21 thoughts on the Biden age question

It's overrated compared to issues and ideology

A quick bonus newsletter for your weekend reading, primarily in response to Ezra Klein’s recent podcast episode calling on Biden to withdraw from the 2024 race.

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1. Ezra says that he has a recurring nightmare where Joe Biden loses to Donald Trump, and the day after we’re inundated with leaks from staffers and operatives about white knuckling it through concerns about his age, with everyone full of regret about how they should have said something sooner.

2. I share this nightmare, but where Ezra sees it as a reason that Biden should step aside in favor of a new nominee picked at an open convention, I see it as a reason for pundit self-doubt. It’s so obvious that if Biden loses there were will be incredible regrets about his age that it’s incredibly and clearly the right move for pundits to call for Biden to step aside. If he loses, we can say “I told you so.” If he wins, we can say “it shouldn’t have even been close.” Since Biden isn’t going to step aside, nobody needs to find out what actually lies behind that door.

3. I think the single most relevant fact in this whole debate is that Kamala Harris currently polls worse than Joe Biden in a head-to-head matchup with Donald Trump.

4. The relevance isn’t that Harris is such an awful option — Ezra says she’s “underrated,” and on some some level I agree with that, as I wrote in December. —The issue is that Harris’ polling is a reality check on the theory that Joe Biden’s political woes are all a consequence of his age. After all, if the public is yearning for “like Joe Biden but younger,” then shouldn’t they like his VP, who is younger, more than they like him?

5. Harris is less popular because she is viewed as more liberal than Biden. I don’t think that’s a fatal flaw in the idea of Harris as presidential nominee. It just goes to show that if she were to become the nominee, she should pivot to the center and revert to more the “tough on crime” persona she had back when she was San Francisco District Attorney and preparing for a tough race for California Attorney General.

6. By the same token, if Kamala Harris merely remains the Democrats’ nominee for vice president, she should still pivot to the center and revert back toward the ideological views she espoused before 2016.

7. My advice to Joe Biden is that he should appear more in the media, and that instead of his team being afraid of “gaffes” and obsessed with party unity, they should embrace the more moderate framings that come more naturally to him and that reflect his long career espousing pre-2016 Democratic Party ideas.

8. Suppose there were to be a contested convention. What would actually happen? Well, my fear is that leftists would start pushing for one of their own (AOC?) and then progressive constituency groups would use that as leverage against Harris. So instead of Kamala The Cop running in 2024, we’d get a version of Kamala Harris who disavows the bipartisan border security deal and promises to declare a “climate emergency” to halt domestic fossil fuel production. The version of Harris who could win a general election is the one who leverages her personal identity in order to tack to the center. But I think the version of Harris who’d emerge from a contested convention would be the opposite — Harris confirming the public’s main doubt about her, a belief that she’s more liberal than Biden. As things stand, something like 80 percent of progressive activist energy is dedicated to trying to sandbag Democrats over either Gaza or climate, and I think this monomaniacal focus on being counterproductive would continue in full force at a convention.

9. The Biden skeptics point out that there are lots of good Democrats out there who’ve won in swing states. And I agree. Josh Shapiro could be a strong presidential candidate. So could Gretchen Whitmer. So could Mark Kelly. So could Raphael Warnock. But are we going to get the versions of Warnock and Kelly who ran to Biden’s right on immigration in 2022? The version of Shapiro who supports domestic natural gas production? A Kelly-Warnock ticket that is younger, more dynamic, and more moderate than the Biden-Harris ticket would be great. But is that what we’re getting from this process?

10. A friend asked me if all these “Biden should withdraw” takes are driven by leftists angry about Gaza. I told him I don’t think, factually, that’s what’s going on. Nate Silver, Jon Chait, and Bill Kristol have all been on this bandwagon, and I don’t think that’s what they think. But I do understand why my friend reached this as a hypothesis, since in practice, the space to challenge Biden is to his left. The space to challenge Harris is also to her left. An open convention would be unpredictable, but the general tendency would be to shift things to the left.

