We Will Never Know if Biden Was Right to Drop Out

I was agnostic, shading towards negative, on the question of whether Biden should step down as the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate. My fear was that his doing so would result in a chaotic free-for-all that would leave Democrats wounded and demoralized going into the general election. The fact that so many of the people who were pushing hardest for Biden’s replacement—in the mainstream media, among Democratic donors, and even some in the party leadership—clearly desired such a chaotic aftermath did nothing to allay those concerns. Obviously, that has failed to occur—thanks in no small part to Biden’s firm hand on the tiller in orchestrating his own removal and Harris’s universal endorsement—for which I am extremely grateful. One effect of Biden’s choice, however, is that the two statements over which so many people, on and off this blog, were wrangling throughout July—”Biden is obviously going to lose” and “no, he’ll be fine”—are now unfalsifiable. Whether or not Harris wins, we have no way of knowing whether Biden would have done worse, or just as well, or better.

One obvious retort is that while we may never be able to know for a fact how Biden would have fared against Trump this November, we can draw conclusions from the respective energies of his and Harris’s campaigns. Before dropping out, Biden was lagging in the polls, clearly struggling to project an image of vigor and vitality in his campaign appearances, and in general had developed—justifiably or not—the stench of a loser. Harris, in contrast, has injected tremendous energy into the Democratic side, taking a more combative approach against Trump and Vance, and leaving Republicans scrambling for an angle of attack against her—all of which has been reflected in the polls shifting in her direction. This has all been enormously gratifying to watch. But I am not convinced that it tells us very much about what will happen in November, for one simple reason.

Donald Trump has run for president two times before, and both of those times, the same two things have happened:

1. The popular vote was an absolute blow-out for Trump’s opponent. If America had a normal electoral system, he would be a joke whose sell-by date is already long past.
2. The electoral college came down to what was essentially a coin toss, to a few tens of thousands of votes in three or four states.

Political commentators often choose to ignore the second of these two points in favor of a narrative of inevitability. Clinton was obviously a historically unpopular candidate (who, uh, won the popular vote by a margin of millions) and thus destined to lose; Biden was obviously the only person who could beat Trump. But if you look at the numbers, it all seems a lot more precarious. A change of weather in Wisconsin, or bad traffic in Arizona, and we could just as easily have gotten president H. Clinton in 2017, or the second Trump term in 2021.

Now, I am not a fancy politics-talking person, but I do know that a thing that has happened twice is likely to happen a third time. For all the energy and momentum of Harris’s campaign, for all of Trump’s increasing doddering and Vance’s ever-more black-pilled statements, for all that Republicans are obviously on the back foot, I still suspect the result in November will be a nail-biter. And I’m not convinced the identity of the person at the top of the ticket will make as much of a difference to that result as whether the press find another Comey letter to chew on, or Republican vote suppression efforts, or the phase of the moon.

Once again, an obvious retort here is “Harris might not be a guaranteed winner, but Biden was a guaranteed loser”. That could be true—of all the categorical statements made in the last two months, it’s probably the one I find most persuasive even though there’s no definitive evidence for it (and despite the fact that it is now, as noted above, unfalsifiable). And equally, I could be wrong about history repeating itself. It’s possible that, after a near-decade of Trump and the GOP’s shenanigans, it has sunk in for enough voters that they can’t be allowed near the levers of power, and the 2024 electoral college will have a comfortable margin. But inasmuch as any of these questions can actually be answered, we won’t know those answers until November at the earliest.

None of which is to say that I think Biden shouldn’t have dropped out. The shift in energy and enthusiasm in Harris’s campaign is a victory in its own right, one that might have important effects on non-presidential races and on the political system as a whole. If nothing else, I’m glad I don’t have to spend the next two and a half months under a cloud of doom and dread. (And obviously, the hypothetical world where Harris wins but Biden also would have won is a tragedy for only a small number of people, all of whom are doing pretty OK otherwise.) But the uncertainty that plagued us in July hasn’t really been resolved, only quieted. And in some ways, it never will be. Let’s hope that come November, these lingering questions will become nothing more than an irrelevant diversion, a game for political junkies, rather than a painful “what if”.