Jailbreaks, Black Swans, and Magical Thinking

Buckle up. It’s about to get heavy.

Early Secret Pod: Sarah and I taped the Secret show a day early. It’s here and it’s a good one.

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(Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

1. There’s a Storm Coming

We are on the verge of a jailbreak in the Democratic party. The signs are everywhere, from weaker polling, to new vulnerabilities on the map, to a fundraising crash, to more reports that Biden is compromised.

This is what it looks like when a party has lost confidence in its leader.

If Biden had the ability to restore that confidence, then he would have demonstrated it already. Instead, his campaign is trying to freeze the state of play by teasing another interview several days out. The hope is that the prospect of Biden showing command on Monday night will prevent more defections in the meantime.

They already used that ploy once. It’s hard to see how it works a second time.

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What does a jailbreak look like? Enough elected D’s run off-sides in public that the party elders are forced to go to Biden in private and say something like the following:

Mr. President, you’ve given decades of service to this country but the time has come for you to pass the burden to someone else. If you step aside, your legacy is complete. You defeated a sitting dangerous president, faced down a coup, healed the country, and passed a historic amount of legislation that improved the lives of your fellow citizens.

But if you continue on this course you will lose. And then your legacy will be as the man who let Trump back into the White House and this time with a mandate from the voters to indulge his worst impulses.

We’re here to help with this transition and to support you as your loyal friends. We want to strategize with you about how best to elevate your successor.

But we’re not asking.

If the jailbreak happens, there will be a period of chaos until the handoff to Biden’s successor is complete. If the handoff is successful, then the chaos will subside. If the handoff is fumbled, the chaos will continue.

So before the chaos accelerates, let’s clear our minds of magical thinking.

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Magical Thinking #1: Biden is going to be okay. For two weeks there has been a sizable group of people insisting that:

• Debates don’t matter.

• Biden is actually fine as a candidate.

• The polls weren’t that bad.

• Or maybe, the polls show Biden doing better post-debate.

• Or you can’t trust polls.

• All Democrats have to do is grab their swords and fight harder.

But the evidence against these propositions is overwhelming. Usually debates don’t matter, but this debate was more akin to a health event that confirmed the largest overriding concern about the candidate. Biden still has yet to prove that he can be a vigorous, effective presence. He has done a number of events and while all of them have been better than the debate, none of them—not one—has risen to the level “good.”

The polls have been bad for Biden. And if the answer is that we can’t trust (a) polls, or (b) focus groups, or (c) what we saw first on the debate stage and later on the stump, then what are we even doing here? This is a non-falsifiable view which posits that nothing is knowable and judgments can’t be made and the universe is either perfectly clockwork or perfectly random—and in either case immune to influence.

Look: Nancy Pelosi is a hard-headed, skillful practitioner of politics. There’s a reason she’s trying to create space for Biden to step aside.

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Magical Thinking #2: Democrats can come up with an exciting way to choose a new nominee who everyone will then get behind. I admire James Carville a great deal, but his proposal for a sprint primary in which the voters are Democratic delegates is not realistic. Meaning: I cannot imagine how it could be implemented and if it were implemented by magic, I do not see how it could avoid creating a great deal of ill will within the party.

There are ways in which Democrats could have a contested nomination. For instance, President Biden and other party leaders could decline to bless an alternative and then Vice President Harris could put herself forward and be challenged by one or more Democrats, leading to factional conflict at the convention and then ongoing charges that the nominee was selected not by voters, but by a couple thousand party apparatchiks.

I suppose that is exciting? But only in the way that falling off your roof is exciting. If you land without breaking anything it’s great. But you probably shouldn’t do it on purpose.

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Magical Thinking #3: Kamala Harris is a safe choice. The most logical replacement—and probably the best replacement—is Kamala Harris. But as Sarah explained on TNL, in focus groups with African-American women the sentiment has been overwhelming that Harris can’t beat Trump for elemental reasons.

I would like to believe that this is not true of our country. But that could be magical thinking on my part.

In other words: There are no guarantees. Biden could stay and win. Biden could stand down and the new nominee could lose. Nothing is “safe.”

The problem is that both options have less than a 50 percent chance of success. We’re choosing between least-dangerous pathways and humans are not good at that.

