Has Joe Biden Quelled Democratic Panic?

A top Democratic pollster says Biden will likely be up two or three points by late April. THAT's when we'll know if we've got a big problem on our hands.

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

A week on from President Biden’s State of the Union address, I’d like to take stock of how decisively he allayed liberal concerns about his ability to mount a vigorous campaign, and thus whether he’s the Democrat best suited to defeat Donald Trump. Did he obviate the nagging, widely-held sense that we’d be better off if he agreed to step aside? 

The address went better than almost anyone—supporters and detractors alike—imagined it would. I want to say it brought an end to the “alternate ticket” conversation overnight, except it probably didn’t even take that long. It’s fair to say he managed to shelve that discourse, if not settle it once and for all.

At the same time, the question was only ever indirectly about Biden’s energy or capacity. It was really driven by the fact that Biden has been unexpectedly behind in the polls for months now, and the supposition was that the polls reflected big but amorphous doubts surrounding Biden’s age and energy. Had he lost the sharpness and fire-in-the-belly required to pull into the lead? 

Even with the benefit of a week’s hindsight, we still don’t know if that supposition was correct, or whether Biden has proved the doubters wrong. 

VIGOR IS BETTER

Loosely speaking, the alternate-ticket debate has divided liberals into two camps: Team Panic and Team Biden or Bust. Those who believed the risks of sticking with Biden were too great to bear, and those who thought the very discourse was unserious or heretical. 

Viewed narrowly, it’s been a great week for the latter, bookended by the State of the Union address on one end, and the exposure of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s deceitful depiction of Biden’s forgetfulness on the other. 

Biden benefitted in an obvious way from a relentless Republican effort to set the bar low—if Barack Obama had delivered the same speech, with the same enunciation, we’d know he’d had a weirdly off night. But Republicans (and media figures who play sucker to them) managed to greatly reduce expectations, such that millions of Americans saw Biden do something they’d been assured wasn’t possible: speak energetically, passionately, and coherently about a variety of topics, while mixing it up extemporaneously with heckling House Republicans.

Something similar happened during the 2020 campaign. Republicans mocked “Sleepy Joe,” running for president “from his basement,” and insisted he was campaigning virtually not because of the pandemic, but because he was incapable. Then Trump and Biden debated one another on live television and Biden managed to show the public (without having to tell anyone) that this was all propaganda. Biden is not actually a sleepy person with dementia, and even if he was, what does that say about Trump, who lost to him? 

Republicans fell into the same trap ahead of and during last year’s State of the Union address, too—ever fanning doubts about Biden’s acuity, only for him to maneuver them into disavowing their desire to roll back Social Security and Medicare in real time. 

I take two lessons from this recent history, one of which bears on the question of Biden’s campaign. The first is that Republicans could benefit from a little subtlety. The second is that memories are short and nothing is ever settled—Republicans have set the stage for Biden to prove them wrong over and over again, but that’s only possible because they’re able to will the same doubts into existence repeatedly, even after Biden has allayed them. By summer or fall, we may be feeling like it’s Groundhog Day again.

This is a big part of why I was never a Biden-should-retire maximalist. Ezra Klein got the liberal establishment abuzz a couple weeks ago when he said he’d seen enough. The time for Biden to call it quits had come. But just like the Republicans trying to cement perceptions of Biden, he didn’t look around the coming corners: What if Biden knocks his State of the Union address out of the park? What if he manages to pull ahead of Trump after they clinch their respective party nominations? 

It was a premature call, so he had to withdraw it. 

CONVENTION-AL WISDOM

If Ezra became the face of Team Panic, Team Biden or Bust comprises everyone who threw rotten tomatoes at Ezra, or who was a gloating asshole to him after the State of the Union address. 

Their position all along has been that Biden will not and should not contemplate yielding to another ticket. But this maximalist view from the other direction wasn’t credible before the State of the Union address, and isn’t credible now. It seemed designed less to win an argument than to will the other side of the debate out of existence. 

Team Biden or Bust has benefited, in my view, from weaknesses in the “step aside” case. Ezra called for a brokered convention, which allowed his critics to dismiss the scenario as an under-theorized fantasy. If put into practice, they argued, it would yield a bloodbath at the convention and a divided party headed into November. 

