Democrats Are Still Better Off With Joe Biden

His best option on the "age issue" is to demonstrate firmly that he's in charge. Immigration provides an opportunity.

Dear readers,

Ezra Klein says Joe Biden should drop out of the presidential race. Nate Silver is floating that idea too — he has a series of media-interview tests he wants Biden to undergo to examine whether Biden is a strong enough public presence to lead the ticket, and he thinks Biden should drop out if he can’t pass them. I think Ezra and Nate need to get a grip. Whatever Biden’s weaknesses, this is bad advice and taking it would make Democrats more likely to lose the next election.

I find it telling that these Biden-should-drop-out pieces dwell very little on the question of what a post-Biden campaign would look like. With Biden out, the Democratic presidential nomination would most likely go to Kamala Harris, who polls even worse than Biden does. Klein describes this as an undue fixation on “The Kamala Harris Problem,” but I think the fixation makes perfect sense — if the idea is to help Democrats win the next election, then it’s an important consideration that if Biden steps aside, he’s likely to be replaced by a less popular figure. Klein argues that Harris is “enormously magnetic and compelling” in private, but if that were likely to translate into an electoral advantage, why haven’t we seen the evidence for it already? I’ve written about this before, but the problem with Harris as a general election candidate is that her whole political strategy subsequent to her initial election as San Francisco District Attorney has been aimed at impressing Democratic Party insiders and climbing the party’s ladder internally. She has never demonstrated the sort of swing-voter appeal that Democrats need in a general election nominee.

Klein also suggests that delegates to the Democratic National Convention, who would choose a new candidate if Biden dropped out at this point, might not even choose Harris if they became convinced that she was not the most electable candidate. I think that is very unlikely — the sort of party insiders who serve as convention delegates are exactly the sort of people for whom Harris has optimized her appeal, instead of normies and swing voters. These people also fear nothing more than being called racist or sexist, which is what they will be called if they deem her too weak a candidate to nominate. If Biden steps aside, their path of least resistance will be to nominate Harris, and we can expect them to take it.

President Joe Biden arrives to speak on the Senate's recent passage of the National Security Supplemental Bill, which would provide military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, in the State Dining Room of the White House on February 13, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

And even if a Harris nomination were somehow avoided — if she were somehow talked out of running, for example — then an open convention process for choosing a candidate would likely show the same dysfunctions as other internal negotiations of the Democratic Party coalition have in recent years: the decision makers would prioritize base mobilization over appealing to swing voters, be excessively solicitous of the desires of left-wing pressure groups, and ultimately choose a candidate with positioning to the left of Biden. As Benji Sarlin puts it, an open convention would likely to lead to a campaign with nominee Gavin Newsom advocating a constitutional amendment to curtail gun rights, not Andy Beshear demanding a taller wall on the southern border. The whole thing is a mess, and I find it very implausible that it would increase Democrats’ odds of winning in November.

When voters say Biden is too old, we should take them seriously, but not literally

Harris’ poor poll numbers should also give people pause when they fixate on age as Biden’s main political problem. Whatever her political shortcomings, Harris is much younger than Biden. She is mentally acute. She surely knows that Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is not the president of Mexico. And she has near-universal name ID. And yet nearly every poll shows that the same voters who overwhelmingly say Biden is too old for another term as president are also even less inclined to vote for her than they are for him. This undermines the idea that age is the real reason that Biden is underperforming in the polls of late.

The complete thud with which the Dean Phillips campaign landed also undermines the claim that age is Biden’s core political problem. Primary voters were offered a candidate who was only 55 years old and seemed to have a standard set of ideas for a Democratic Party politician, and even though lots of Democrats tell pollsters Biden is too old, they have so far shown almost no interest in trading him in for a newer model.

