No one is replacing Joe Biden, ffs
The bed-wetting needs to stop.
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New York Times columnist Ezra Klein argued last week that President Joe Biden should step aside and not run for another term. Klein argues Biden is too old to successfully run for president, and that Democrats should therefore abandon their primary process and voters.
Instead of heeding the primary results, Klein argues that Democrats should let a bunch of party insiders choose the nominee at this summer’s convention.
“Could it go badly?” Klein muses. “Sure. But that doesn’t mean it will go badly.”
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The plan, then, is to somehow persuade Joe Biden to retire because his election is uncertain, and instead replace him in a way which might well be a disaster. If this idea sounds half-baked at best, that’s because it is.
Klein does not explain why the uncertainty of Biden is worse than the uncertainty of his replacement. He just enthuses that a contested Democratic convention would be “the most exciting political show on earth.” Which would be fun for pundits, maybe. But it’s not a great argument if the goal is to prevent Trump from again taking power and finishing off American democracy.
Furthermore, as Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out Wednesday evening in a brilliant monologue (watch the whole thing below), Klein omits any discussion of fundraising. Biden holds a gigantic cash advantage over Trump heading into the general election. Why would Democrats sacrifice that to nominate a candidate like Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom who would be starting from scratch?
"The notion that Joe Biden is too old is based on a complete and utter misunderstanding of the work of the presidency,” O’Donnell said. “The job is to make decisions, not speeches. History writes about the decisions. That's what matters."
There have been a number of effective responses to Klein’s piece already. It’s worth taking a moment to emphasize, though, that Klein provides basically no evidence for his central contention that Biden would be a worse candidate than whoever gets picked at a contested convention. On the contrary, there’s plenty of reason to agree with Democratic primary voters who, in 2020 and 2024, affirmed that they think Biden is the best bet to win.
Biden keeps winning
Klein says he thinks Biden is fit and competent to be president for another term. He lauds Biden’s accomplishments, including low unemployment and groundbreaking climate legislation.
The problem is that Klein is afraid Biden won’t get a chance to serve another term. He worries about how the president comes across in recent videos and wrings his hands about Biden not giving a Super Bowl interview.
But of course Klein wouldn’t care about any of that if Biden’s numbers were better. The real problem is that Biden’s approval numbers aren’t good; his numbers have ticked up slightly over the last couple weeks, but he’s still hovering around 40 percent approval in 538’s poll tracker. Most head-to-head general election polls show him narrowly trailing Trump (though a new Quinnipiac poll shows Biden with a four point edge).
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The prospect of another Trump presidency is terrifying, so Klein’s concern is understandable. But early polls just aren’t that predictive; polling analyst G. Elliot Morris noted that polls in January of an election year have “basically the track record of an (untrained) monkey throwing darts at a dartboard.”
We’re in February, not January, but the point holds; the general election campaign hasn’t really started and most voters aren’t paying attention yet. You’d rather be ahead for sure, and Trump’s relatively strong polling is a reminder that he can and may win. But polls even in March don’t tell us a lot about who’s going to win in November. And considering Trump’s multitude of legal problems and busy upcoming schedule of court hearings, there’s good reason to believe this year will get worse for the presumptive GOP nominee before it gets better.
We do have indications of where things are heading other than polls, though. There have been a bunch of elections since 2020. And there Biden has been doing much better, despite his low approval numbers.
Democrats started off 2021 by winning two key Senate seats in Georgia, giving them control of the chamber. Then they had a remarkable midterm in 2022, retaining control of the Senate and winning key races for legislatures in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. Biden in fact had the best off-year election performance of any president in 20 years, and arguably in 50. The out party usually cleans up in off-year elections. But not this cycle.
Dems continued their streak in 2023 with an more decisive victories. They’ve also been doing well in special elections, most recently in the NY-03 contest to replace disgraced rep George Santos.
Midterms and special elections aren’t necessarily predictive either. But given unpredictive polls and unpredictive elections, it’s not clear why you’d insist on paying attention to the first and ignoring the second.
Klein himself acknowledges that Biden’s midterm success is a problem for his narrative.
“I had, in 2022, been planning to write a column after the midterms saying there should be a primary because Democrats need to see how strong of a campaigner Biden still was,” he says. “But when they overperformed, that drained all interest among the major possible candidates in running. That test wasn’t going to happen.”
Gavin Newsom, Ezra Klein turns his lonely eyes to you
Klein is disappointed that talented younger Democrats — like Whitmer, Newsom, Raphael Warnock, and Pete Buttigieg — looked at the midterm elections and decided that they didn’t want to challenge Biden. He believes all these figures are astute political actors who could do better than Biden in a general election. And Klein simultaneously believes that all these figures are fools who should have seen Biden’s vulnerability and challenged him in the primary. Those beliefs seem like they’re in conflict.
If Illinois governor JB Pritzker is a great political talent, and decides not to run, who’s Klein to say he knows better? Or, on the other hand, if Pritzker is too foolish to see the great truths Klein is penning, why should we think that Pritzker would be canny enough to defeat a sitting president in a primary?
People like Pritzker and Newsom are smart, ambitious, and able to read internal polls. And those internal polls likely reflect what the primaries are showing, which is that Joe Biden is very popular with Democratic voters. Biden does have a primary challenger in Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, and he’s in the process of embarrassing that opponent badly.
