The Biden botch shows the Democrats are falling apart

As serious people, the Democrats and their outriders get to decide what being ‘serious’ means. Until Joe Biden took to the debate stage, being serious meant understanding that Biden was the best candidate to take on Donald Trump.

It meant telling people to focus on the core of his message, not the gaffes or loose threads he left behind. It meant telling people to look at the record of what he had accomplished as president, rather than the painful way he shuffled.

But then what qualified as “serious” changed. Forced to watch the reality of an 81-year-old man debating a splenetic 78-year-old rival, Democrats were suddenly engaged with a new and urgent spirit to warn a nation that they had brand new information: Joe Biden was too old, too incoherent, too uninspiring to be the presidential candidate. He must be changed.

The shift was like a switch being abruptly flicked, in a way that few of those calling for Biden to step down acknowledge: they did not wait for evidence, for polling, for focus groups before calling on him to go. It came from their gut, and it came fast. 

Once their mind had been changed, though, they saw the evidence that they had spent a year or more telling everyone else to ignore: the American public wanted a younger candidate, many disliked both candidates, and a hypothetical younger candidate polled much better than Biden against Trump. 

Never mind that all of this was unchanged since the Democrats ran a primary with no serious challenger to Biden – the serious people had noticed it now, and what were we going to do about that? 

As if the thought could never have occurred to anyone before the last Thursday in June, suddenly the prospect of a candidate other than Biden was raised as if it were new, as if it were a no-brainer, and as if it weren’t just weeks away from the Democratic convention in which every candidate is pledged to vote for Biden, unless he releases them.

Unsurprisingly, after three weeks of being trashed publicly by a few of the braver Democrats in Congress – and many more of their colleagues through “friends” or media outriders – Biden’s polling has taken a hit. Democrats draw the story out day after day and then tell the media the story isn’t going away. 

Having sustained the story through even an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, it seems nothing will kill the story that Joe Biden should step down other than Joe Biden stepping down. The Democrats, as serious people, are presenting that as if it is the only sensible and sane option. 

Perhaps at this stage, given the additional damage they’ve done to a candidate who was already only at about 50/50 to beat Trump, they have made themselves right.

Each of these party outriders who has concluded Biden going is the only sane and sensible way forward seems to also think it is obvious what must come next. Unfortunately, they seem to have missed that while lots of them agree there’s only one obvious next step, they absolutely do not agree on what the obvious next step is.

Some say that Kamala Harris absolutely must be the nominee. She is the vice president, she is already on the ticket, she may have an easier time accessing existing campaign funds and voter data than a new late-stage candidate would (due to campaign finance and other laws, other candidates might have to build their apparatus afresh), and she is largely vetted and battle-tested from Republican attacks.

Others find it equally obvious that it must not be Harris, who is barely polling better than Joe Biden in key battleground states right now – and that’s when she is at a high and he is at an all-time low. She would be closely associated with Biden (more on why that could be a problem later), has vulnerabilities with some of the base owing to her past as a prosecutor, and may be unfairly punished by US voters at the ballot box simply for being a woman of colour.

Instead, some say, there should be a contested convention, as if this would be a wonderful battle of ideas instead of a shouting match of candidates most voters have never heard of – candidates who had built no national messaging with the public, no plans or infrastructure for election, no theories of the case, or more. 

This scenario would risk not just a backlash from the voters still loyal to Biden who feel he’s been pushed out by elites, but by those who felt Harris had been unfairly overlooked – particularly if these were felt to be on racial grounds, those of gender, or both.

Some in the party seem to imagine a coronation of a candidate other than Harris could happen without a contested convention – as if everyone else would step aside, without process, and agree that X or Y must be the candidate.

This might happen in the West Wing. It is much less likely to happen in the world in which the Democratic Party actually lives, in which people project seriousness but actually crave respectability.

Senior Democrats want the public to believe – and often believe themselves – this election is an existential one for their country. They have spent the last three weeks briefing through friends, signalling off message, engaging in power plays, trying to make sure they’re on the right side of whatever shakes out, and more than any of this, trying to make sure they’re not in a position where they might be blamed for anything.

They have been as chaotic as they have been craven, spurred to action less by the prospect of Joe Biden losing as the idea that they might be blamed if he did. The debates weren’t the moment they realised Biden was 81 – they were the moment they realised that if they kept backing him as they had been, they might be expected to share the blame if he did lose. 

To keep their hands clean, they created some distance. What has followed is several weeks of a party that’s just not sure whether or not it wants its coup to succeed.

The irony is that this election is still winnable for the Democrats. The party has spent three weeks trying to make Biden unelectable, and FiveThirtyEight still gives Joe Biden a 50% chance of winning the race.

If he’s pressed to stand down, Democrats might look back on that 50% chance wistfully (more likely they’ll say they didn’t think it was true). A new candidate will mean a whole new set of attacks from Republicans – the poll numbers of a new candidate can only go down. 

It will also mean they will be saddled with Biden’s ‘record’ – if he’s not fit to be the candidate, why’s he president now? If he’s such a good president now, why did they oust him?

And how involved were senior Democrats in the cover-up about his health? The party that turned Benghazi and Clinton’s emails into months-long scandals can very easily do the same with Biden’s health.

But even then, a new candidate might just be viable, even if the Democrats make as much of a debacle out of selecting them as they have out of re-selecting Biden through the primary process and then going off the decision after they had 15 million voters endorse it.

There is, despite the Democrats’ best efforts, still a chance that they pull a win out of this utter shitshow – and across the world, we are going to hope that it happens.

The truth is that the Democrats absolutely deserve to lose the 2024 election. It’s just that the world cannot afford for them to do so.