It was not undemocratic for the Democrats to dump Joe Biden

Not long after President Joe Biden announced he was stepping aside from the presidential race Sunday, pro-Trump social media influencers had settled on one line of attack: that Democrats had carried out a coup against their own president. 

Biden “has now been deposed in a coup,” Trump-backing venture capitalist David Sacks wrote. “Undermining Democracy should never be condoned,” Trump ally Richard Grenell posted. “The coup is complete,” wrote Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ). 

“What you just witnessed is proof positive that when the most powerful Democrat institutions and oligarchs unite to topple an American regime, they expect to succeed,” conservative activist Charlie Kirk wrote.

From people who support Donald Trump, the man who tried to steal the 2020 election, this is obviously a ridiculous and absurd thing to say. Yet it echoes a self-interested argument made by Biden himself just two weeks ago, when he argued that him dropping out would be tantamount to ignoring democracy.

“The voters — and the voters alone — decide the nominee of the Democratic Party,” Biden wrote in a July 8 letter. “Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned.” 

What’s unfolded in the two weeks since has been a steadily intensifying pressure campaign from various members of the press, pundits, donors, and current and former elected officials aimed at making Biden quit. Some of these entreaties were made in private — and, when Biden didn’t appear to be listening, more spilled out into public view. They argued that he couldn’t win and, eventually, he listened. 

There may arguably be something a bit uncomfortable about the role of Democratic power brokers and donors in pushing Biden aside after his primary win. But while they’re doing this without voters’ explicit say, they’re doing so in an attempt to (belatedly) respond to voters’ beliefs that Biden is too old to serve another term.

So it may be undemocratic in practice, but in a sense it’s democratic in intention. Because the party isn’t avoiding an election, they’re trying to win one, by picking a nominee who (they hope) can win more people’s votes.

How democratic were the 2024 Democratic primaries?

Democratic Party elites didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree after the debate. Up until that disaster, they’d been fully behind Biden, and their support of him was one major reason Democratic voters were presented with no credible alternatives in this year’s primaries. 

Because in reality, Biden won the primaries well before the people got to vote. Back in 2022 and 2023, some polls showed a majority of Democratic voters saying he shouldn’t run again. The president never seems to have seriously considered bowing out, though. He ran again and (as is normal for an incumbent) solidly locked down support from Democratic elites. As a result, Democratic rising stars were deterred from challenging Biden, believing they likely would have lost, and then been blamed if Trump won in the general. 

So, yes, 15 million people did indeed end up voting in those primaries. But how democratic was that process? Biden won the primaries because he won the inside game. It was party elites who determined the (few) options available to voters. Polls showed the voters would in theory have preferred someone else, but they weren’t offered a realistic opposing candidate.

Furthermore, asserting that the primary result is all that matters, and that taking anything else into account is “undemocratic,” is a very limited and blinkered definition of democracy. After all, those 15 million people are a paltry sum compared to the 150 million people who may vote in the general election — people who, according to polls, overwhelmingly think Biden is too old to serve another term. Many of those people wanted another candidate — shouldn’t their views matter?

The “new information after the primaries” problem

Another issue is that primary voters did not have the information that Biden would perform so poorly in the debate when they cast their votes.

And though what key Democratic Party figures just did to Biden is in some ways unprecedented, in other ways it’s very familiar. That is: it’s the standard playbook for how to force out a suddenly scandal-plagued elected official who is believed to be hurting the party.

This playbook involves a ratcheting up of pressure and condemnations as co-partisans gradually condemn or abandon that official, making sure they know that the battering will continue unless they quit — basically what we’ve seen over the past few weeks.

New York Democrats successfully employed it against Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2021, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in 2018, and Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2008. Senate Democrats did it against Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) in 2017. (Though it doesn’t always work, as shown in the cases of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, and 2016 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.)

Your mileage may vary in how much you view Biden’s bad debate performance as a full-on scandal. But it was certainly new information that wasn’t clear during the primaries. Back then, Biden refused to participate in any debates and skipped some high-profile interview opportunities, leaving it ambiguous how he might perform in a high-stakes setting.

But the truth is that party elites didn’t just casually abandon the choice of the voters right after they made that choice. They defected later, because of new information — information that those primary voters did not have.

Party loyalty is a two-way street

Finally, it is also worth noting that party elites didn’t push Biden off the ticket in an effort to steal the power of the presidency from him. They abandoned him because they fear he is hurting the party’s electoral chances — that is, because he’s lost support from voters. 

Party loyalty is a two-way street — it is not, or at least should not be, a blood oath or a cult of personality. Leading Democrats backed Biden when they thought he could win, and they ditched him when they thought he couldn’t. 

Now, they’re trying to substitute a nominee they hope the American public will like a lot better. And there’s something very democratic about that. They are (finally, belatedly) trying to listen to the voters, who, according to polls at least, keep saying they don’t want to support Biden again.

So maybe it would have been nice if Democrats had had an actual presidential primary process rather than this mess. But that didn’t happen — and, considering the options, party officials abandoning Biden to try and nudge him aside in favor of someone who can win was a reasonable response.