Biden’s 2024 case is weaker than it was immediately after the first presidential debate.
In the wake of President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, Democrats implored their standard-bearer to prove he just “had a bad night”: He could prove his mental acuity, rhetorical skills and vitality. Live television appearances are a blitz and press conferences. And he can demonstrate his cognitive and neurological health by submitting to clinical tests and then releasing the results to the public.
Instead, the president conducts the two in secret Pre-scripted radio interviews, and then sat down for a single, 22-minute televised Q&A — after taking a week to prepare — and still repeatedly failed to articulate a coherent thought. In a clear reply, however, Biden expressed his adamant refusal to undergo cognitive and neurological tests.
Biden followed that up with a call-in interview on MSNBC morning joe on monday During that appearance, the president seems to be Stop reading written notes – and still sometimes fail Complete his own sentencesBacktracked after losing a talking thread about Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, a wide array Democrat And Foreign officials there is told reporters That Biden’s debate performance wasn’t an anomaly: The president has repeatedly suffered from similarly troubling mental errors in private. Democratic donors revealed that Biden strangely dependent on a teleprompter to deliver comments in a patron’s private home.
Voters appear similarly distraught. inside more than one voteMore than 70 percent of Americans say Biden is unfit for a second term. And Trump’s lead over the president both increased nationally and inside battlefield States – Despite Biden outspending his opponent on TV ads, an advantage will disappear as the Republican begins tapping his own powerful campaign funds.
In light of all this, die-hard supporters of the President have been forced to resort to various absurd arguments in favor of his candidacy. I made some of these rebuttals in a column last week. But the weekend took on a new prominence, which can be summed up as, “History teaches us that switching nominees this late is electoral suicide.”
Here’s how Boston College history professor (and Substack author Hit) Heather Cox Richardson puts it. CNN on Saturday:
In the whole picture of American history, if you change a presidential nominee at this point in the game, the candidate loses. And it loses for several reasons. First, because the party machinery for elections revolves around someone else. Second, because the news is just going to report all the growing pains of a new campaign, including all the opposition research the opposition will then throw at the public.
This analysis is badly misguided. It is founded on a fundamentally absurd premise: that we can ascertain eternal truths about politics from the results of exactly two elections. And the substantive evaluation of the logic of those selections is also highly questionable. Most critically, however, Richardson completely avoided the extraordinary nature of Biden’s liability. History cannot tell us what happens when a party chooses to replace its cognitively compromised, 81-year-old nominee because no political party in America has ever faced such a predicament.
No, “history” does not prove that replacing Biden would be a mistake
The first problem with Richardson’s take is conceptual: you can’t derive timeless laws of political science from the correlation of a dataset of two sample sizes.
In modern US history, a sitting president has abruptly declined to seek re-nomination in an election year on only two occasions. Harry Truman Dropped out in March 1952 After an upset in the New Hampshire primary. nearby 1968 race on the same stage, Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not seek reconstruction, amid widespread opposition to his handling of the Vietnam War. In both cases, the Democratic Party ultimately lost the general election.
But these data cannot draw general conclusions about the wisdom of changing standard-bearers in election years. This is because you cannot harvest responsibly any General rule from a correlation supported by two data points. It is true that Donald Trump won a general election when the Democrats nominated a candidate under 70 in 2016, but then lost in 2020 when the Democrats nominated a candidate over 70. But given these facts, it would be odd that “in the whole picture of American history, when the Democrats nominate a non-septuaginarian to run against Donald Trump, the candidate loses.”
Richardson’s argument is a little less absurd. In 1952, the Democratic Party had held the White House for 20 consecutive years and the GOP chose a moderate, popular general, Dwight Eisenhower, as its nominee. Isn’t it possible that the Democrats lost because of this instead of Truman resigning? As we all know, the party could have done worse if Truman had been nominated; We do not have access to counterfactuals. We can’t get into a time machine, change a variable, and then run through history again. And without the benefit of such testing, we can’t know for sure whether Truman’s dropping out helped or hurt his team.
