Trump Reminds Democrats He's Beatable—Against A Party That Can Fight

He's only winning now because the Democrats are sapped of energy. Here's how they can rekindle it.

(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Donald Trump and his growing army of media boosters like to cultivate the impression that he’s indomitable. Sometimes they use that exact word. Democrats should know better after all this time than to let that brand of dominance theater creep into their psyches. Republicans have trash talked this way my whole life, even in the throes of defeat and failure—they’re just more shameless and menacing about it now. But Democrats have beat Trump and his allies over and over again, proving he is in fact quite domitable. And yet, Trump manages to send Democrats into spasms of self-doubt regularly, and with ease.

His endless, rambling acceptance speech at the RNC last night was an exception. It reminded Democrats that Trump is a strange, unappealing man in decline, and that that their difficulties so far this election are idiosyncratic and reversible.

But they won’t reverse themselves. The cursed few of us who watched Trump’s speech to the end saw a paper tiger, but it’s not as though Trump ran a textbook campaign until last night. He got convicted of 34 felonies just a few weeks ago! He’s backed terribly unpopular ideas, boasting repeatedly of his responsibility for overturning Roe v. Wade. And yet he’s been leading—neck-and-neck at worst—the whole way through. Watching him flail through another bizarre speech doesn’t suggest Democrats’ misgivings about President Biden have been misplaced. Rather, it suggests that Trump’s weaknesses have gone unexploited, because Democrats have been poorly situated to exploit them.

This week Emerson surveyed how Trump would fare against a “younger Democrat,” and found that he would lose in a landslide. Now this is obviously a bad question if you’re interested precise forecasting. It tests for a generic candidate (which Democrat, with what baggage?) in a head-to-head matchup (no third-party candidates) and then thumbs the scale by describing him or her as “younger”—something we know most voters have wanted for years. If you were to poll Trump against a “handsome Democrat” or a “normal Democrat” or a “war-hero Democrat” he would probably lose those races by even wider margins.

But it’s still a reminder that the Age Tax Biden is paying, and making us all pay, is large and likely decisive. Trump has been able to maintain a small lead, with less than 50 percent of the vote, because Biden’s candidacy has been like quicksand for his party.

Though reality has begun to sink in, and his resistance to standing aside has worn down, Biden reportedly still clings to the concern that Kamala Harris would also lose to Trump. We are all rightly cautioned to acknowledge uncertainty in an unprecedented moment. Harris is a younger Democrat, but she’s not generic. She’s more popular than Biden, but not popular per se. That specific swap, Biden for Harris, would by no means be guarantee victory, let alone by landslide margins.

But I do think recent events provide a reasonable basis to imagine how an orderly and gracious succession would invert the race, and revive the can’t-fail spirit that animated the early resistance.

MIRE STRAITS

Biden’s incumbency, his unpopularity, his age, and the peculiar circumstances of his initial victory, have all conspired to sap the party of insurgent energy. Under normal circumstances, most Democrats would simply defer to the president. A party’s leader sets message, tone, pace and strategy. In Biden’s case, that has locked in a halting, losing dynamic. Rank-and-file Democrats—those in swing districts and swing states—have thus receded from the national fight and begun treating their races as local, disconnected affairs. When the leader of the party is unpopular, they seek distance from the leader. Biden’s age is wrapped up in both of those considerations, but it plays an innate role, too. The Democratic electorate is disproportionately young; Biden is historically old. This fueled youth disaffection long before the presidential debate revealed Biden unable to eloquently attack Trump, defend his record, or articulate a vision for the future. It was never a strictly rational reaction—substance matters more than form; young people loved Bernie Sanders, who’s also old; the Republican nominee is just three years younger than Biden. But it’s also natural. Nobody questions it when older Americans express visceral suspicion of younger leaders. Generational tension is a fact of American life.

Compounding these immediate difficulties is the fact that Biden won the presidency under terribly unusual circumstances. Trump was the incumbent. His presidency was a disaster. Defeating him was a matter of existential urgency, but a pretty straightforward challenge, too. He was deeply unpopular. Under the circumstances, Democratic primary voters and elites alike gravitated to a nominee they adjudged to be safe. Not youthful, not inspiring, not radical. An ideologically flexible party man, with high name recognition, white working-class appeal, and an extensive political network. The main concerns about him were even then rooted in age: His primary campaign was fairly shambolic. His debate performances were jarringly bad. He would be 78 upon taking office and 81 when facing voters for re-election. But confronted with a choice between nominating him or a 78 year old democratic socialist, the party rallied around Biden.

Then COVID-19 struck, and in a weird way it both mooted these concerns and made his biggest liability—the one that would come to imperil everything—invisible. Biden was able to campaign virtually. His travel schedule wasn’t nearly as exhausting as it would have been in a COVID-free world. And Trump—well, COVID was his only real test and he failed it. Notwithstanding Trump’s criminal effort to overturn the election, Biden practically tap danced into the Oval Office. 

