I have been occupied by a number of professional matters and so have not had time to address the building pressure on the COVID-isolated President to step down from the campaign. I will say that I went to bed Thursday night half expecting to wake up to an announcement that he was no longer running on Friday. Instead at one point my phone pushed a NYT headline that Biden announced he would be returning to the campaign trail next week. NPR reported the same this morning.
Indeed, the news is an ongoing mixture of somebody else saying he should go coupled with counter-programming from the Biden camp that he is still in the race.
So, earlier in the week I had noted the following scenarios.
- The party rallies around Biden.
- The party fights with Biden to get him to step down.
- Biden gracefully steps away and hands the baton to Harris.
- There is a floor fight to choose someone after Biden exits (without or without a “mini-primary” as some have suggested).
We are firmly in #2. As noted above, stories about Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff (a Pelosi ally), and even Obama suggesting Biden should exit made it seemed almost inevitable.
Now I am back to being not so sure, especially given the signaling from Biden.
I also have concerns that a prolonged #2 scenario is damaging to the anti-Trump cause. But I will also hasten to note that it felt (and I use that word very deliberately) to a lot of people last Saturday that the assassination attempt on Trump was going to be the decisive factor in this race. However, I must confess that it feels (again, a deliberate usage) to me that that event has already faded a bit into the overall fabric of the narrative. Like school shootings that were finally going to change the national narrative on gun violence, this event seem to be just another example of the fact that we have come to accept these things the same way we accept tornadoes and earthquakes. Just facts of life that are awful news stories that happen to other people and we just move on to the next bit.
But I digress.
I would argue that #2 needs leads to either #1 or #3, and it needs to do so quickly. The Democratic National Convention is basically a month away and the party cannot (or, at least should not) wait until the last minute.
I still think #4 would be a disaster on multiple fronts to include the fact that an intra-party fight will be a detriment to overall goal. It would take attention away from Trump’s negatives, give the GOP a talking point about how unified they are (and Dems are, well, in disarray), and, most importantly, give voters a lot of negatives about the winning side of the fight (since, by definition, an intra-party fight would mean Democrats criticizing other Democrats).
What I continue to find troubling is that a lot of the oust Biden camp seems to think #4 is a swell idea.
Still, I would note this from the DNC Chair:
Really, the only possible route, in my view, for #4 is Biden bowing out and releasing the delegates to a floor fight without endorsing Harris. (Also I keep seeing words like “coalescing” about Democratic leaders in these reports–but that seems to me to be obviously wishful thinking at best, if not just rank speculation).
The reporting on all of this has been a bit maddening, insofar as headlines Thursday made it sound like Biden was seriously contemplating an exit. However, both the NYT (Secluded in Rehoboth, Biden Stews at Allies’ Pressure to Drop Out of the Race) and CBS reporter Robert Costa are now reporting the opposite.
The private v. public part of this key to me. If Pelosi, et al., really do think that the party’s only hope is changing presidential nominees, they are going to have to take that fight public, and they will need to do so pretty much this coming week. But, of course, if they do that and fail they will hand the GOP a whoooole lot of commercial fodder.
I continue to be of the belief that the race will be close regardless of #1 or #3, and that it will be winnable, but I also wouldn’t wager anything of substance on the outcome. I think it all boils down to MI, PA, and WI.
One passing note, as this stuck out to me from the NYT piece linked above:
In privately railing about Mr. Obama and even aides to former President Bill Clinton, Mr. Biden has made clear that he finds it particularly rich that the architects of historic Democratic losses in the 1994 and 2010 midterm elections would be lecturing him about how to save the party after he presided over a better-than-expected midterm in 2022. While one person said Mr. Biden is not irked at Mr. Clinton himself — in fact, he is grateful the former president has been pressing donors to keep giving — others said that Mr. Obama is another story.
This strikes me because if I were Biden, or one of his team, this would certainly be the kind of thing that would reinforce my desire to stay in. On the one hand, Obama was a two-term president who is looked back on fondly. On the other, the Obama stewardship of the Democratic Party was not one of great success.* As such, were I Biden looking at 2022 and the general health of the Democratic Party, I would probably use that as evidence that I knew more than the people trying to oust me. I am not saying that that is actually good evidence for him to stay, but am noting how it could be self-reinforcing to him and his allies. Likewise, I think that Nancy Pelosi may be one of the most impressive legislative leaders in the nation’s history (and certainly of recent vintage) but that’s not the same skillset as running a national election (or, at least, I can see Biden’s folks thinking that way).
*See, for example, via Brookings, The fragile legacy of Barack Obama and The Atlantic: What Happens to the Democratic Party After Obama?
