Do You Think He's Better Than Trump?
Siena is a decent polling firm for the New York metro and teh NY Times uses them and gives them a kind of credibility nationally that they don’t deserve. They know how to predict who’s going to win a New York gubernatorial race. When it comes to national contests… just another polling firm that might or might not be better than throwing a dart. But… expect to hear at least a few days worth of Siena-NY Times polling results (and hand-wringing). The latest poll explaining why Biden can’t win was released yesterday.
Shane Goldmacher: “Only one in four voters think the country is moving in the right direction. More than twice as many voters believe Biden’s policies have personally hurt them as believe his policies have helped them. A majority of voters think the economy is in poor condition. And the share of voters who strongly disapprove of Biden’s handling of his job has reached 47 percent, higher than in Times/Siena polls at any point in his presidency. The poll offers an array of warning signs for the president about weaknesses within the Democratic coalition, including among women, Black and Latino voters. So far, it is Trump who has better unified his party, even amid an ongoing primary contest.”
Nate Cohn, pushing the company's flawed brand, offered more of the same. “Donald Trump has the largest national lead in an NYT poll since first running for president in 2015… Biden’s support among nonwhite voters keeps sinking. He held just a 49-39 lead among the group, even though nonwhite respondents who voted in the 2020 election said they backed Biden, 69-21. Despite the positive economic news over the last few months, 51 percent of voters still said the economy was “poor.” In a strange way, perhaps that’s good news for Biden: Maybe his standing will improve if or when voters begin to gain confidence that the economy has turned the corner. Even at this late stage, Democrats are still divided over whether Biden should be the nominee, with 46 percent saying he should be and 45 percent saying he shouldn’t. We didn’t ask whether Biden should drop out of the race. We considered it— in fact, we discussed it for days— but many respondents may not know the complications involved in a contested convention.”
One thing I’m not looking forward to is all the conservatives who had fled Trump’s nihilistic/kleptocratic Republican Party, taking over the Democratic Party in cahoots with the Democrats’ own conservative wing. It’s inevitable… I’m just not looking forward to it. Conservative thought-leaders are more and more setting the Democratic Party agenda and many of us have complained about the direction MSNBC has taken as more and more slots are filled by anti-Trump Republicans.
That said, some of them are entertaining and talented and some have perspectives worth taking into consideration. Jonathan Last is one of those conservative Republican thought-leaders who fled the MAGA GOP for The Bulwark; he's the editor now. He’ll be 50 in 2 months and many people [unfairly] consider him and Tim Miller interchangeable. Last week, he warned Democrats that they’re stuck with Biden and they need to grin and bear it. Acknowledging that Biden is old— and the manifestations concerning— he still trashed Ezra Klein’s lame opus on why Biden needs to step aside for… some other lame, imperfect, shitty Democrat. Klein: “He is not the campaigner he was, even five years ago. The way he moves, the energy in his voice. The Democrats denying decline are only fooling themselves.” Still, wrote Last, “Biden is almost certainly the strongest possible candidate Democrats can field against Donald Trump in 2024.”
Biden’s strengths as a candidate are considerable. He has presided over an extraordinarily productive first term in which he’s passed multiple pieces of popular legislation with bipartisan majorities.
Unemployment is at its lowest low, GDP growth is robust, real wage gains have been led by the bottom quartile, and the American economy has achieved a post-COVID soft landing that makes us the envy of the world. He has no major scandals. His handling of American foreign policy has been stronger and defter than any recent president’s.
Moreover, he is a known quantity. The recent Michigan primary results underscored that Democratic voters don’t actually have an appetite for leaving Biden. In 2012, 11 percent of Michigan Democrats voted “uncommitted” against Barack Obama when he had no opposition. This week, with two challengers on the ballot and progressive activists whipping votes against Biden, the “uncommitted” vote share was just 13 percent. Biden is fully vetted, his liabilities priced in. Voters are not being asked to take a chance on him.