But all that history is part of why Biden’s effort to re-rally the party after the debate has failed: He’s always been more of a vessel for anti-Trump sentiment than a phenom in his own right.

Seeing Barack Obama through to a second term, by contrast, was a project. Liberal America had invested its hopes and dreams in Obama, specifically—not in the party and not in his relative polling strength against Republicans. When his approval reached its nadir in the summer and fall of 2011, his supporters became concerned about his prospects for re-election and doubts began to seep in. Sanders even publicly contemplated a primary challenge! But these anxieties ultimately took the shape of recommitment to Obama: The election itself was high stakes, but there was a lot riding—psychologically, as a matter of morale—in vindicating Obama, the person. Surely if Obama ever seemed as destined to lose re-election as Biden does now, many if not most Democrats would have reconsidered. But the point is, Biden doesn’t benefit from anything like Obama’s totemic appeal. He was a crude instrument for beating Trump; now he’s seen as an avatar for allowing Trump to tap dance into the Oval Office; his support within party officialdom has thus collapsed. 

Any new ticket, consisting of any of the younger stars whose names get batted around most frequently, would enjoy something like the mass commitment Obama enjoyed in 2008 and 2012. The best read of the murky data is that Kamala Harris has slightly less potential in this regard than most of the other potential alternates. At 59 she’s relatively young; she can prosecute a good case for herself and against her opponents; her presidency would be history-making in its own right. And—this is probably more significant than it sounds—she would take over the ticket at the behest of a huge range of influential actors who put all of their credibility on the line to say she could win, where Biden likely couldn’t. 

If Biden is truly hanging on over concerns about Harris’s electability, he may not quite realize how thundering the all-hands effort to support Harris will be.

Anxious Democratic voters would experience a huge (if perhaps fleeting) sense of relief. Party activists would remind themselves of the things they liked about her, before they came to focus on the things they didn’t like. And Democratic and liberal elites would feel honor bound to give her every chance of winning. Having defrocked an incumbent president, they’d have ownership of the new, can’t-lose ticket and rekindle the spirit of 2008, 2012, and 2020. They will be all in.

STOP, SWAP, AND ROLL

They are obviously, at this moment, all out. A groundswell of support is not available to Biden because his political condition puts the party on the defensive and saps it of energy.

That’s not to say Democrats are resigned to losing, or that they won’t try to persuade Americans that a Biden-shaped cast of wasted meat would make a better president than Donald Trump. 

But their hearts won’t be in it, and their arguments will ring hollow. They’ve already questioned his capacity to mount a winning campaign. They’ve shown their cards and their cards say “no confidence.”

My cards say this, too. And in my unusual case, it’s not so hard to square the circle. The writer of a newsletter with an overwhelmingly liberal audience can just lay it all out: Biden’s candidacy creates intolerable risk of losing, and I now lack confidence in his ability to win and then be president for another four years—so for now, most of my arguments are aimed at shaking up the race to reduce the risk. But if Biden wins the delegate roll call and becomes the nominee, my argumentative focus will shift to the binary choice between Trump and Biden, and Biden’s superiority even in this frail state. 

Party activists—particularly incumbents and candidates—don’t have it so easy. They have to answer to constituents, not to subscribers. And those constituents will want them to vouch for Biden, or square their support for him with their expressed doubts and the efforts to edge him off the sate. They, of course, can also say “look, Trump’s worse, and that’s the beginning and end of it for me.” But that kind of appeal will not form the basis of a galvanizing campaign, while Trump’s will be suffused with the fervor of a religious rising. 

Worse, many Democrats will feel impelled to vouch for Biden’s vigor, and they will reveal themselves as bullshitters. They will cashier much of their credibility.

If Biden voluntarily declines the nomination, while announcing his intent to serve out his term (assuming he is healthy enough to serve) the problem largely goes away. Rank and file Democrats and Biden alike can explain the decision as one driven by the physical rigors of campaigning, not the mental rigors of the presidency. Suddenly, Biden’s solid record in office becomes an asset. He’ll continue doing the job he’s done well for the next six months, then step aside for the good of the country. His legacy will be stopping Trump, reinvesting trillions in the national infrastructure, and then selflessly giving the country a fighting chance to stop Trump again, this time once and for all.  

At that point, the impulse to peddle bullshit disappears: Biden’s served the country selflessly for 50 years, four as president. But the country asked for new leadership, and we’ve listened, and no one’s better equipped to finish what he started than his vice president. 

We must of course be mindful of uncertainty. But at this point a candidate swap is a tidier option than forging ahead with Biden and forcing everyone to pretend the past three weeks never happened.