Biden wasn’t even on the ballot in New Hampshire and still got 63.9 percent of the vote against Phillips’s 19.6 percent. In South Carolina, where Biden was on the ballot, he got a stunning 96.2 percent of the vote. Phillips got 1.7 percent, which is a rounding error.
These are not numbers that suggest an ambivalent electorate. Whatever Biden’s weakness with the public as a whole, he’s clearly still very popular with Democratic primary voters.
People like Pritzker and Newsom are happy overall with Biden’s policy achievements — as is Klein himself. They see Democrats under his leadership overperforming in elections. And they see that he’s popular with Democratic voters. That’s why they didn’t enter the primary.
It’s also why they’re not going to be eager to pressure him to step down, or to push for a contested convention. Biden keeps winning and has a good shot of winning again in November; Democrats are almost entirely unified in supporting him. Furthermore, spending this spring and summer pressuring the sitting president to get out of the race instead of touting his impressive record and making a case against Trump seems like a supremely counterproductive waste of time.
Throwing over a successful president who’s pulling 96 percent support from Democrats in South Carolina is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Or, if you prefer, it’s like spitting on the South Carolina electorate in order to appease Ezra Klein.
No guarantees
You can win midterms and off-year elections and primaries and still lose the big one. Democratic elections are democratic in large part because you don’t know who’s going to win. That’s unsettling and, with Trump on the horizon, terrifying. But the uncertainty doesn’t go away if you jettison Joe Biden.
On the contrary, a recent Emerson polls shows Biden running ahead of VP Kamala Harris, his most likely successor. That poll shows Biden down by one percent against Trump while Harris trails by three. Klein would like to see Harris shunted aside too. But, alas for the narrative, Gavin Newsom (down by 10) and Gretchen Whitmer (down by 12) both poll even more poorly against Trump.
You could argue that Whitmer and Newsom would do better after a campaign raises their name recognition. And maybe you’d be right! But you could also argue that Biden will do better when he’s spent hundreds of millions of dollars reminding the electorate what it was like to live under a Donald Trump presidency.
It’s difficult to predict the future, and that makes people and pundits understandably anxious. But Biden is currently the one Democratic politician who has beaten Trump in a national election, and (despite low approval) he’s continued to defeat the Trump-led GOP throughout his presidency. Democratic primary voters seem to think that’s reason enough to support him against Trump again.
The reasoning here can’t be ironclad or certain because presidential elections aren’t ironclad or certain. But the argument in support of Biden is certainly stronger than Klein’s fantasies about successful presidents suddenly resigning, setting up magical and exciting conventions which manage to choose the perfect candidate without dividing the party.
Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee. Even Ezra Klein will figure that out at some point. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
That’s it for today
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Thank you for this post. Nate Cohn and Ezra Klein are driving me crazy with their polling and “suggestions”. Joe is sharp and knows the ropes. He doesn’t “speechify” as the other one does but he gets policy done ✅ that actually benefits the regular citizens. And a President Harris is not “scary” to most Dems, just mostly the Republicans.
The problem with Ezra Klein is that someone paid too much for his education, and it made him arrogant in his youth to think that he has any insight into Joe Biden's age, or anything else having to do with this presidential election. He looks pretty young to me. Closer to my 18-year-old daughter in age, who by the way is not directly paying for her college education because she is going to uni in Germany, and that already shows she is a more critical thinker than Klein. She is not worried about Biden's age, and she is a Gen-Zer. What she is worried about is Trump winning. While Biden might not win, it won't be because of his age, but because of idiots like Klein who think he is "too old" in years is equated with his biological age. At 43 the doctor told me I had the fertility of a 20 year old. So, knock 23 years off my age biologically. It is not surprising. My maternal grandma lived to be 99.5, my mom is pushing 90, and my paternal great-grandmother lived to be 109. I know a lot of people in their 90s because of my mom. The other day, a group of 5 in their 90s up to 97 were sitting at the table next to us, fit as you please. The men were starting to sing as they downed a bottle of wine with their 3 women companions for dinner, but also bent down to pick up something the waitress dropped while walking spryly around the room and stopping to converse with different friends at other tables. The conversations were all lucid. So if we knew everyone's biological age, not their age in that years, I imagine Joe Biden would be younger. No one is questioning Warren Buffett, who is still running the multinational company Berkshire Hathaway at 92. The USA is a national company with international outreach, and Biden is doing an excellent job running it at 81. He has a wife who can keep an eye on his health, and in Harris, a vice president who not only brings her own wisdom to the job, but also has excellent tutelage under a master statesman for 4+ years. Ezra Klein looks too young to understand age, unless he has aging parents who are not aging as well as Biden. If they are, then shame on him. They need to tell him off. I am in Germany and in my art group is a woman fit as a fiddle who is 91. She looks like she is around 70. She is sharp, creative, and talented, and has an incisive discussion on art, politics and life. She lives independently and gets around on bike, public and her car when she is transporting bigger things to our workshop. Americans need to understand age in a biological context, and stop worrying about Biden and start worrying about Trump. He is a Russian asset who has corrupted his entire party to serve an enemy of our Nation. Let's reserve our speculation on who can replace Biden for in 3 years when we look at the next election cycle.