Joe Biden bowed out of the race for his party’s nomination today promising in a prepared statement to “speak to the Nation later this week in more detail about my decision.”
If Biden had left it at that, chaos would have reigned. He left no instruction to the delegates he amassed in what was, for the most part, an uncontested primary. He thanked his vice president, Kamala Harris, “for being an extraordinary partner in all this work,” but he neither endorsed her presumed candidacy to replace him nor did he sanction any of the various processes some have toyed with that would be designed to produce a suitable, consensus replacement. No one knows what the president currently thinks about how this unprecedented condition should resolve itself. Into that void, an untold number of freelancers will rush in the effort to popularize their vision of how the party should move forward.
Shortly after the statement was published, however, Biden endorsed his vice president to “be the nominee of our party this year.” The president’s endorsement was, however, confined to a social-media post composed, presumably, not by Biden’s own hand. The president will have to show far more enthusiasm for his chosen successor in the coming days to tamp down apprehension among Democratic elites over her competency as a candidate — no matter how much he resents it.
Democrats have a big opportunity before them — one they could easily blow. If the party descends into infighting and factionalism as their nominating convention approaches — or, worse, if the convention itself turns into an undisciplined free-for-all — whatever goodwill Democrats hope to capitalize on from this maneuver is unlikely to materialize. Voters tend not to reward a party in anarchy with control of the reins of power. If, however, Democrats rally around a new candidate — and, let’s face it, it’s more than likely Harris or bust — and turn their convention into a show of renewed enthusiasm and unity akin to what the GOP managed, they very well could reset the race.
If Democrats manage to transform their convention into both the most lavish ice floe in history for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s debutantes’ ball, Democrats could reap the rewards of being the first of the two parties to jettison their extremely unpopular nominees. If the party descends into pandemonium, Donald Trump’s upward trajectory will continue apace. But we just don’t know precisely how much the Democratic Party’s struggles at the top of the ticket were a result of their Biden problem or their Biden-Harris problem. We’re about to find out.
For the last three weeks, Joe Biden has insisted that he would not drop out of the race — no one, not even God himself, could make him reconsider. To this, Democrats stroked their chins over Biden’s coy ambiguity, eventually assuring their supporters that he would make up his mind eventually. Not one Democrat is today confused over Biden’s intentions.
Before today, I was inclined to agree that Joe Biden was toast — unelectable even against Donald Trump, with a campaign irreparably damaged from all the major Democratic figures admitting what we could all see: that Biden would be incapable of winning or serving another term. But, I did not really believe until today that Biden would drop out of the race. After all, while Biden has always been a hollow man and a transactional politician who would never stand up to the demands of his party’s various constituent groups, the one thing he’d never before been asked to surrender was his own position. (Even his 1987 withdrawal was done in good part to retreat to his perch as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the pivotal Robert Bork hearings.) But the pressure from donors and Democratic power brokers was too much in the end. Biden, or someone in his corner, finally threw in the towel.
Biden’s letter insists that he will continue to serve out his term, although his visible decline makes even that a farce, and one that will continue to dog his party’s presidential ticket.
We are in completely uncharted territory in modern presidential history. Nobody has ever before dropped out after winning the primaries. Lyndon Johnson quit in March 1968, and Bobby Kennedy was shot in June. It’s late July. Biden has already had a general-election debate, which is what finished him. Parties picked nominees at their conventions later than this in the era before modern primaries started, in 1972 for the Democrats and 1976 for the Republicans, but the whole business of elections ran differently then.
It looked for all the world as if this would be a historically depressing and uneventful race, like 1892, when the Cleveland–Harrison rematch resulted in collapsed turnout and an incumbent so depressed after his wife’s death in October that even he didn’t bother to vote for himself. Now, we’ve had Biden’s withdrawal just eight days after Trump survived an assassination attempt. We have never seen anything like this.
It will be interesting to see if Democrats line up behind Kamala Harris. That means absorbing the downsides she brings. She has been even more unpopular than Biden throughout their tenure. She’s closely tied to Biden’s record and to the cover-up of his decline. She has failed at everything she has been assigned to, can’t keep staff, and is a cringeworthy public speaker. And her menacing pre–vice presidential record is full of its own minefields. But with the Democrats’ need to avoid having the bottom drop out in Senate races, Harris could at least fire up some base enthusiasm, immediately inherit Biden’s campaign war chest, restart fundraising, and avoid the potential catastrophe of a contested convention. She’ll probably get a short-term poll bounce from relieved Democratic voters and a national press corps that is likely to go all-in to praise her. She may also be able to pick a female running mate to drive up the gender gap, which may not help win the election but could at least salvage turnout.
Biden’s age, a massive drag on the Democrats, is now mostly off the table as an issue. Trump, at 78, is now the old candidate. And at this writing, Trump’s favorability rating in the RealClearPolitics average is still -10.9, with 53.7 percent disapproval and 42.8 percent approval. He has been underwater by double digits continuously since a brief recovery in April and May 2022 (when Trump was out of public view and inflation was spiking, triggering nostalgia for his presidency). He has been disapproved by more people than approve of him continuously for nine years. So, his broad-based lead in the polls does not really reflect that Americans have stopped disliking Trump. I’m inclined to the view that it’s too late for Democrats to come back — but, if they do, it will be because they got rid of their unpopular nominee and Republicans are stuck with theirs.
One of the big reasons why there wasn’t more of a concerted effort among Democrats to keep President Biden from running for reelection a year ago, when it would have been a lot easier, was the widespread perception that Vice President Kamala Harris was unelectable. Now, many Republicans are licking their chops about the prospect of running against her.
It isn’t hard to see why. Harris has been one of the most unpopular vice presidents in history. She owns all of the failures of the Biden administration (especially inflation and a lax border policy), and, on top of that, she will now have to answer for her involvement in the cover-up of the president’s mental decline. Harris has an odd and inauthentic demeanor (from the cackle to odd musings about the “coconut tree” and being “unburdened by what has been”) that turns people off. In her previous run for presidency, she performed so poorly (including among women and black voters) that she was forced to drop out before Iowa.
Having said all that, the race is now a whole new ballgame. None of the polls, which have shown Harris doing marginally better than Biden on average but still trailing Donald Trump, are very predictive at this point. Democrats have spent the last several weeks attacking each other over Biden’s mental acuity. In another few weeks, they will be over that. They will nominate Harris and a new vice-presidential candidate and come out of their convention unified around the common goal of defeating Trump.
Harris will also have an opportunity to introduce herself beyond the embarrassing viral clips, and the media will be inundated by stories about the “new Kamala.” Now that Biden is out of the race, the negative stories about Democrats will stop and it will be hard to find any critical coverage of Harris. She will also be able to turn the age issue into an asset, with Republicans now running a candidate who will be in his 80s during the next term, while she won’t turn 60 until October.
Republicans, having just had their convention, will miss out on what would have been the best opportunity to message against her.
Unlike Biden, she can be given a list of talking points and offer a more focused line of attacks on Trump, who still remains hugely unpopular. Even after receiving a bounce after the assassination attempt, an ABC poll showed Trump with a 40 percent approval rating, compared to 51 percent who have an unfavorable view.
I’m not saying I’d place her as the favorite. But at the same time, I won’t assume she has no chance, and will not be taking polls seriously that say otherwise until after Labor Day — when Democrats will have had a chance to unify around her at the convention.
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