Last Thursday night, President Joe Biden advertised his inability to reliably remember the topics of his own sentences to over 50 million Americans.
The president’s excruciating debate performance triggered an avalanche of op-eds calling for his exit from the race. The New York Times editorial board, Biden’s (admiring) biographers, and a wide range of liberal pundits have all argued that the Democratic Party — and the country as a whole — would be better served by a different nominee, no matter how fraught the process of selecting a Biden replacement might be.
Thus far, Biden has rejected this view. And some Democratic politicians, operatives, and columnists have fed him rationales for soldiering on.
Unfortunately, it has become clear that Biden staying in the race is making it more likely that Donald Trump will be the next president. To the contrary, the president’s conspicuous cognitive and rhetorical decline has rendered him an exceptionally weak candidate, whose odds of victory look much slimmer than any of the Democratic Party’s plausible alternatives.
To see why this is so, it’s worth examining five prominent arguments for Biden to remain in the race — and why they are misguided.
1. “Biden’s post-debate poll numbers aren’t that bad.”
In a memo circulated among Democrats Monday, the Biden campaign’s pollster Geoff Garin wrote that internal polling showed that the president had not lost substantial support since the debate: In his survey, Trump narrowly led Biden before Thursday night, and maintained roughly the same lead afterward.
In a fundraising email over the weekend, meanwhile, the Biden campaign told supporters that “according to the polls” every high-profile alternative to the president would “be less likely to win than Joe Biden — the only person ever to defeat Donald Trump.”
The basis for this claim was a post-debate Data for Progress (DFP) poll that found Biden and Harris taking 45 percent of the vote against Trump, while various other Democrats — from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — won no higher than 44 percent.
There are two problems with the argument that Biden’s polling isn’t so bad.
The first is that Biden’s campaign is misrepresenting the available polling data. On the day of his debate with Trump, Biden trailed his Republican adversary by 0.2 percentage points in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average. Today, the president trails Trump by 1.4 points. And some of the most recent surveys have been downright catastrophic: A post-debate poll of New Hampshire voters released Monday found Biden trailing Trump by 2 points. In December, Biden led Trump by 10 points in the same poll. In 2020, he won the Granite State by more than 7 points.
Even the Biden campaign’s own handpicked public poll suggests that he is not the Democrats’ strongest candidate. Yes, the president received 45 percent support against Trump in DFP’s survey, while other hypothetical nominees secured slightly less. And yet, in some of those theoretical head-to-heads, Trump’s share of the vote also fell; whereas the Republican led Biden 48 to 45, he led Whitmer 46 to 44. In other words, the best poll the president could find showed him losing by a larger margin than the governor of Michigan — who has yet to introduce herself to the national electorate.
And that same poll also showed that 1) 67 percent of Americans think Biden is too old to serve as president, 2) a majority of voters are more concerned about Biden’s age than Trump’s “criminal charges and threats to democracy,” and 3) Biden has a worse net approval rating than every single other Democrat included in the survey.
It is true that, to this point, we haven’t seen massive erosion in Biden’s support since the debate. But it’s much too early to say that no such decline is forthcoming. The full impact of major news events can take a week or two to pervade the public’s consciousness. Even if Biden’s numbers hold roughly steady, however, that does not constitute a strong argument for his candidacy.
After all, the president was losing before Thursday’s debate! Biden has been trailing Trump in polls of virtually every swing state for months. Before Thursday night, Nate Silver’s election forecast model gave Trump a roughly two-thirds chance of winning.
Biden’s team pushed for an early showdown with Trump because they needed to change the race’s trajectory. The fact that Biden emerged from the debate in worse position than he had entered it — but maybe, only slightly worse — is not cause for comfort.
2. “Elites may have been scandalized by Biden’s debate performance, but ordinary voters weren’t.”
Some analysts have argued that the debate will not durably dent Biden’s numbers because the general public already believed that he was too old to competently serve. The hoarse, sputtering old man they saw Thursday night was exactly whom they already thought Biden to be. As the Substack columnist Max Read puts the point, elite liberal commentators are panicked because “they might be the only people in the country to have just now realized that Biden is too old to be running for president. Most voters have known that he’s too old for months.”
Similarly, the election analyst Lakshya Jain notes that “in February, 35% of registered voters believed that Biden had the mental and cognitive ability to serve as president.” In a post-debate survey from the same pollster, that figure did fall to 27 percent. But this loss came almost entirely from partisan Democrats who will vote for Biden over Trump, anyway. Thus, one could argue that Biden’s incapacity to speak coherently off the cuff was already accounted for in his poll numbers.
