There are only two reasons why Joe Biden should consider not running for reelection. The first is if he doesn’t think he’s up to four more years in the job. And the second is if he thinks he’s going to lose to Donald Trump but another Democrat would win. Now, I remember when Nate Silver assured me that Trump had only a 20 percent chance of being the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2016, so I don’t put much stock his powers of prognostication. But I do not necessarily disagree with him when he says Biden should drop out. Increasingly, I’ve been thinking the same thing.
But when I have that thought, I move to the second or third thought. For example, what do we know about how Vice-President Kamala Harris is polling against Trump in a head-to-head matchup? If that scenario doesn’t look promising, what would Biden’s plan be to guide the convention to a different flag-bearer? Would denying Harris the nomination do too much damage to the cohesion and enthusiasm of the party? For example, if Gavin Newsom were nominated instead of Harris, how would that go over?
Silver doesn’t ask these questions. He just insists that Biden is vulnerable–an underdog, really–because of his age. But age isn’t a knock against Harris. What if her head-to-heads against Trump are the same or even worse than Biden’s? A new Emerson poll has Trump beating Harris and Newsom by bigger margins than Biden, so perhaps age isn’t the core of the problem here. Maybe getting younger isn’t a magic cure for what ails the Democrats. When are we going to grapple with the important “why-in-the-fuck” question of the American people still supporting Trump and his nakedly criminal and fascist movement?
Right now, today, the polls say the pro-Trump coalition is winning and on track to win in November. Is this because the economy is doing badly? Is it because of scandal in the White House?
The strongest thing standing against Trump right now actually is Joe Biden, the president of the United States. So, before we go calling on him to step down, we better have a good idea of how that’s supposed to improve the situation. And I don’t see how it improves the situation.
I can envision best case scenarios, but who is really in a position to navigate the party through to an optimal ticket for the fall? Does President Biden even have the pull and power to push Harris aside and set up an alternate replacement? Because I cannot agree Harris could be part of any optimal ticket.
Since Silver doesn’t ask these questions, it seems more like he’s just taking shots at Biden than offering constructive advice for preserving our form of government past the next election. It’s trollish.
5
Coverage of this election makes me feel like I’m on crazy pills. The media is trapped in this psychosomatic cycle where Joe Biden seems vulnerable because of all the people fretting about how vulnerable he is, which is making him vulnerable. There are legitimate criticisms one can make about this administration in a vacuum, but in an electoral context those criticisms melt away because the opponent is Trump. Any problem with Biden’s capability or policy is a thousand times worse with Trump.
But Biden is not just Not Trump, he’s been a legitimately good president. I say that as someone who did not support him in the primary last time around. He’s blown past all of my expectations, and I will happily vote for him again in November.
Every time I see someone complain about Biden running because of his age, my question is always, OK, who should replace him? Harris was a very unpopular candidate in the 2016 primaries and there’s no reason to suppose that everyone’s magically changed their minds just because she’s the VP now–in fact, I was pretty annoyed with the decision as it just seemed to be a blatant pander move. I may be too cynical.
So if it isn’t Harris, then who? I can’t think of a single other entity in the Dem fold with anything like the level of familiarity the general public needs to fee comfortable with a candidate. I have some people in mind who I think would do a pretty good job given the chance, but the odds of them winning the office this close to election day seems ridiculously slim.
What really irks me though, as others have mentioned here occasionally over the period of Biden’s term, is that by and large, he really has done about the best job a single person could do under the circumstances he’s been dealt. What on earth do you think Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsome (Honestly?) or, again, give me a name because I got nothin’, is going to accomplish that even runs a distant second-place to Biden’s first term? and bear in mind, again as others have mentioned before, I was no supporter of Biden when he got the nomination and was actually pretty upset about it. He’s earned my support.
As to wtf is going on with voter opinion, at the risk of sounding reductionist, it really seems to boil down to the media. Things were looking really positive until the Afghanistan withdrawal, and everything just seemed to sour irretrievably after that. Even the centrist media was beating him up nonstop for what seemed like (and may have been) months afterward, and he just never got back into their good graces. I’d like to see a comparison between the Afghanistan coverage and Trump’s utter betrayal of the Kurds; in hindsight, while there was a good deal of furor in the press as to the latter, it seems like it was over within a matter of week or two. Also, the Fox News and related audiences probably never even heard about it.
Beats me. I know it sounds like a knee-jerk reaction to blame the media, but that’s all I can come up with.
5
I remember back in 2008 when Nate Silver used data—both the demographic makeup of Democratic primary voters in different states, and the actual rules for apportioning delegates—to predict with impressive accuracy the delegate counts for Clinton and Obama in the Democratic primaries.
Now that every news organization and think tank that wants to can use data in that way, Silver is like Billy Beane: he discovered a market inefficiency in how the job was done and had a few good years with it. Then everyone else started copying him and he became just another guy.