How to Think Clearly About (Maybe) Replacing Biden
Where do we go from here? Also: The president is now a king. #Awesome
A reminder why this moment is fraught: The Supreme Court ruled on presidential immunity. Here is Justice Sotomayor, in a dissent, explaining the logic of the majority’s opinion:
The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.
Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.
Those are the stakes.
And that is why defeating Trump overrides all other considerations. The Supreme Court has created a kingship while a man who wants to be a dictator approaches the throne.
We are in crisis.
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1. If This, Then That
The mission is to maximize the chances of defeating Donald Trump.
Back in March the available evidence suggested that Joe Biden was the best bet for accomplishing this mission. The available evidence has changed. Maybe Biden is still the best bet. But maybe not.
Let’s work through some choices, systematically.
Was Biden’s debate performance a one-off failure?
If yes, then he needs to demonstrate that fact to voters, quickly.
Axios reports that Biden’s team might do something unscripted with him “later this month.”
If the report is accurate, it is not reassuring. If the debate was a singular event, then you would have expected Biden to show up on something like Jimmy Kimmel’s show or Saturday Night Live. You would have also expected him to sit down with George Stephanopoulos or one of the other Sunday shows, too.
The fact that Biden spent the weekend with family (not counting the scripted Friday rally in North Carolina) and not on the trail is not an encouraging data point.1
If no, then we need to reassess Biden’s chances to defeat Trump.
If Biden is compromised, how much does it hurt his electoral chances?
The only reasonable answer is: A lot.
For two years, every poll and focus group has showed that Biden’s biggest liability is his age. If Biden is compromised, it feeds directly into the overriding concern voters have about him.2
Before the debate, Biden was losing to Trump. Not by much, but he was losing. He needed a comeback. If he is compromised and cannot wage a vigorous campaign then his chances of winning are, by definition, lower.
Maybe a compromised Biden can roll double sixes and win. That does not seem like a high-probability outcome.
Is it possible to replace Biden as the Democratic party’s nominee?
Technically, the answer is yes.
The party rules provide the ability for delegates to select a different candidate at the convention.
But practically speaking, this is two different questions:
(1) Can Democrats select a different nominee if Biden steps down voluntarily?
Yes, and this is the easy scenario. Biden gives some reason for why he can’t serve as the nominee and regretfully releases his delegates.
Either Democrats choreograph a handoff, coalescing around a new candidate, or
Democrats divide into factions and scramble to build a coalition strong enough to win the nomination over multiple rounds of voting.
(2) Can Democrats force Biden aside if he declines to withdrawal his candidacy?
Also technically yes—in the sense that the delegates could be persuaded en masse that they should abandon their pledge to Biden. But this is much harder to execute. It would require at least one Democrat to blow up his/her career by openly challenging Biden. The bitterness this move would provoke would make the intraparty arguments of the last 96 hours look like patty-cake.
Ergo, if Biden is going to be replaced by someone who has a better chance to win, then he has to step aside of his own volition.3
2. Next Man Up
That’s the Biden side of the equation. What would the replacement side look like?
The only way to evaluate it is: Kamala Harris or Someone Else.
The Case for Kamala: As the sitting vice president, Kamala Harris is a different category of replacement candidate from everyone else.
She is the only potential replacement who has been fully vetted and has universal name ID.
As part of the Biden campaign, she could inherit the existing organization.
Also, she’s probably the only candidate who could inherit the $91.6 million the Biden campaign has in the bank.
As the sitting vice president, she is best positioned to unify the Democratic party around her because her selection would do the most to foreclose factionalism.
It’s not hard to envision how a successful handoff would work.
Biden announces some previously undisclosed health problem and says he now realizes that he can’t manage the rigors of a campaign.
He blesses Harris with the entire D elite behind her: From Schumer to Jeffries, from Polis to Newsom.
Harris—who is already in campaign mode—accepts and is off to the races with 18 weeks to reset the election as a pure referendum on Trump.
The downside is Harris herself. Jonathan Chait recalls this devastating passage from a Times piece last year:
But the painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation—including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket—said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country. Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.
Which leaves us trying to work out probabilities. Would an imperfect Harris have a better chance to beat Trump than a compromised Biden?
We can’t know, of course. All we can do is try to feel our way through while looking at polling. But I’ll say this for the vice president:
I was quite bearish on her ability to win a full primary and then manage 18 months of a general election campaign this cycle. That’s a lot of open space in which her flaws could have been exposed. That’s why I had previously judged Biden to be a stronger candidate.
