Hey everyone. Slow news week, right? I am doing a quick Jackal for you today, but this will not take the place of my normal Jackal (which was supposed to come out today anyway)!
That was on Trump’s convention speech, more speculation about Biden dropping out, and Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the classified documents case. That draft will get edited (or folded into this piece) and come to you during the week. For now, we’ll just dig into Biden’s decision and who will replace him on the ticket.
Joe Biden does America a great service.
Joe Biden announced today that he is suspending his campaign for reelection and endorsing Kamala Harris. Pretty wild news for a Sunday afternoon.
Lots of people on the Left are calling Biden’s decision to step down one of the most “selfless” acts in political history, and that he is cementing his incredible legacy by choosing to pass the torch.
I commend Biden for doing a really difficult thing, but I sort of think that the Democratic Party would have been better served by a real primary process, or one that would produce the best and most winnable ticket going into the Convention next month. There are arguments against that (more on that below), but if that was a process Democrats believed in then it’s fair to ask why Biden is doing this now, as opposed to a year ago.
So, I don’t know how that fits into it being a selfless act. But it is also possible that Biden really thought he could run, tried, and found out that he couldn’t mount a formidable campaign against Trump. I wrote this is in the now scrubbed Jackal, but it is super relevant now:
I’ll end with this: After Biden’s horrible debate performance, I was up for seeing evidence that he could campaign and do the job of the presidency. To me, it does not seem like he can do both. He is unable to make a coherent argument about why his presidency has been so successful. In fact, I think I have made that case better than he has!
Maybe I would have cleaned this up before publishing, so I will caveat that I think Biden can do the job of the presidency. That said, it is inarguable that he did not have it in him to campaign against Trump. Even in super favorable interviews he could not communicate a clear point without producing a super embarrassing and terrible soundbite. Biden had weeks after the debate to prove his doubters wrong and he failed. He has a great record to run on, but he could not even articulate why he should be reelected on it.
In that sense, Biden is doing a really difficult thing and suspending his campaign. I can’t imagine that is easy, since a sitting president naturally wants to defend their record and prove why they can reproduce it in their second term. And yes, Biden’s record is extremely good.
I will do a longer post on that, but for now Biden deserves credit for stepping down when every normal human emotion is probably telling him to stay in.
Yeah, whatever. Who is going to be the nominee?
I think it is pretty clear that Kamala Harris is going to be Biden’s replacement. He has officially endorsed her and she is still picking up endorsements as we speak. If she wins all of Biden’s delegates at the convention, then there will be no real challenger who can stand up to her.
The question then becomes: Who will be her vice president? To me, the obvious pick is Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. For one, his speech about the shooting victim at Trump’s rally - Corey Comperatore1 - was really incredible to watch. I think Shapiro has pretty excellent political skills and would be great in a debate against J.D. Vance, too (assuming the Trump Campaign doesn’t run away from all the debates).
Shapiro is also the governor of what pollsters call a “tipping-point state,” which means that whoever ends up winning it likely ends up winning the presidency. He is super popular in Pennsylvania and will add a lot to the ticket. Some dark horse candidates would be Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina and - to a lesser extent - Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. However, I think a lot of Democrats like Whitmer or Gavin Newsom would prefer to run in the next cycle.
OK, are they going to win?
I have tried to communicate this a lot, but replacing Joe Biden is a risk. Continuing with Joe Biden was also a risk. Everything is a risk at this point, but it definitely throws the likelihood of a win up in the air. I said this to a few friends in a conversation about Biden getting out (before he made his decision):
The argument for Biden staying in is pretty simple: Despite a horrible debate, a bad media cycle, and maybe the worst two weeks of his presidency (sans Afghanistan), Biden is essentially tied with Trump in polls. An NPR/Marist poll had him up two points today. 538 has him winning 51 out of 100 times in their simulation. So, for all the insanity, the race has been pretty static. Even looking at all the polls across the swing states, Biden only really needs one normal polling error to win the race, and those happen in every cycle. He could also pick up support as the campaign goes on. Add into that historical precedent, which shows that in an economy that is not in a recession, the incumbent has won in every election since World War II.
That's the pro-Biden case. The anti-Biden case is that even though the polls show him only slightly behind, the polling errors in the past have underestimated Trump. And then you have the personal questions asked of Americans, where they overwhelmingly say that Biden is too old to serve a second term. Huge chunks of those people say they will vote for him anyway if Trump is his opponent, but he basically needs every single one of those voters. Without that, he's toast. And then you have to consider his brain.
I personally think that the only reason this race is as close as it is is because Biden's opponent is Trump. If it were Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis (maybe less the latter but for sure the former), we would not be having this conversation now because Biden would already be off the ticket. That makes the argument for a switch pretty strong: Trump is a historically weak GOP nominee and would probably lose to someone younger than Biden.