This last part is crucial, because 2024 pits a current president against a former president, making both quasi-incumbents. If Biden was replaced, another Democrat would have her or his own strengths— but would be an insurgent. Asking voters to roll the dice on a fresh face against a functionally incumbent President Trump is a bigger ask than you might think.
But the biggest problem plaguing arguments for Biden’s retirement is: Who then? Pretend you are a Democrat and have been handed a magical monkey’s paw. You believe that Biden is too old to defeat Trump and so you make a wish: I want a younger, more vigorous Democrat. There’s a puff of smoke and Kamala Harris is the nominee.
Do you feel better about the odds of defeating Trump in nine months?
You shouldn’t. Harris’s approval rating is slightly lower than Biden’s. People skeptical of her political abilities point to her time as vice president, but that’s not really fair: Very few vice presidents look like plausible successors during their time in office. (George H. W. Bush and Al Gore are the exceptions.)
What should worry you about Harris is her 2020 campaign, which was somehow both disorganized and insular. She did not exhibit the kind of management skills or political instincts that inspire confidence in her ability to win a national campaign. Worse, she only rarely exhibited top-level-candidate skills.
Harris had some great moments in 2020. Her announcement speech and first debate performance were riveting. But more often she was flat-footed and awkward. She fell apart at the Michigan debate in 2019 and never got polling traction. (My colleague Sarah Longwell likens Harris to a professional golfer who’s got the yips.)
Some public polling on this question fills out the picture: Emerson finds Harris losing to Trump by three percentage points (Biden is down one point in the same poll). Fox has Harris losing by five points (it also has Biden down by one point). These are just two polls and the questions were hypothetical, but at best, you can say that Harris is not obviously superior to Biden in terms of electability. At worst, she might give Democrats longer odds.
So you go back to the monkey’s paw with another wish: a younger, more vigorous Democrat who’s not Kamala Harris, please.
I’m not sure how it would work logistically— would the Democratic Party turn its back on the sitting vice president? [who happens to be a woman and a person of color]— but this is magic, so just roll with it. There’s a puff of smoke and Gavin Newsom walks onstage.
Newsom is one of those people who, like Bill Clinton, has been running for president since he was 5 years old. Also like Clinton, Newsom is a good talker with some ideas in his head. But Clinton was a third-way Democrat from the Deep South at a time when the Democratic Party needed southern blue-collar voters. Today, the Democratic Party needs Rust Belt blue-collar voters— and Newsom is a liberal [a liberal in the eyes of a conservative Republican like Last but... not a progressive] from San Francisco. Not a great starting position.
Every non-Harris Democrat begins from a place of lower name recognition, meaning that there would be a rush to define them in the minds of voters. Republicans have convinced 45 percent of the country that Scrantonian Joe Biden is a Communist. What do you think they’d do with Newsom? In the Fox poll, he runs even with Vice President Harris at -4 to Trump. In the more recent Emerson poll, Newsom trails Trump by 10 points.
Then there’s the eyeball test. Look at Newsom’s slicked-back hair, his gleaming smile, and tell me: Does he look like the guy to eat into Trump’s margins among working-class whites in Pennsylvania and Michigan?
What about Pennsylvania and Michigan? You have only one wish left on the monkey’s paw, and Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro— popular governors who won big in swing states in 2022— are sitting right there. Maybe you should put one of them on the ticket in place of Biden? There’s some polling to back you up: Whitmer would probably beat Trump in Michigan and Shapiro would probably beat Trump in Pennsylvania.
Nationally, it’s a much different question. I haven’t found anyone who’s polled Shapiro-Trump nationally, but Emerson and Fox both have Whitmer polling worse than Biden. (Emerson has Whitmer 12 points behind Trump.)
Name recognition accounts for part of this gap, but not all of it. In 2022, Whitmer won her gubernatorial race by 11 points while Shapiro won by 15. But each ran against an underfunded MAGA extremist. In the Michigan poll pitting Whitmer against Trump, she leads by only six points; in the Pennsylvania poll with Shapiro, he leads Trump by 11. So even in states where everyone knows them, these potential saviors are softer against Trump than they were against their 2022 MAGA tomato cans.