But this is a different scenario: Could Harris accept a handoff from an eclipsing president (who most voters believe to be a good man) and then successfully prosecute a 120-day blitzkrieg against the most hated presidential candidate in history—all while economic reality continues to buoy her party?
I’m more bullish on that proposition. Your mileage may vary. I’d like to hear what you think in the comments.
The Case for Someone Else: Maybe another candidate would have better odds against Trump than Vice President Harris.
I don’t know who this candidate would be, but for our purposes it doesn’t matter. Let’s say there is a Gov. Smith, who is a generational political talent. Let’s then pretend that we all agree that, in a neutral-environment, head-to-head race against Trump, Gov. Smith would give Democrats the best chance of victory.
The challenge is that we are not in a neutral environment and Gov. Smith starts out with a bunch of problems.
Her name ID is zero. No one outside her state knows who she is.
She hasn’t solidified a rationale for her candidacy because she wasn’t campaigning for president until five minutes ago.
She has not been vetted on the national stage.
She will have to create a national organization and fundraising operation from close to scratch.
She will have to outmaneuver at least one other potential candidate—and possibly more than one—in order to secure the nomination, meaning that unifying the party will also be a heavier lift for her.
Now maybe the upside of being a generational talent overbalances all of those costs and what we have is:
Someone else’s chance of beating Trump > Harris’s chance of beating Trump > Biden’s chance of beating Trump
But maybe not. For Kamala Harris, the short campaign is an advantage against Trump. For the Someone Else candidate, the short campaign is a weakness. Someone Else would want as much runway as possible.
If you think Someone Else has a better chance to beat Trump, then I’d like to hear your description of how that would happen and what it would look like.
And remember: The identity of the Someone Else is kind of beside the point. Tell me the story of how Someone Else wins the nomination and then what the general election campaign looks like.
3. Net-Net
TL;DR:
(1) If Biden is compromised, then he should step aside and Kamala Harris is probably the best-percentage play available.
(2) If Biden is compromised and he is not willing to step aside voluntarily, then Democratic leaders should be prepared to go to him privately and convince him.
I am acutely aware of how painful this is.4
(3) If Biden is not compromised, then he needs to demonstrate it—quickly, decisively, and continuously—so that voters can rally to him. Because the support of people who are monomaniacally just trying to beat Trump—people like you and me—won’t be enough.
Two other not-encouraging data points:
(1) Reports suggest that Biden is getting advice from his son, Hunter. Whatever else there is to say about Hunter Biden, at least we can agree that his judgment is not always fantastic?
(2) This line from the NYT readout on the Biden family summit is . . . concerning: “At least one of the president’s grandchildren has expressed interest in getting more involved with the campaign, perhaps by talking with influencers on social media, according to the informed person.”
Not all scandals are equal. Dan Quayle spelling “potato” wrong was only a problem because it fed into the pre-existing concern about him being a lightweight.
An angry or agro Biden at the debate would not have hurt him nearly so much as his doddering performance.
There’s a third option here, which is a forced “voluntary” withdrawal. Under this scenario, Biden doesn’t want to step aside, but senior Democrats (perhaps Obama, Clyburn, Pelosi, Jeffries, etc.) go to him privately and say that if he doesn’t stand down, then they will publicly call for his recusal.
This course would require determination and coordination by the Democratic party elders, but it would probably result in Biden pulling out.
Why might Biden be reluctant to stand down? Because in 2016, President Obama basically forced him not to run for president in order to clear the field for Hillary Clinton. Obama was wrong. Biden was right. And maybe America would have been spared the Trump era.
Also: Biden has been a good president. A very good president.
None of this is fair and none of it is a reflection on his person. But it’s also bigger than him. Scroll back up to Sotomayor’s dissent if you need to.
"Chief Justice John Roberts, writing in his majority opinion, appeared to argue that the liberal justices overreacted to the court's decision in their dissents. 'As for the dissents, they strike a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today,' Roberts wrote."
Rather ironic and telling that Chief Justice Roberts shows more concern over the tenor of dissents from his liberal justices, and not a single solitary chirp ever about the rampant ethics and appearances of impropriety, from some of his conservative justices....
And he wonders why Americans have lost faith in both him and this court....
The biggest thing I learned today is that John Roberts is just a slicker version of Alito and Thomas.