Joe Biden says he ran for president in 2020 because of Charlottesville. He says he ran because he saw the threat Donald Trump posed to the country and the threat he posed to democracy. If Biden truly believes that, he needs to end his reelection campaign. Indeed, dropping out could be the most patriotic gesture of his long career in public service, and every senior Democratic official and leader in the country should be pressuring him to act immediately.
Throughout last night’s debate, Trump lied, obfuscated, and made bizarre, unsupported arguments about the economy, foreign policy, abortion, and the January 6 riot. A halfway competent opponent would have capitalized on these many, many errors. But Biden could barely speak coherently. The catastrophe of the incumbent’s performance is almost impossible to capture in words; you have to watch.
According to reporting by The New York Times, the campaign believed that the debate would “provide an opportunity to go on the offensive on issues like immigration and abortion access.” When asked about the latter—Biden’s best issue—he rambled about his worst issue, immigrant crime. You can read for yourself:
There’s many young women who’ve been—including the young woman who was just murdered and he went to the funeral—the idea that she was murdered by an immigrant coming in, they talk about that but here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women being raped by their in-laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters, it’s just ridiculous and they can do nothing about, they try to arrest them when they cross state lines.
Before the debate, the president spent a week with a full slate of advisers at Camp David: former Chief of Staff Ron Klain, current chief of staff Jeff Zients, White House senior adviser Anita Dunn, and campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon. This performance was rehearsed.
It should be the last straw. The president went into this debate as a historically unpopular candidate. At this point in his presidency a lower percentage of Americans support him than any other president since at least Harry Truman. He’s running behind Democratic candidates for Senate in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
When the Times’ Ezra Klein argued in February that Biden should step down, he was shot down by countless White House staff and Democratic leaders who claimed that Biden was up to the challenge of campaigning. And when Biden overperformed expectations at the State of the Union, speculation about his capacity to effectively campaign became more subdued.
But not anymore. Last night, Biden’s advisers were clearly underwhelmed with his performance; during the debate, they began leaking that he had a cold. After the event, when pressed repeatedly by Anderson Cooper on CNN, even Vice President Kamala Harris was forced to concede that the president’s showing had been lackluster. “He’s losing,” one prominent Democratic Party operative, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, told me by direct message. “The campaign said this debate would help him and it did not. Now he has no credible argument for how he’s going to turn the race around by November, especially since the convention is going to be a shit show.”
The problem facing the country is twofold. First, because the primaries are over, Biden would have to voluntarily step aside; there’s no other way for his party to nominate someone else. And second, there’s a first-mover disadvantage at play. No one wants to stick out their neck and end up as the laughingstock of the party—as Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota did when he briefly challenged Biden for this year’s Democratic nomination. And for those closest to Biden—Jill Biden, Val Biden, Mike Donilon, Ted Kaufman, and all those who joined him at Camp David this week—the question will be whether they can put the needs of their country above their loyalty to the current president.
In their recent book The Hollow Parties, the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld discuss the weakening of the Democratic and Republican establishments. In another age, no party apparatus would have allowed an aging, frail Joe Biden to get to this point. I recently asked Schlozman why the Democratic Party hasn’t simply replaced Biden—why Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison hasn’t called Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or any number of other Democrats and tried to whip up support for them as potential replacements for Biden.
As a political scientist, Schlozman hates questions like this, so he answered me somewhat facetiously: He cited “the old joke of ‘Why is Profiles in Courage such a short book?’ ‘Because we don’t see these kinds of behaviors very much.’”
But what’s needed right now is exactly that kind of bravery: uncommon fortitude in the face of atrophied party institutions that have lost the power to prevent the rise of candidates like Trump, and, more to the point, Biden’s continued presence in the race.
What exactly happens if Biden drops out? Well, there are two options. Either he drops out and endorses another candidate, or he allows the party to decide at the convention. Ideally, he would do the latter, to allow a competitive process to determine his successor as the Democratic nominee.
Either way, I have no illusions that any of this would be orderly. Speeding through a nominating process in a month and a half because the incumbent has decided he’s incapable of victory is going to be chaotic, and the Democrats could end up with a candidate with serious vulnerabilities.
But as Biden showed last night, the party most certainly has a flawed candidate now. The Democrats need to be able to find a nominee who’s actually able to mount a vigorous challenge to Trump and the singular threat he poses to American democracy.