11. Dean Philips tends to go unmentioned in these takes, but he is, in fact, running against Biden. And while he’s a bit of a nobody, I think he’d make a totally solid presidential nominee and be a fine president. He is a living, breathing example of a qualified Democrat who is younger than Joe Biden but ideologically similar and maybe positioned a touch to Biden’s right via his association with Bill Ackman and Ackman’s anti-DEI crusade. He’s also drawing approximately zero support from voters, even zero support from columnists who think Joe Biden should step aside in favor of someone younger. Like Harris’ poor polling against Trump, this calls into question the idea that Biden’s age is genuinely motivating doubts about him. It’s not just that Biden is beating Philips; he’s crushing him without trying. There was a time when I thought Philips would poll strongly enough to tempt a higher profile candidate into the race. But he’s a zero.

12. Gavin Newsom is a well-known Democrat who is younger than Joe Biden. Unlike Kamala Harris, he is a white man. But like Kamala Harris, he polls weaker against Trump than Biden does, because he is seen as more liberal.

13. Joe Manchin polls stronger than Joe Biden against Donald Trump.

14. We’re dealing here with a world of compounding uncertainties. Where Ezra and I agree is that Biden is currently on track to lose the election. And I agree with Ezra that if Biden loses, which he probably will, age-related recriminations will almost certainly loom large in the aftermath. But Ezra has what I think is an unreasonably high level of confidence in the proposition that Biden stepping aside would lead to a stronger nominee, because I believe he is overrating the genuine importance of age relative to issue positioning in explaining the pattern of public opinion. I have a very high degree of confidence that Biden could improve his standing by positioning himself more moderately, and a very low degree of confidence that Biden stepping aside would generate a better-positioned nominee. And I very, very strongly believe that Kamala Harris should seek to aggressively moderate her image, but my understanding of the situation is that she sincerely does not want to play the role of identity politics human shield for the white male moderates of the Democratic Party.

15. Brian Beutler has written a couple of pieces about the Biden age problem, including one that calls for Democratic Party leaders to offer “more candor” about why their post-2020 plans haven’t gone as well as they hoped.

16. As you will frequently hear me telling Brian on the Politix podcast, I think that he substantially overrates tactical failings as an explanation here relative to ideological ones. I think the genuinely candid explanation of the current situation is that Donald Trump is an incredibly weak leader for the Republican Party, and that Democrats have chosen to respond to that weakness by moving aggressively left on policy. That’s not a totally crazy idea. If the opposition taps a horrible pitcher, you respond by swinging aggressively for the fences. But I think you won’t hear “candor” on this subject from party leaders in part because it seems to me that Democrats often genuinely don’t realize how much more liberal the party became between 2012 and 2020.

17. If you could take a Time Machine back to 2019 and convince James Clyburn and Hillary Clinton to both aggressively endorse Amy Klobuchar, that would be great. Or maybe you could talk Julián Castro into running as a loyal member of the Obama-Biden administration who agrees with Obama about everything, rather than as Junior Varsity Elizabeth Warren. Or maybe everyone would just be like “huh, Steve Bullock is obviously the most electable.” But recall that the party elite, in terms of donations and top campaign staff, all gravitated toward candidates (Bernie and Warren and Buttigieg and initially Beto) who were positioned to Biden’s left.

18. People often tell me that my obsession with issues and ideology is sad and pedantic, that we are in a post-policy world run by vibes and Donald Trump. But I think that if Trump gave a speech tomorrow where he said “I ran the numbers with Russ Vogt and realized that W and Paul Ryan were right and if we want to Make America Great Again we need to cut Social Security and Medicare, and also end gay marriage and maybe kick gay soldiers out of the military” he would lose the election in November — badly.

19. Journalistically speaking, an open convention would be insanely fun.

20. In the context of a contested primary for a senate seat in California, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee and Adam Schiff all disavowed support for the bipartisan border security deal that Democrats are counting on to help neutralize the immigration issue. Thus, lending further support to my theory that an open convention would likely result in a nominee that is further to Biden’s left.

21. Unlike alternatives to Joe Biden, Nikki Haley has actually does poll much more strongly than Donald Tump. Because Trump is up in the polls, there is relatively little hand-wringing about the GOP squandering a large potential edge in electability due to the party’s cult-like commitment to an loathsome scumbag, but this is still an important fact about American politics. I’d be happy to see Haley beat Trump to help put the threat to democracy in the rearview window, but I’d still strongly prefer Biden to Haley and think that realistically he’d get crushed by her. It’s not going to be Haley, so on some level this doesn’t matter. But it does appropriately contextualize everyone’s choices.