We are risk-averse animals evolved to believe that if one option is risky, then the other option must be not-risky.

That is not the situation we find ourselves in. We’re choosing between an option with a 10 percent chance of success and an option with 35 percent chance of success.¹ That’s a hard, painful, call.

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The Bulwark isn’t a place for happy talk. We’re realists who’ve been mugged by an even harder alternate reality. And we’re building a community for people who want to try to make our dark timeline better by telling the truth—but also by being kind.

Things are about to get crazy. Come and ride it out with us.

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2. A Bevy of Black Swans

One of the reasons I get frustrated with talismanic incantations about Allan Lichtman and his keys to victory is that everything about this election is a black swan.

It is true that no incumbent president has lost re-election during a time of economic expansion and low unemployment.

It is also true that no 80-year-old has ever been elected president. And no felon has ever been elected president. We are presently on course to make history with at least one of these improbabilities.

There are other firsts surrounding this election: Never before has an aspiring president said, out loud, that he wanted to be “a dictator.” Never before has a sitting president attempted a coup. Never before has the general election featured two men who have served as president.² Never before has the general election matchup been settled so early. Never before has a presidential general election debate taken place in June.

So when someone says that Biden will win because it has never happened before that a president in his position has lost—or that Kamala Harris will lose because it has never happened before that a nominee withdrew and his party went on to victory—yes, that is not exactly helpful.

A lot of never-before things are happening all around us, right now.

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This isn’t to say that we should ignore all historical precedents, but rather that we should understand that we are in a period where many historical precedents are falling.

Here is another historical precedent that I’ve become concerned about: Donald Trump has never won the popular vote.

We should not assume that just because it hasn’t happened yet, it can’t happen.

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Donald Trump has spent more months running general election campaigns for president than anyone since Nixon. By my count, Trump has spent roughly 44 months in general election campaigns against his eventual opponent.

For the first 33 of those months, Trump trailed in pre-election polling by significant margins. In 2016, he was behind Hillary Clinton the entire way. In 2020 he trailed Joe Biden in nearly every single poll, wire-to-wire.

In October 2023—for the first time—Trump became the clear polling leader.

Look at the timelines:

We dismiss this data at democracy’s peril.

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Trump has dominated this race and on the current trajectory he could win not only the Electoral College but also a plurality of the popular vote.

This has been unthinkable for eight years. And now it’s right there, a blurry vision in the middle-distance ahead.

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People say the popular vote doesn’t matter and that’s true in a technical sense. But there is a moral dimension, too. A party that wins the Electoral College while losing the popular vote understands that it gamed the system. It knows that it is practicing minority rule.

And the popular majority understands that it is a majority. It has hope to fight another day.

Can you imagine what it would feel like to wake up on November 6 and discover that a plurality of Americans chose the insurrectionist who attempted a coup?

Imagine what such an administration would be emboldened to do.

The black swans: They are everywhere around us.

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3. Grace

There’s a lot of anger in The Discourse right now. Why? Because this is a time of stress and danger and people do not always respond to such moments with rationality and sangfroid.

Keep that in mind in the coming days because the stress is going to get worse.

Do not assume that the people making different judgments about probabilities and pathways are corrupt or weak. Don’t assume that they’re either wetting the bed or acting like they’re in a cult.

You can believe that they are wrong or mistaken. But if you see someone acting in a way that’s troubling, try to extend them grace. We’re all going through something here. And despite everyone’s good intentions, it might not work out for the best. Even if we choose the “right” course.

I have been incredibly proud of the ongoing conversation we’ve had here, in this community, for two weeks now. How great have people been? We had a guy who canceled his subscription and was so upset with The Bulwark that he came back to the comments every day to argue to other people that they should cancel their subscriptions, too.

And even this guy—who was clearly upset—exhibited civility and politeness. I’m so grateful for that.

It’s been remarkable. There’s really no other place like this on the internet.

Here’s my charge to you today: In the coming days, take that same ethos we try to exhibit here every day and carry it out into the world with you. Be forbearing. Show grace.

We’re all in this together. Even if everything turns out for the worst.

Especially if everything turns out for the worst.

1. I’m making these numbers up. You get the point: Both paths are less-then-even propositions.

2. In the modern era. I understand this has happened before in the mists of history.