Recently, in the wake of Robert Hur’s report denigrating President Biden’s memory, followed by Biden’s puzzling refusal to do a Super Bowl interview, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein urged Biden to end his candidacy.
A suggestion that drastic is invariably going to spawn disagreement. But the argument that has ensued from Klein’s proposal has been especially disjointed for a few reasons. First, there’s a fundamental disagreement about the scale of the problem. Second, Klein’s remedy is badly flawed. And third, nobody agrees on how to handle the Kamala Harris problem.
If you poke any argument about whether Biden should quit, pro or con, you’ll quickly find that it begins with a disagreement about how bad his predicament actually is. The skeptics have been emphasizing the risks entailed by replacing Biden with somebody else. If everybody agreed that Biden was certain (or almost certain) to lose, though, those risks wouldn’t matter very much. The focus on the downside risk to changing course assumes that Biden still has a strong chance to win reelection.
My colleague Ed Kilgore, who has been emphasizing the downside of replacing Biden, argues that Biden is in a dead heat with Trump. “Dead heat” is an admittedly subjective term, but I look at the same numbers Ed compiles and I see a race Biden is losing.
Trump is currently leading the national polls by about two points. In each of the last two elections, the Electoral College has given Trump a clear advantage, and the current polls show the same dynamic. The tipping point state in the Electoral College right now is Michigan, where Trump has been leading consistently and currently has a five-point edge in the polling average. The next best chance for Biden after Michigan would be North Carolina, where he trails by 6 percent, and then Georgia, where he trails by 6.8 percent.
So as of now, it would take a five-point national swing to make the race a pure toss-up. How should we view that situation? On the one hand, there are still ten months to go. The economy is in fantastic shape, and another almost-year of prosperity — along with, hopefully, an end to the war between Israel and Hamas — might give Biden a significant boost in the polls.
On the other hand, this is a way of saying that there needs to be a lot of positive development, with no major bad news, just to get into coin-flip territory. And while it is still somewhat early, the electorate is deeply polarized, and Biden and Trump are both unusually well-known figures. All that suggests there aren’t a lot of persuadable voters out there.
Keeping Biden makes sense if you think he’s running just a hair behind Trump. My read is that he’s in a dire spot, though not quite a hopeless one. It’s not quite a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency scenario, but if he sees no improvement within a few months, it will be. And in that case, if you’re staring at a very high probability of defeat, measures that look desperate and bring a real chance of catastrophe would begin to look reasonable.
This brings us to the second question: What then? Klein’s remedy is an open convention. Presidential hopefuls would display their wares through rallies and media interviews. The delegates would debate and, after some necessary controversy, settle on a choice and move forward, like they did before the era of presidential primaries.
I find this scenario unrealistic. One unrealistic aspect is that it’s high-risk — specifically, as Matt Yglesias and Josh Barro point out, a convention would likely recapitulate the 2020 dynamic of a race to the left, leading to an even less-competitive nominee hobbled by unpopular promises to progressive interest groups.
Another oddity in Klein’s scenario is that it assumes that President Biden drops out of the race and abandons all interest in his own succession. In reality, Biden would possess enormous influence over the process. All the delegates are loyal to him, and he’ll be the nominee, barring a health emergency, unless he decides he can’t win. If Biden were to drop out, he would have the leverage to dictate the ticket. He would make a decision, probably in consultation with Barack Obama and perhaps other Democratic luminaries (Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Bill Clinton). They would announce their choice and press the convention to ratify it. It’s the only way this unusual process could be made to work without risking anarchy.
An issue hovering over the debate on replacing Biden is that his most likely successor is the vice-president who polls no better than him, and whose political instincts many Democratic Party elites don’t trust. Most Democrats believe that even if they could persuade Biden to step down from the ticket, they would be forced to give the job to Harris, defeating the purpose.
It may well be true that if Biden decided he couldn’t win, he would hand the rein to his vice-president. But I don’t think that’s the only alternative. The widely shared idea that “the base” would demand Harris misunderstands the purpose of a base. A party’s base is composed of committed partisans. Political activists on both the right and the left like to pretend the base will become demoralized if their leaders fail to take various positions advocated by the activists, but those demands are a product of lacking actual political leverage.
In any case, the issue is that Democratic-aligned interest groups may have demands about race and gender representation on the presidential ticket, and might choose to enforce those demands by talking the result up or down in the media. Democrats could respond to these demands by appointing a ticket with a woman (say, Gretchen Whitmer or Amy Klobuchar) and an African American (say, Cory Booker or Rafael Warnock). There would not be a whole lot of room to complain about Black or female candidates being given short shrift. This, again, assumes a ticket chosen by Biden and various party insiders, designed to gain wide approval within the party and circumvent a public process.
Do I think the Democrats are at a point where this is their best chance of winning? At the moment, I don’t know. Biden is saddled with two giant problems. First, the inflation run-up of 2021-2022 left a bitter taste in the electorate’s mouth that the subsequent soft landing hasn’t erased. And second, his age is limiting his ability to campaign and probably making it hard for persuadable voters to believe he’s capable of handling the job (even though I believe he is).
There’s enough time for a combination of an improving economy and a more ambitious campaign effort to improve Biden’s standing on both fronts. But if summer rolls around and the president is still trailing by five points in the tipping-point state, I think the risks of staying the course will be larger than the risks of trying to get Biden to stand down.