Read and Jain don’t think this constitutes a strong argument for Biden 2024. But the president and his team apparently do, dismissing his critics in the media as a “bedwetting brigade” that’s out of touch with the electorate. As Garin, Biden’s pollster, argued Monday, “the president’s age was already priced into the decision-making process before the debate, and the debate itself did not cause any substantial reconsideration of the voters’ decision-making process.”
And yet, even ignoring the fact that Biden has lost support in the polls, the argument that “our candidate’s debate performance only generated a media consensus against his candidacy” is not reassuring. The media is a very powerful actor in American politics! Voters do not derive their impressions of candidates and parties from the ether; their understanding of the world is shaped by the editorial decisions of editors, reporters, and newscast producers.
Let’s say that two weeks from now Biden’s polls look no worse than they did before the debate. With that generous assumption, he would still be on track to lose the election. To gain the necessary ground, his campaign needs to shift the nation’s focus toward Trump’s vulnerabilities and Biden’s more favorable issues.
Biden’s team struggled to do that before Thursday’s debate. Now, they need to find a way of doing so in the face of unrelenting media scrutiny of Biden’s age.
The past four days have already witnessed a series of leaks from White House staffers and foreign officials detailing the president’s declining cognitive performance. Reporters love nothing more than an opaque scandal. They will spend the next four months digging up other anecdotes about Biden’s senescence, and giving headline coverage to his every campaign-trail misstatement or brain freeze. They will ask which Democrats knew that Biden was like this, and when. Picture Hillary Clinton’s email server scandal, only with actual stakes — not “but her emails” so much as “but his almost certain inability to effectively serve as president in 2028.”
And the problem extends beyond objective reporters. A wide array of liberal pundits (including myself) have declared that Biden lacks the communication skills necessary to be an effective presidential candidate (if not an effective president). It is possible to believe this while also considering Biden exponentially more fit for national leadership than Donald Trump. But that is not the easiest case to make to anyone who does not find Trump’s unique monstrosity self-evident — a group that includes all undecided voters by definition.
The reality is that Biden — unlike more or less any other Democrat nominated in his place — will not be able to count on the full-throated support of his party’s most prominent allies in the media. Every case for his candidacy will either include a disclaimer acknowledging the legitimacy of concerns about his fitness, or else, be tainted by the absence of such acknowledgements.
The political elites stunned by Biden’s performance also include many of the Democratic Party’s most influential donors and activists. Some I’ve spoken with say that they feel gaslit and humiliated by the president’s showing, having previously vouched for his vitality when friends, family, and special counsel Robert Hur called it into question. They are now demoralized at the prospect of having to fundraise and organize for a candidate who they consider cognitively compromised and politically doomed.
Meanwhile, as Republicans hammer down-ballot Democrats for alleged complicity in covering up Biden’s decline, many will likely feel compelled to distance themselves from the president and affirm voters’ fears about his competence.
Whatever polls show in the coming weeks, Biden’s candidacy now faces irrevocable challenges, which no other Democrat would confront.
3. “Kamala is even more unpopular.”
The most common and potent argument for Biden’s candidacy might be that Kamala Harris is the only realistic alternative and she is even less likely to defeat Trump than he is.
The first part of this claim is reasonable. I’m not certain that bypassing Harris would trigger a huge backlash among Black voters, as many are wont to claim. After all, Harris attracted so little support from Black Democrats during her first presidential run that she ended up dropping out before the South Carolina primary.
Nevertheless, passing over the first Black woman to serve as vice president would be a risky maneuver. And going with anyone besides Harris would create myriad logistical problems. Only Biden’s running mate would have immediate access to his campaign funds, for one thing. Thus, it seems more likely than not that Harris would be the nominee if Biden dropped out.
But the idea that Harris is a worse candidate than today’s version of Biden lacks support. Voters disapprove of Biden by an 18.4-point margin, while disapproving of Harris by only 10. And since she is less well-known to the public, it is more plausible that she can change voters’ perceptions of her than that Biden can.
At this point, Harris is more capable of running as a “normal” candidate, one whose liabilities are sufficiently ordinary to keep attention focused on Trump. Her nomination would also flip the valence of the age issue, enabling Democrats to hammer Trump’s own declining lucidity.