The same could be said of LBJ’s decision to step down from the presidency in 1968. Richardson says the Democrats may have lost that election: Johnson dropped out, and his replacement, Hubert Humphrey, struggled to win as much support as the “party machinery” built around LBJ (whatever that means) and news media reports. Did conflicting research on Humphrey.
But how well are we proving that thesis? How do we establish that Democrats would have done better with Johnson on the ballot? After all, LBJ was more closely identified with the Vietnam War, and therefore more likely to split the Democratic coalition internally than Humphrey. And many features of that election cycle favored Republicans, one of which is massive Response to civil rights And Increasing crime. Despite these headaches, Humphrey almost won the popular vote. How do we know that LBJ wouldn’t have done worse?
Political scientists often compensate for the inherently small sample sizes of US elections by examining voter behavior abroad. And when we widen the lens, the idea that changing leaders at the last minute is always harmful becomes more questionable. To take one example: In 2017, New Zealand’s Labor Party saw its support drop below 25 percent less than two months after election day. In response, party leader Andrew Little resigned and his deputy, He was replaced by Jacinda Ardern. Labor went on to gain support, eventually winning 37 percent voteArdern as prime minister is enough to lead a centre-left coalition government.
The Democrats’ current predicament has no historical precedent
If Richardson overestimates what we can learn from the past, he also understates the challenges Biden faces in the present. His current position does not resemble that of LBJ or Truman. Neither of these men were yet in their 70s, let alone their 80s, as Biden is today. Both were accomplished public speakers, and there was no evidence—public or private—that they suffered from severe cognitive decline.
Richardson’s suggestion that replacing Biden would hurt Democrats, because the news media would publish damaging stories about his replacement, is particularly odd. If the party sticks with Biden, it’s an absolute certainty that Democrats will have news that illuminates the personal. Concerns about his cognitive health, including each of the president’s public missteps. And it’s also certain that Biden will struggle to counter the impact of these stories through vigorous campaigning and eloquent interviews. We know these things because they are already happening.
By contrast, Richardson’s implicit claim that Biden’s replacement will suffer from more negative media coverage appears to be nothing more than a hunch. He doesn’t recognize that the new nominee will almost certainly be better equipped to both 1) participate in numerous media interviews and 2) speak coherently on their time and therefore receive more favorable press.
Most critically, Richardson fails to engage with how bleak Biden’s current odds look. the president There is a 37 percent Approval rating. He has followed Trump nationally and in virtually every swing state for months. Before he advertised his cognitive decline in the first debate, Biden failed to catch Trump despite inflation and his rival’s criminal convictions. It’s highly unlikely that the president will be able to outdo Trump in the coming months any more than he did before the depths of his aging were revealed on national television.
The real choice faces Democrats
Indeed, the question facing the Democratic Party is this: managing a historically unpopular, 81-year-old president who can neither maintain a normal campaign schedule nor speak coherently — and who is considered unfit to lead. More than 70 percent voters And many of his own allies in Washington — really the best way for Democrats to keep Trump out of power?
History cannot answer that question, not least because there is no historical precedent for the Democrats’ current predicament.
What we do know is that nearly every hypothetical alternative to Biden — Vice President Kamala Harris, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Gov. Josh Shapiro etc. — have. A low disapproval rating Than that, and we also know that any of those alternative candidates would dramatically shake up the presidential race and the narratives surrounding it for the Democratic nominee. Suddenly, the valence of age as an issue would be reversed: Democrats would have a nominee in the prime of life, while the GOP would be saddled with a 78-year-old whose own incoherence and mental flaws would be more apparent than a much younger challenger.
This does not mean that there will be new candidates clearly Perform better than Biden. A strong opinion of low voters about Harris and Whitmer implies that they could win more support than the president – but also, they could theoretically win less. But at this point, such uncertainty is a virtue. When you’re on track for almost-certain loss, it’s unwise to gamble on a course of action with unpredictable consequences. And this is especially true in this particular situation, where common sense dictates that it is preferable to have a candidate who is physically and cognitively capable of running a vigorous campaign than one who is irrevocably diminished by age.
To believe otherwise is to mistake historical anecdote for immutable law, and Status Quo Bias For sage insight.