But how brokered would the convention really be? It seemed obvious to me, as a squish in between these two camps, that if Biden were to agree to step aside, he’d exert enormous influence over who might replace him. If he believed the fate of the American republic required him to relinquish the nomination it would be a show-stopping decision and a moment of such gravity that most ambitious Democrats and party delegates with axes to grind would be moved to honor his wishes. Even if they included replacing the entire ticket—Kamala Harris and all. He’d be making a huge, patriotic sacrifice, and asking delegates, along with other party luminaries, to honor his wishes. Would that really generate a dangerous level of acrimony? Worse than when Ted Cruz told Republicans to “vote their conscience” at the 2016 GOP convention, only for Donald Trump to win the election? I tend to doubt it. But in either case, the idea of a totally open, contested-convention free-for-all is the straw man at the heart of the Team Biden or Bust argument. If the handoff wouldn’t actually be disastrous, then the risk of entertaining the idea is quite low. 

And of course, the risk is relative. Biden entered his State of the Union address down two-three points nationally, and more than that in swing states. A week later, that is unchanged. What if Biden doesn’t take the lead soon? What if the gap never narrows? Worse: What if it grows? Would Team Biden or Bust really remain united behind Biden if he slips to down by five? Down by 10? In certain scenarios, the risk of sticking with Biden obviously outstrips the risk of switching tickets. 

This is why my view, articulated across sundry tweets and newsletters and podcasts, was that the question wasn’t ripe in February. It might’ve been ripe last June or July, when credible Democrats could have launched credible primary campaigns. And it might become ripe again as spring turns to summer. But winter is the liminal period when it’s too late for primaries, and too early to talk about trying to persuade Biden to yield. My view was: It’s a contingency we may have to consider if Biden doesn’t pull ahead soon. And if he doesn’t, I imagine many people on Team Biden or Bust will either take refuge in poll unskewing, or else their faith will start to wobble.

That’s still my view.

SIMON SAYS

This is why I appreciated Simon Rosenberg’s conversation with the New Republic’s Greg Sargent. Given his role in Democratic Party politics, Simon is unsurprisingly not on Team Panic, but he offered a theory of the case that’s much more constructive than just insisting the haters and losers are wrong; that Biden’s gotta be the nominee no matter what. 

One of the explanations for [Biden’s polling deficit] is that we’ve had asymmetrical engagement, meaning that the Republicans have had a primary, we haven’t, the Republican party leader is being challenged in the courts and he’s sort of facing an existential threat by the judicial system, and so if you’re a marginal Republican voter you have much more reason to be engaged in the election than the marginal Democratic voter…. 

I’m not saying we’re ahead, I’m saying it’s a close competitive election, and a big chunk of our coalition is wandering right now and we have to go get them and bring them home. I don’t think, though, that that’s a big surprise. I don’t think the Biden campaign was spending money communicating with voters. They weren’t trying to turn things on. We’re really at the very beginning of the election…and we’re going to know a lot more about this election by late April or early May. My view…is that what’s the likely scenario at this point is that Biden’s up by two-three points by late April or early May as the Democratic coalition begins to come home. And then we’ve got to campaign to go get the rest. And hopefully even go beyond what we did in 2020 and win the election by an even bigger margin than we did last time.

Bookmark this: Biden will likely be up two or three points by the end of the next month, with room to grow.

If that’s what happens, the conversation will truly be over. Biden would have to become incapacitated, or suffer an enormous political setback, to face calls for a new ticket if it becomes clear he’s winning. 

And Simon’s theory of the case is quite plausible. It’s really a restatement of the Biden campaign theory of the election—that the cult-like thrall of the Trump base is very different from the “wandering” nature of the Democratic base, and when nomadic Dems realize Trump has staged a comeback they’ll coalesce against him. 

As the devil’s advocate, I’d say the counterpoint here is that both Biden and Trump are extremely well known; misperceptions of Biden are rampant, but they’ve had a long time to harden. Getting people to reassess their views of him may not be as easy as it would be if he were a challenger instead of an incumbent, or if he were running against someone who hadn’t been fully defined. 

This is why I’d still like the Biden campaign to be candid with the party rank-and-file about how we got to this point. Presumably being down two points in mid-March was never part of their plan. Why do they think it happened? Did Democrats make a mistake by treating Trump as though he’d entered exile, giving him wide berth to rehabilitate himself and smear Biden without pushback? And if that was a mistake, how do they plan to fix damage done over three years in the next few weeks or months?

Maybe the answers are good; maybe Simon’s non-prediction prediction will prove to be correct. That, rather than any speech, is the only thing that will truly draw this conversation to an end. If it doesn’t come to pass, though, the case for pressing Biden to step aside and endorse an alternate ticket will become very strong, and I’ll be out there making it.