Harris is no one’s idea of an optimal candidate. Her electoral track record is lackluster. But, unlike Biden, she’s not regarded as too old for the presidency by a majority of Americans. She can be an awkward speaker at times, but never so incoherent as her boss now is. And she offers voters an alternative to the Trump-Biden binary they’ve long been discontented with.
She’s not a great option. But she has a better shot of changing the race’s menacing trajectory than Biden does.
4) “Biden stepping down would be undemocratic.”
As Axios reports, one of the Biden campaign’s “biggest arguments” against a new nominee “will be that Biden won the Democratic primaries overwhelmingly, and that result is final.” One source close to Biden told the publication, “You guys don’t get to decide. That’s not how this works. We don’t have smoke-filled rooms.”
But the idea that Biden stepping down would constitute an affront to (small-d) democratic principles does not withstand scrutiny.
Throughout 2022 and 2023, polls repeatedly showed around two-thirds of Democratic voters wanted a nominee other than Joe Biden. In at least one post-debate survey, more Democratic voters supported Biden dropping out than opposed him doing so, even this late in the game. These polls represent the views of a much larger body of Democrats than the small minority who turned out for uncompetitive primary elections this year.
Of course, were the Democratic Party to somehow rewrite the rules of his nominating procedures to oust Biden, that would violate democratic principles. But no one is suggesting anything like that. The decision is ultimately Biden’s alone. If he wants to base that decision on what’s best for democracy, however, then he must do whatever would give his party the best chance of keeping an authoritarian demagogue out of power.
5) “Biden’s exit would lead to chaos.”
In the New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang argues (somewhat tentatively) that Biden should stay in the race, as “the known bad candidate is better than the chaos of the unknown.” He notes that Biden’s exit could lead to a “potentially toxic battle for the candidacy” at a disorderly Democratic convention. Given that one of Trump’s chief liabilities is his association with chaos, better for Democrats to project an image of stability.
This is a reasonable view. Without question, all of the Democratic Party’s available options are freighted with risk. But staying the course is nevertheless the least promising play.
As already noted, Biden is losing and is ill-equipped to catch up to Trump, as he’s saddled with a unique incapacity to communicate effectively off the cuff or persuade the press that he is physically capable of serving four years. And he is also personally identified with the highest inflation of the past four decades.
The idea that the safest bet is to stick with a nominee whom more than 70 percent of the country deems unfit to run for president is founded on little beyond status-quo bias.
Yes, Biden’s belated exit from the race would invite some disorder. But if he were to immediately endorse Harris, it seems likely that the party would coalesce behind her rapidly.
Were Biden to drop out — and advise his party to settle on a replacement through deliberation at its convention — then matters would get rather chaotic. But there would also be significant upsides to such a scenario, which Biden’s defenders have given short shrift.
An open convention almost certainly guarantees much higher ratings than an ordinary one would receive. Yes, this might mean that a massive, national audience might be exposed to bitter Democratic infighting. But competent producers and stage managers could also ensure that that audience sees a great deal of anti-Trump propaganda.
Meanwhile, there are potential strategic benefits to springing a mystery nominee on the GOP in late August. A “generic Democrat” tends to perform much better in polls than any particular Democratic politician. Giving Republicans less than three months to define the Democratic nominee — and dent his or her “generic” status — might be advantageous. In the interim, it might be easier to portray the election as a referendum on Trump if he is the only major party candidate during the next two months.
To be clear, I’m not sure that the hypothetical benefits of a completely open convention outweigh the hazards. The best of the party’s bad options might be to rally around Harris as quickly as possible, her vulnerabilities as a candidate notwithstanding.
But sticking with the known over the unknown — when the former is a nominee severely compromised by old age — is not prudent. There are risks to replacing Biden, but also, potentially large upsides. The same cannot be said of running a candidate whom a large and growing majority of voters consider unfit to serve.
Perhaps, this reality is best conveyed through a hypothetical: Imagine that Donald Trump was trailing Biden in virtually every swing state and had just appeared senile at the first presidential debate. In that world, how would Democrats feel if they woke up to learn that Trump was voluntarily stepping down and that the Republican National Convention would be nominating a new candidate (who could be certain of Trump’s unequivocal support)? Would they consider themselves fortunate to no longer be running against a historically unpopular candidate who was oratorically incompetent and on track to lose, since now the GOP was going to look chaotic? Or might they be more afraid of an unknown, more generic Republican than they were of the much-disliked, elderly guy they were already beating?
It seems clear to me that Democrats would not be happy to see Trump step down in that scenario. In any case, according to reports, Republicans are privately fretting about the possibility that Biden will hang it up.
