Twenty-seven more thoughts about the state of the race
Kamala is good enough, Obama won't save us, and moderates should be very nervous
I don’t want this blog to become 100% focused on the question of who the Democratic Party nominee should be or the questions surrounding that. I don’t think our tempo of publication is ideally suited to covering that kind of news story, and I also don’t think my take on this is particularly distinctive. Yesterday I wrote an introspective post because I am uniquely qualified to write about myself, but in terms of the future of the country, I basically agree with what Ezra Klein, Jerusalem Demsas, Eric Levitz, and Jonathan Chait have been saying.
I was glad to have this morning’s guest post about the future of transportation policy, and we’ll be publishing non-horse race pieces on Wednesday and Thursday. I’ll continue to focus on covering the election with an eye to the stakes and trying to provide a highly differentiated product that features primarily non-election content.
That said, I do have thoughts that I want to get off my chest after a week away, and here come 27 of them:
The critical question in the “should Biden stand down” debate has always been, in my opinion, the question of the Kamala Line. It’s been easy to say since the midterms that Democrats would be better off with “a different nominee,” but the right question is would Democrats be better off with Kamala Harris.
That’s not because Harris is the only possible option; it’s just that from the moment she was selected as VP, she’s been the most likely option. You should not wish for “not Biden” unless you’re prepared to get Harris as the alternative.
In 2023, I did not think we had crossed the Kamala Line. When Ezra Klein wrote his open convention piece, the discussion of convention mechanics seemed like a concession that we were still not.
After the debate, we clearly are. This is in part because her numbers have actually been on a positive trajectory recently. But mostly it’s because while I think you can still make a strong case for voting Biden, the only people who will find that case compelling are people who are comfortable with the possibility that Harris will take over if Biden’s health continues to decline — which is very likely given the linear progression of time.
Under the circumstances, we’d be better off letting Harris assume the nomination and make the case for herself. She’s slightly more popular than Biden right now, has dramatically more upside, and could get a mini-burst of positive attention from becoming the nominee and rolling out her VP.
Broadly, I think betting markets and external observers are grossly exaggerating the odds that Biden will, in fact, step aside.
The key error that smart people who I like and respect keep making is assuming that there is some critical mass of “party leaders” or “elder statesmen” who could push Biden out of the race if they wanted to.
This is just not true. A joint press release from Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Nancy Pelosi would not force Biden out of the race. Other people might be able to persuade him to drop out, but they would genuinely have to persuade him.
To understand Biden’s mentality, you have to remember that he did succumb to informal pressure from party leaders to stand down in 2016, and everyone now thinks it was a world-historical mistake of him to do that. People are really good at self-flattery and self-deception, and this is a strong data point to bolster his desire to stay in it.
The other leg of support for Biden’s self-deception — the belief that polls predicated a red wave in 2022 or that the 2022 midterm results were consistent with Biden being on track to win — is totally false, but unfortunately, these false ideas associated with Simon Rosenberg have been widely circulated in liberal circles since the midterms themselves.
Exacerbating the problem is that Biden’s inner circle of advisors all have reputations that are under water at this point, and Biden staying in maximizes their chances for personal vindication. If I got to sit down with the president alone, I would make the case to him that standing down maximizes his odds at a great historical legacy. But does that apply to Mike Donilon? I’m not sure it does.
Right now, the main reason for members of Congress to throw Biden under the bus is not that it will be persuasive to him, but that anyone in a swing seat — or even a D+5 seat — needs to worry about saving their own skin. A convention where leading figures in the Democratic Party stand up on stage and swear that Biden is doing great is going to make them all look like idiots and risk pulling everyone else down.
On Bidenist Twitter, people are acting like “but Republicans will say mean things about any nominee” is a decisive takedown of the concern about Biden. This is like when people denied that running a self-identified socialist could be harmful because Republicans call all Democrats socialists. Just because you get attacked either way doesn’t mean you should make yourself defenseless.
The key problem with Biden is that he was losing decisively before the debates. Not by huge margins, but clearly losing. He needed to make up lost ground at the debate, and he did not. Instead, he slipped. He’s clearly not going to do an impressive media blitz, so what’s he going to do? Run ads. Democrats have great ads. But ads matter less than free media, and Biden was already running ads before the debate, taking advantage of a financial edge that Trump has now eliminated.