I think what we’re seeing in the polls is a widespread sense that Biden is ineffectual. Biden’s advanced age provides a convenient frame for arguing about how and why he is ineffectual — if he’s not achieving the things voters want done, it must be because he’s lost a step, he’s not really in charge, and the real decision-making is being done by party insiders who don’t share Biden’s middle-class roots and instincts for relative moderation. But the core problem isn’t his age itself — it’s this sense that his age is why he’s not in control, and that the real decisions are being made by other people whose ideas often aren’t very popular.

It’s not just Biden’s detractors who have this idea of how his administration is working. It’s also why many partisan supporters wave off age concerns — if the Democratic Party blob takes care of running the country, that’s fine with them — and it’s what Matt Yglesias sees going on when he describes how Biden staffers are unwilling to operationalize the president’s moderate instincts into messaging that can actually appeal to the middle. If this sense that he’s not really running the country is the real nature of the Biden age problem, then it makes perfect sense that replacing him on the ticket with his much-younger vice president wouldn’t help — she’s one of those party insiders with unpopular ideas, who doesn’t share Biden’s middle-class roots and instincts for relative moderation, and whose alleged domination of the administration is what’s making him unpopular to begin with.

I agree that Democrats need a change of course, but the president is now the only person available to lead it. He needs to make a better show of being effectual. And I believe he can do it.

The border crisis is a key opportunity

We keep seeing news reports about how Biden is preparing a major executive order on migration, which is likely to involve legally aggressive steps to make it more difficult to cross the southern border and claim asylum. This was a major goal of the now-dead bipartisan deal on immigration and border security, and it was also something that former President Trump tried in various ways but was often thwarted by the courts. I think a strategy of executive action is a very good idea and is likely to help the president politically in three ways:

1. Moderating helps you win. Before it became fashionable to claim that swing voters don’t exist, it was widely understood that doing popular things helped you win elections and doing unpopular things could cause you to lose elections. Making it harder to sneak across the border and live here for years while awaiting adjudication of a weak asylum claim is a popular idea, which is part of why the border deal proposal was itself popular. If Biden tries to use executive power to thwart asylum claims, that will make his positioning on immigration less unpopular, helping him win votes.

2. Bucking the “groups” shows that Biden is really in charge. The best way Biden can show he’s not being used by the party establishment as a “Weekend At Bernie’s”-type figure is by doing things that get staffers and other insiders to complain that he’s not doing what they want. I expect most congressional Democrats will back the administration on any border actions, like most of them backed the bipartisan border bill, but some will criticize him from the left, and that will also help show the public that Biden is leading.

3. Even if Biden loses in the courts, a strategy of executive action will make his attacks on Republicans for killing the bipartisan deal more effective. I don’t assume Biden will lose in the courts, at least not on everything — the Supreme Court has shifted to the right since they were thwarting Trump’s immigration actions a few years ago. But one problem with Biden’s strategy of attacking Republicans for standing in the way of border security is that Republicans can say Biden has not shown an eagerness to use all the powers he already has to stop illegal immigration and abuse of the asylum system. By taking executive action, he will show that he is trying — over the objections of activists linked to and within his own party! — and to the extent he fails, he can say it’s because Republicans did not give him the legal powers they said they wanted presidents to have.

Biden’s years in office have produced an unusually high level of party unity — an excessive level, I would say. Biden’s reluctance to set priorities and disappoint interest groups has led to legislative misadventures, like the failure to put the Build Back Better package out of its misery until long after it was clear it could not pass. It has led to unpopular policy choices, particularly dovish moves on immigration in his first 100 days that encouraged the migrant surge that has since proved very difficult to suppress. I also think it has significantly exacerbated the age issue — by choosing not to lead the party as much as he could, he opens himself up to the obvious criticism that he’s not leading.

Biden can’t make himself younger by executive order. But I am hopeful that he and his team are preparing a set of steps that will make clear that he is in charge, and he is willing to buck his party when it takes unpopular positions. And if he does, I think his poll standing will improve.

Speaking of age issues, I’ll be back soon with thoughts on Sonia Sotomayor.

Very seriously,

Josh

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