Sure, Whitmer and Shapiro seem like strong candidates at the midsize-state level. But you never know whether a candidate will pop until they hit the national stage. Scott Walker, Ron DeSantis, John Kerry, Mitt Romney, Kamala Harris— all of these politicians looked formidable too. Then the presidential-election MRI for the soul exposed their liabilities. Always remember that Barack Obama’s ascent from promising senator to generational political talent was the exception, not the rule.
Let’s say that one of these not–Kamala Harris candidates is chosen at the Democratic National Convention in August. In the span of 10 weeks they would have to:
Define themselves to the national audience while simultaneously resisting Trump’s attempts to define them.
Build a national campaign structure and get-out-the-vote operation.
Unify the Democratic Party.
Fend off any surprises uncovered during their public (and at-scale) vetting.
Earn credit in the minds of voters for the Biden economy.
Distance themselves from unpopular Biden policies.
Portray themselves as a credible commander in chief.
Lay out a coherent governing vision.
Persuade roughly 51 percent of the country to support them.
Perhaps it’s possible. But that strikes me as a particularly tall order, even if one of them is a generational political talent. Which— again with the odds— they probably aren’t.
We've got one final problem with the monkey’s paw: It doesn’t exist. If Biden withdrew from the race, the Democratic Party would confront a messy, time-consuming process to replace him. Perhaps a rigorous but amicable write-in campaign would produce a strong nominee and a unified party. But perhaps the party would experience a demolition derby that results in a suboptimal nominee and hard feelings.
Or maybe party elites at a brokered convention would choose a good nominee. (This is the Ezra Klein scenario, and I’m sympathetic to it. Smoke-filled back rooms get a bad rap; historically they produced better candidates than the modern primary system.) But very few living people have participated in a brokered convention. It could easily devolve into chaos and fracture the moderate, liberal, and progressive wings of the party.
The point is: Biden has a 50–50 shot. Maybe a little bit worse, maybe a little bit better— like playing blackjack. Every other option is a crapshoot in which the best outcome you can reasonably hope for is 50–50 odds and the worst outcome pushes the odds to something like one in three.
Joe Biden is Joe Biden. He isn’t going to win a 10-point, realigning victory. But his path to reelection is clear: Focus like a laser on suburban and working-class white voters in a handful of swing states. Remind them that Trump is a chaos agent who wrecked the economy. Show them how good the economy is now. Make a couple of jokes about the antlers. And then bring these people home—because many of them already voted for him once.
Having a sure thing would certainly be nice, given the ongoing authoritarian threat we face. But there isn’t one. Joe Biden is the best deal democracy is going to get.
Since Last brought up his— and all conservatives’— admiration for party elites selecting presidents in smoke-filled backrooms, I just want to point out that excluding Trump, admittedly the worst president in history and who was placed in the White House by interference by a foreign power, the worst presidents in American history were chosen by party elites. Many consider Warren G. Harding the worst pre-Trump president. He was a compromise candidate GOP elites picked at the 1920 convention. When he died (1923), his vice president, Calvin Coolidge— whose path to power was courtesy of party elites— became president and is also considered one of the worst pre-Trump presidents. Similarly other shitty vice presidents became presidents via elites’ decisions and deaths of presidents, Millard Fillmore and Andrew Johnson being the most obvious. Nixon’s nomination in 1968 involved significant behind-the-scenes maneuvering and support from party elites. Of the other worst pre-Trump presidents only James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce weren’t backroom picks, though neither was chosen in a primary. Primaries came into their own following the catastrophic 1968 Democratic convention. The results have been one mediocrity after another: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush (more a disaster than a mediocrity), Barack Obama and Biden. And, of course, the worst of the worst, Señor Trumpanzee, who will never be generally described as a mediocrity.
