moreover!), but they’ll also be capable of mounting some kind of response to the attack. Even an halfway decent talent should also be able to shift the conversation to Trump, for whom standard character assassinations are always going to be a double-edged sword. I’m not even sure if Biden, when not giving a speech, has attempted to deflect the age attack by pointing to Trump’s own weaknesses.
- That specific liability undermines, both figuratively and literally, a major line of attack against Trump: that he is unsuited to reassume the presidency.
In addition to what I’ve said earlier, Trump’s autocratic dispositions may even be an asset in a campaign where fence-sitting voters don’t think Biden can lead the country. That’s not good.
- A large majority of Democratic voters want someone else, and that’s been the case for quite some time.
I know that it’s tempting to make this about the “elites” versus the “voters.” Or to argue it’s all driven by the columnists. But in this case elites are responding to public opinion. It also doesn’t matter who set the table. The party has to eat at it.
- Biden is underperforming, and there’s evidence that his age is a big part of the reason.
The discussion of Biden’s poll numbers often comes back to the idea that voters will ultimately “come home” in order to stop Trump. But many of those voters are likely to come home to any Democratic candidate. Winning is largely about other voters, including those that the Trump campaign is trying to peel off. How is Biden going to get them back? Or, more specifically, other than incumbency—which may be less of an asset than we think it is—what does he have to offer that any other Democrat doesn’t? Biden has no specific line of attack that isn’t available to other potential nominees.
It follows, the argument goes, that the upside risks of changing horses outweigh the downside ones.
Basically, all our options suck, so the question is whether or not you find these kinds of arguments persuasive. I didn’t a week ago. I do now.
God help us.
