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Many congressional Democrats believe their party is hurtling toward a cliff’s edge and shouldn’t even bother trying to turn around.
Late last week, Senate Democrats held a private meeting to discuss Joe Biden’s electoral viability in the wake of his disastrous debate performance and subsequent revelations of his apparent cognitive decline. According to Politico, no more than four of the caucus’s 50 Democrats said they were committed to sticking with Biden as their party’s nominee.
By many accounts, a large majority of Democrats on the Hill believe that Biden has little hope of defeating Donald Trump and that a different candidate would have a better chance. The Capitol Hill reporters Heather Caygle and Jake Sherman claim that they haven’t spoken to a single congressional Democrat “who privately says they think Biden is capable of running and beating Trump at this point.” Unnamed “senior Democrats” have told Politico they’re convinced the president will lose the election.
Then a 20-year-old man nearly assassinated Trump.
The former president’s near-death experience has rendered some Democrats even more pessimistic about Biden’s chances. And yet, Saturday’s tragic events have also led many to give up on persuading him to step aside.
The precise rationale for this surrender varies between lawmakers. Democrats who spoke with the Washington Post’s Robert Costa said, in his summary, “it’s time for the country to stick together, and that means Democrats sticking together as well.”
As Jonathan Chait notes, this argument is incoherent. It is unclear why a shocking act of violence — committed by a young person with no discernible political motive — compels Democrats to change their behavior. If the concern is unifying the nation, it seems counterproductive to line up behind a president with a 38 percent approval rating.
Regardless, the impulse to prioritize the pursuit of unity over victory is informed by fatalism: Many Democrats have decided that the attempt on Trump’s life has made him unbeatable.
A senior House Democrat told Axios Sunday, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” A veteran Democratic consultant echoed this new conventional wisdom in an interview with NBC News the same day, saying, “The presidential contest ended last night.”
If Democrats are certain to lose no matter whom they nominate, then why bother with the uncomfortable, divisive task of trying to persuade your party’s president to forfeit the nomination?
But this defeatism is rooted more in Democrats’ own cowardice than objective reality.
We do not yet have much polling data taken after the assassination attempt against Trump, but there’s no reason to assume that the Republican’s brush with death will secure him a durable surge in support. America is a deeply divided country, and voters’ views of Trump are generally deep-seated at this point. The defining feature of this year’s polls has been their relative insensitivity to (even extraordinary) events.
Trump’s criminal conviction cost him only about 1 percentage point in polls taken immediately afterward, and this shift dissipated in the ensuing weeks. Biden’s catastrophic debate performance shaved only about 2 points off his margin. Maybe Saturday’s assassination attempt will prove to be the one thing capable of totally upending the race, but there’s no reason to presume it will.
Even if there is a large shift in polls this week, such a change is likely to revert toward the long-running average over time. Four months is an eon in the American news cycle.
Meanwhile, the polling data taken through the end of last week suggests that the Democratic Party is in okay political shape. It’s only Joe Biden who is not.
When asked which party they would like to see running Congress, voters currently favor the Democrats over the Republicans by 0.6 points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average. In battleground states, Democratic Senate candidates are consistently outperforming Biden. A New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday found the president trailing Trump by 3 points in Pennsylvania, while Democratic Sen. Bob Casey leads his Republican challenger David McCormick by 11 points.
Meanwhile, a fresh set of swing-state surveys from YouGov found Trump leading Biden by 7 points in Arizona, 2 points in Michigan, 4 points in Nevada, 5 points in Wisconsin, and 3 points in Pennsylvania. In those very same polls, Democratic Senate candidates led Republican ones in all of those states by 7 points or more.
Some Democrats believe that only Kamala Harris could realistically replace Biden and that she would make no stronger a candidate than the president, even in his diminished state.
I think this view is mistaken. For one thing, we’re in uncharted territory; no one can be fully certain of what would happen if Biden stepped aside. More importantly, though, there is good reason to think that Democrats could improve their prospects by replacing Biden with Harris. The vice president is currently polling at least as well against Trump as Biden is: In RealClearPolitics’s polling average, Harris trails Trump by 2 points while Biden trails him by 2.7 points.
Harris also has a lower disapproval rating than Biden. It’s conceivable that her numbers are currently depressed by her association with him.
Most critically, Harris is not in conspicuous cognitive decline. An overwhelming majority of voters do not consider her too old to serve. She is a competent public speaker. All of these qualities differentiate her from Biden.
Biden’s boosters may cite his relatively small polling decline since the debate as evidence that he’s still viable. After all, as I wrote above, the significance of even extraordinary campaign events tends to dissipate over time. But this reasoning is premised on a conceptual error. Biden’s problem is not a bad debate, it’s more the sad reality his debate performance revealed: He is no longer capable of reliably achieving even bare competence when communicating with the public.
In an Oval Office address Sunday night, Biden proved unable to successfully execute a short speech, even while reading from a teleprompter. The president aimed to say that “in America, we resolve our differences at the ballot box” instead of “with bullets.” Instead, he said that “we resolve our differences at the battle box” — then, evidently trying and failing to correct himself, he continued, “You know, that’s how we do it, at the battle box, not with bullets.”
By itself, the president accidentally suggesting that America’s political conflicts should be resolved in some sort of ultimate fighting arena would be of little consequence. But Biden’s flub underscores his campaign’s fatal flaw. A bad debate will fall out of the news, but a candidate’s increasingly limited capacities for effective communication will not. Biden’s decline will constrain his capacity to convey favorable political narratives while perpetually introducing new negative news stories spotlighting voters’ top concern with his candidacy. The president’s Oval Office address Sunday and recent press conference gave him a rare chance to ingratiate himself and his party to a large national audience. Due to Biden’s limitations, these functioned less as opportunities to exploit than hazards to survive.
All this said, Democrats who still have faith in Biden aren’t the problem. It is the lawmakers who believe that their party would do better if he stepped aside — but are doing nothing to bring that about — who are most derelict in their duties.
Such Democrats may tell themselves there’s no point in pressuring Biden to step down since their party is doomed either way. But this is a rationalization for cowardice, not an unblinkered appraisal of reality.
Accepting a second Trump administration as inevitable is not rational, given the available data. And doing so is not moral, given the stakes of keeping an illiberal reactionary out of power. Democrats have a path to victory. Some would simply rather avoid personal risk or discomfort than take it.