A new nominee would have fresh legs to be on television multiple times a week making the case against Trump. If you’re a pure Dem partisan who is angry that none of the media focus is on Trump right now, this is why you want a new (younger) nominee, someone who can be everywhere delivering crisp anti-Trump talking points.
Is Harris the best person in the world to do that? No. In terms of pure skill, I would advocate for Pete Buttigieg, who is great at television and who leads the field in net favorability and whose head-to-head polling against Trump is strong when you adjust for name ID.
Gretchen Whitmer’s polling is almost as good as Pete’s, and she might be an even better choice since she’s not a member of the Biden administration. She can say she didn’t know the details of the president’s condition and also frankly can just wash her hands of some of some of Team Biden’s worst moments, like “transitory inflation.”
But again, Harris is good enough. And the leak that she would look to Roy Cooper or Andy Beshear as VP was, to me, a good sign that she sees the basic dimensions of her political problem clearly. You don’t achieve as much political success as she has without some form of political skills, but she’s never had to get swing voters to vote for her. Beshear and Cooper have, and either would be the right kind of person to add to her team.
For Whitmer, I like Josh Shapiro as VP. In theory, the governor of Michigan plus the governor of Pennsylvania on the ticket together visiting every small town in Wisconsin equals victory. Chill Midwestern politicians usually lack the pizzazz to win a nomination (Barack Obama is the exception that proves the rule), but those are the swing states!
If it’s Pete, I think he should do the Clinton/Gore thing of doubling down on youth rather than trying for “balance.” I’m very intrigued by a Buttigieg + Ritchie Torres ticket.
With any of these tickets, think about how cool it would be to have live town halls as campaign events, five minute call-ins to cable, long sit downs on podcasts. It’s incredibly annoying to have all this focus on Biden’s fitness and acuity when Trump is also extremely old and constantly forgetting stuff and talking nonsense! Make the point by putting forward a young nominee who speaks fluidly!
Just don’t get your hopes up that it will actually happen or spend your time thinking that Barack Obama or some other magic figure can make it happen. That’s not how it works.
Given how central the jitters about Harris have been to this whole process, I think the question of why there was so much insider conventional wisdom in her favor in 2020 has never been properly litigated. Her problem — she’s never won votes outside of the base — was obvious. I said it at the time, and the reaction to my take was not positive. At this point, I’d be happy to support her as better than Biden and better than Trump, but Democrats did not need put themselves in this situation.
Pay close attention to the wording of The Procedural Rules of the 2024 Democratic National Convention (Section IX) as stated in the official Call For The 2024 Democratic National Conventional. Specifically, look at paragraph F2(d) governing the behavior of pledged delegates on the first ballot where superdelegates do not vote: “All delegates to the National Convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.”
Biden is probably going to be the nominee and he is probably going to lose, and I think media coverage of the 2024 election ought to reflect that fact — not in the spirit of the press needing to do partisan anti-Trump crusading, but just like the pre-election coverage in the UK focused much more on Labour’s plans than on the Conservatives, because they were obviously going to win. As long as Biden is clinging to the nomination, Trump is the important story.
It’s worth saying, as one moderate factionalist to others, that if Democrats lose with Biden as their standard-bearer, our side is realistically going to take the lion’s share of the blame for defeat. Of course, I and others will do our best to make our case, but the most likely outcome is not just Biden losing to Trump, but nascent efforts to revive a common sense factional project suffering a big setback as well.
This is not my brand personally, but given the range of wild things people have been bullied into signing on to in the name of identity politics, I think “it’s racist to believe a Black woman is less electable than a white man who can’t get through a 30 minute television interview” is a pretty reasonable take.
To give a hopeful note to the idea the Biden might actually step down, I think his recent statements that he has no such plans should be given approximately zero weight, since that's what he would say whatever his thoughts actually are. He knows that as soon as he steps down, he's already done in politics and probably public life, so there's really no negative consequence to breaking a promise to stay in the race. On the other hand, if he wants to preserve his option to stay in the race, giving any indication that he might step aside makes that much harder. If he does step aside, I expect he'll be saying he won't right up till the moment he actually does.
Buttigieg/Torres would simultaneously be a historic shutout for straight people and a ticket designed in a lab to infuriate a particular kind of queer leftist