A new wave of liberal debate has broken out over whether President Joe Biden should end his reelection campaign.
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein suggested an open Democratic National Convention to replace Biden. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait floated a counterproposal whereby Biden picks his successor with the help of various Democratic grandees if things don’t improve by summertime.
Longtime Democratic operative James Carville got the ball rolling on this latest round of Biden doubt when he questioned the decision to forgo a Super Bowl interview.
This talk percolates and then fizzles every few months after an age-related storyline or a series of discouraging poll numbers.
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Usually the news cycle passes and with it the urgency to contemplate alternatives to Biden at the top of the 2024 Democratic ticket.
It’s possible that this pattern will resume, with the White House physician saying there were “no new health concerns” for Biden and declaring him “fit to successfully execute the duties” of his office after the president’s latest physical examination.
But the real underlying concern appears to be that Biden hasn’t pulled away from former President Donald Trump, who has so far swept the Republican primaries and beat his last major opponent by nearly 42 points in Michigan on Tuesday.
Trump has a 2-point lead over Biden in the RealClearPolitics polling average. This advantage grows when third-party candidates are factored in and gets bigger still in most of the battleground states that will actually decide the Electoral College majority.
It’s early. The primaries aren’t over yet. But events ranging from Jan. 6 to criminal charges in multiple jurisdictions were supposed to have discredited Trump, hammering the final nails into a political coffin built during the pandemic. A dip in inflation without a recession or spike in unemployment, a more or less soft landing, was expected to restore faith in Bidenomics.
Nevertheless, Trump is polling better than he was during most of 2016, when he won north of 300 electoral votes against Hillary Clinton en route to the White House, and at any point in 2020, when he came within 43,000 votes in three states of sneaking back in for a second term.
A Democratic nominee who cannot build a safe lead against Trump when the headlines are full of court appearances and massive civil judgments seems unnecessarily risky.
These are not commentators who have opposed Biden from the left. Chait is generally center-left. Klein acknowledged that Biden’s “victory was seen as, was in reality, the moderate wing triumphing over the progressive wing, the establishment over the insurgents.”
“But instead of making them bend the knee, instead of acting as a victor, Biden acted as a leader,” Klein continued. “He partnered with Bernie Sanders. He built the unity task forces. He integrated [Elizabeth] Warren’s and Sanders’s ideas and staff into not just his campaign but also his administration.”
Carville is the Clintons’ decadeslong political consigliere who became famous during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign running as a “different kind of Democrat.”
“Keeping Biden makes sense if you think he’s running just a hair behind Trump,” Chait writes. “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.”
This is for the moment all pundit playacting. The challenges of persuading a man who has been running for president since 1987 to give up the prize he has been seeking for nearly all of Klein’s life once he has finally attained it, of figuring out what to do with an equally unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris, of navigating all the Democratic coalition minefields that made Biden the party’s standard-bearer in the first place all remain.
Biden just won 81% of the vote in Michigan against an “uncommitted” option that gave him more of a challenge than any of his actual primary opponents ever have. His campaign and the White House are going full speed ahead. None of the alternative scenarios seem all that realistic.
Yet these commentators do represent a segment of elite opinion. Marianne Williamson has unsuspended her low-polling primary campaign. Mixed with real disquiet about Biden’s age and stance on Israel, especially among young Democrats, this chatter could at least be a nuisance heading into the convention.
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In the meantime, the conversation can be weaponized by Republicans who harbor similar fears about Trump’s electability. “The Democrat Party is already scrambling to figure out who’s going to be the person,” former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told CBS News. “It is not going to be Joe Biden.”
Haley continued, “Republicans need to wake up and know you’re going to be running against a younger candidate.”