To ____’s point, all of this is basically a discussion about risk. It is a risk to keep Biden and it is a risk to replace him. Lots of people are writing about how an open connection would be "energizing," but all of them are about ten years old and/or have watched too much West Wing. The last two times the Democrats tried to do that they lost the election in a landslide. ____ is right that it will be hard to formulate a whole new coalition around a new candidate with only a few months to go before the election (in fairness, the Europeans do this in a matter of weeks and maybe we should get our ish together).
I also do not see how it will be anyone except Kamala Harris, and she comes with risks of her own. Biden's best, inside-straight case is this: Because voters are upset about their two choices, huge chunks of them stay home and the low turnout gives Democrats an edge because the Parties have now flipped on low-propensity voters, with Democrats being more likely to turnout in special elections and midterms. That would be my best, unicorn scenario for Biden.
Joe Biden killed my unicorn earlier today, but it is still true that Harris comes with her own set of limitations. For one, she has low approval ratings for a vice-president, although that could be a product of her being tied to Biden. For another, she will have to explain to voters and the media how she was arguing for Biden to continue when he has now left the ticket.2
Harris also has her advantages: She will be able to run on Biden’s record, which includes historic job growth and a booming economy. And, crucially, she is much, much younger than Donald Trump.
I want to be super clear here: Democrats are now going to be total hypocrites and say the Donald Trump is too old to be president, and conservatives are going to complain. It is a huge advantage for Democrats and they are going to say it every day from now until November: “Our candidate is young and your candidate is almost 80.” If Republicans don’t like it, they have to grow up.
The Twitter reaction from conservatives also seems to be pretty panicky. They had put together an entire campaign based on running against Joe Biden and now their strategy has been upended. Just today Trump suggested that he was not going to debate Harris, which some conservatives are trying to justify as a response to a ticket-change, but in reality it is just Trump being afraid of debating her.
Ezra Klein (fleece be upon him), has been sounding the Kamala Drum Beat™ for a few weeks now and has been linking to her speeches. He argues that she has gotten better over time and is ready and able to campaign against Trump. Maybe he is right, but I think pundits from D.C. have always underestimated Joe Biden’s appeal. He very likely would have beaten Trump in 2016, and guys like Klein (but maybe not him specifically) were pushing for Hillary Clinton early on, which has reportedly led to a lot of resentment from Biden. So, I’m taking everyone’s newfound adoration for her with a grain of salt, while also using that salt to season my steak which I have named, “Anyone is better than Donald Trump.”
I sometimes feel like I am the only one who believes this, but I do think Biden had a pretty good chance of beating Trump in November. Look at these polls:
Democrats are performing well down-ballot too. Biden’s team always saw this as their argument: Voters will eventually come around and accept that Biden is the nominee, and when that happens he will be leading Trump the same way that Democrats are leading in the Senate races.
But that ignored what Democratic voters had been saying for months. Here is Klein again:
This dynamic had been present in the polls for months, but everyone ignored it. Only a few days ago, slightly more than half of Democrats were saying Biden should suspend his reelection campaign.
That’s why GOP claims of this being an “anti-democratic” move fall short: The democratic voters themselves had been telling pollsters for months that they wanted someone else to run. The Democrats - more specifically Joe Biden himself - actually listened to their voters. I am still seeing takes like this:
Just an open question: Is this better or worse than what happened in 2016, when Trump won the primary with a majority of Republican voters voting against him? If those people were not talking about the “sanctity” of democracy back then and the will of the voters, you can ignore them now.
Republicans will challenge Kamala being added to the ballot. Will they win in court?
No.
Really?
Yes, the Democrats do not even choose their nominee until next month. Joe Biden is the sitting President but he is not their nominee. Whoever gets picked at the Convention will be the nominee, and they will appear on the ballot in every state.
Are you feeling good?
I’ll say this: I think the ideal scenario here would be a 60 year-old Joe Biden running on his record rather than Kamala Harris or an 81 year-old Joe Biden. But it is clear to me that 81 year-old Joe Biden could not run for reelection and that he needed to be replaced.
Am I more excited about other candidates? Yes. But I think anyone who starts running against Trump now has the wind at their back. Case in point:
The election is in 107 days. Let’s send Donald Trump back to the Shadow, for the last time.
Side note: Trump’s team got a lot of heat for misspelling Corey’s name at the the Republican Convention, and I have heard it a lot from liberal friends. However, the misspelling was actually a part of his firefighter’s uniform because his full name couldn’t fit.
This feels a little like a Too Online™ take to me, but I have heard other people saying it.