Last week, I wrote a column puzzling why no mainstream Democrat is challenging President Biden for the nomination, given the strong demand among Democrats for a different and younger nominee. It remains mysterious to me.
Dan Pfeiffer offers a reasonably strong response that still fails to satisfy my curiosity. Pfeiffer, a former aide to President Obama, argues that the main challengers are largely unknown. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, Georgia senator Raphael Warnock, and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker “were mentioned but still have relatively low name ID among the Democratic electorate,” in a CNN poll. He concludes, “a primary challenge would be a massive longshot with potentially devastating consequences for the primary challenger and the incumbent.”
I think that argument may capture why private polls might not show an alternative standing a strong chance to beat Biden. And perhaps it would also explain why challengers have stayed out of the race — if they are surreptitiously taking polls and finding Biden holds a commanding lead, which some insiders have speculated but remains unknown, they would sensibly decide not to run against him.
But I think this misunderstands the nature of such a race. Name recognition is extremely important in an ordinary presidential primary. Contested primaries typically involve a lot of candidates, and a big component of winning is getting the media to give you a lot of coverage so voters think of you as a contender. 2020 had an enormous field of contenders, most of whom never received serious coverage. You’d probably have trouble remembering most of their names without prompting.
But a race with one main contender against Biden would have a different dynamic. (This assumes the contender had a credible background, such as having won statewide office or some other well-established record.) The campaign would draw a lot of media attention. Name recognition would pretty quickly cease to pose a major obstacle. The question would be whether the candidate could look to Democrats like a better candidate than Biden.
The number that seizes my attention, again, is the CNN poll showing two-thirds of the party’s voters prefer somebody else over Biden as their nominee. Now, obviously, a generic “somebody else” is going to capture the ceiling of voter appetite for an alternative. An actual nominee, with a concrete identity and flaws, is probably going to fare worse than an undefined alternative.
That said, two-thirds of the vote is a pretty high ceiling. You might wonder how meaningful that number is. Don’t voters always want somebody different and better? This time four years ago, just 24 percent of Republicans said they wished somebody else were running for the nomination. This time in 2011, just 32 percent of Democrats wanted a challenger against President Obama. So the huge majority of Democrats currently wishing they had somebody else is actually quite unusual for an incumbent president.
I think the best explanation for the party’s complacency is that they simply don’t believe Biden is in serious trouble. He did win the nomination in 2020 even though the media wrote him off, and he did defeat Trump. That confidence comes through in reported stories about the administration’s thinking.
Axios reports, “The recent calls for Biden to step aside are seen internally as just the latest example of elite Democrats underestimating Biden,” and quotes a senior Biden adviser saying, “We don’t take the ups and downs of individual polls to heart.”
The phrase “ups and downs” implies that there are ups in the polls, a premise that seems increasingly far-fetched. The problem is not a handful of individual polls with outlier views. The average of the polling now has Trump pulling into a slight lead.
Here, via Peter Hamby, is another story explaining the administration’s thinking:
Biden’s own political instincts are cautious, institutional, and generally risk-averse. His whole bet on 2024 is that the same safe and boring formula that won him the presidency — a bulwark against Trumpian chaos — will work once again. Why would Biden suddenly mess with that calculation and potentially shatter the fragile Democratic coalition that voted him into office in the first place?
Hamby is responding to a different argument — that Biden should replace Kamala Harris, rather than that a Democrat should run against Biden — but it still captures the premise that Biden is “safe.” Biden certainly can win, but I don’t consider that prospect “safe.” While he overcame those concerns in 2020, the pandemic shielded him from much public campaigning, a protection he won’t have in 2024, when he will be four years older.
He has dreadful approval ratings that have failed to budge since halfway through his first year in office. The overriding concern voters have with him, his age, is one that by almost definition cannot get better and may well get worse.
Yes, it’s early, and yes, the polling has limited value this far from an election. An improving economy offers a highly plausible scenario for how the dynamic of the race could change for the better.
That said, I can’t escape the conclusion that Democrats are treating a highly risky plan as though it were a safe one, locking themselves in to a single-track strategy, and leaving themselves little recourse if the plan falters.
