President Trump’s racist immigration policies have kept him popular with a disturbingly-large segment of G.O.P. rank and file and elected officials. But he has failed to sway a majority of Americans, who now view immigrants as a positive force in our society. The latter trend provides Democrats with an edge in upcomming elections — if they promote policies that line up well with public opinion on immigration issues.
Immigration is likely going to be a major topic in the 2020 election. From issuing a travel ban on many majority-Muslim countries to shutting down the government while seeking funding for a border wall, President Trump has made immigration perhaps the central defining issue of his presidency. And Democrats have so far successfully punted on tackling the issue head-on, opting to try to block Trump’s policies rather than propose a full-fledged alternative agenda.
However, survey data suggests that public attitudes toward immigration may be somewhat more in line with Democrats’ positions than Republicans’, so Democrats might do well in 2020 if they campaign on their vision for overhauling the immigration system. Yet this move still carries risks…
Skelley notes further, that “Some views held by members in the left wing of the party — like abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — don’t poll well with voters and could be particularly alienating among Americans who are worried about border security…This January, 62 percent of Americans said that immigrants strengthen the country, while just 28 percent said they felt that immigrants were a burden, according to the Pew Research Center. But as you can see in the chart below, this is pretty much a complete reversal from where the public stood when Pew first asked this question in 1994.”
Skelley adds that a 2018 Gallup Poll indicated that “a record share of Americans — 75 percent — thought immigration was a good thing for the country.” However, cautions Skelley, “just because more Americans have a positive attitude toward immigration doesn’t mean they want to see more immigration. In early 2019, 30 percent of Americans told Gallup they wanted immigration levels to increase while 31 percent said they wanted levels to decrease and 37 percent said they should be kept the same.”
Skelley goes on to cite several polls which show that most Americans believe border security is a major concern. But most Americans don’t see Trump’s wall as the overarching priority: “Gallup found that 75 percent of Americans favored hiring significantly more border patrol agents, while Fox News found that 68 percent of Americans favored spending more on border security measures other than building a wall.” In addition, “most Americans oppose more barrier construction on the U.S.-Mexico border, and so Democrats have fought to limit the amount of funding available for that project.”
Trump’s family separation policies are highly unpopular, according to polls, and his national emergency declaration was opposed by 64 percent of respondents in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll. Also, “just 30 percent of Americans said they wanted it to be harder for undocumented immigrants to request asylum” while 61 percent said they wanted assylum policies to be “left as is,” or made “easier.”
Recent polls idicate that Democrats would be wise not to advocate abolishing ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement), which political analyst Ruy Teixeira includes among “The Four Don’ts of the 2020 Democratic Campaign.” Dems should instead urge reforming the agency and support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
As for the best policy mix for Democrats, the overall challenge is “to craft an immigration strategy that’s both humane and “also takes border enforcement seriously,” according to Simon Rosenberg, president of the liberal think tank NDN. Instead of just blasting away at Trump’s immigration policies, Dems must pass comprehensive immigration legislation of their own in the House — even though it will be killed in the senate — so they can make a credible claim to be the only party that has a serious plan for both border security and sound immigration policies.
Morning Consult just released their weekly tracking poll of likely Democratic primary voters and the results for Joe Biden are very good. The rollout of his formal candidacy has widened his first choice lead over Bernie Sanders from 6 to 14 points (now 36 to 22 percent).
Interestingly, despite all the brouhaha about the Anita Hill hearings and Biden’s overly-familiar physical style, he is doing quite well among women (38 percent support) and, especially, black women (47 percent).
How can this be? I would refer you to the very interesting article by Trip Gabriel of the Times on Biden’s appeal in Pennsylvania. Gabriel notes that Biden “has the potential to attract suburban moderates defecting from the Republican Party under President Trump, to invigorate black voters who were underwhelmed by Hillary Clinton and to reverse at least some losses among working-class white voters.”
The material on black voters in this article is the most interesting. Most white liberals fail to understand that Ta-Nehisi Coates and like commentators do not represent the median black voter, who comes from a more pragmatic and, in important ways, more conservative place. Indeed, recent public opinion data show clearly that white liberals themselves are now to the left of blacks on many issues concerning race and racism.
Gabriel interviewed black voters in Philadelphia. He found that:
“patrons [of a black-oriented coffee and book shop] universally said Mr. Biden was at or near the top of their list, in no small part because of his eight-year partnership with President Barack Obama….
Kerry Chester, 53, a network engineer working at his laptop, said he voted for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the 2016 Pennsylvania primary. But for 2020 he thinks it is so important to defeat Mr. Trump that Mr. Biden is preferable, even compared to the two top African-American candidates, Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California….
Neither Mr. Chester nor other black voters interviewed said Mr. Biden’s record of championing anti-crime bills — as a Delaware senator in the 1980s and ’90s — that led to mass incarceration were impediments to their support.
“That was 20 years ago,” Mr. Chester said. “I can’t hold everything against him.” He added that compared with other candidates, “I trust him a lot more.”
Nasya Jenkins, 21, who works at a Boys and Girls Club and is an aspiring influencer on Instagram, said she did not penalize Mr. Biden for his treatment of Anita Hill in her 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony. Mr. Biden called Ms. Hill recently to address some of her concerns, a conversation she said left her dissatisfied.
“I’m not really so caught up on what happened in the past,” Ms. Jenkins said. “We’re here now, with all the problems we have. What do you plan on doing to change that — period?”
Sure, this is anecdotal stuff but it seems consistent with preference patterns we’re now seeing in the data. It may be the case that Biden could not only do a better job reaching white working class voters than Clinton but also do a better job mobilizing black voters, including women. That’s pretty important.
Look, I don’t want to go overboard on Biden. He has lots of problems, including possible lack of appeal to young voters. And if I was backing someone strictly on the basis of policy and who would do the best job as President, I’d pick Warren. But the data as they come in do suggest that Biden has a case as the candidate best-suited to Job #1: taking out Trump.
I liked this piece by Paul Krugman. It’s a commonplace among what you might call the hard environmental community that high carbon taxes are the way to go and that everything else is second best and beside the point. Eat your damn spinach!
Krugman says that one thing he likes about the Green New Deal is that it seems to understand that this sort of approach is doomed politically and that if a clean energy transition program is ever going to be passed, it’s going to have to be a Christmas tree bill with lots of goodies for lots of people. Suffer now to avoid the apocalypse later is just not going to work. The Green New Deal, as currently discussed, may not be the right Christmas tree but we still are going to need a Christmas tree.
A similar logic, Krugman notes, applies to the Medicare for All maximalist approach that would eliminate private insurance. You cannot succeed politically by taking something away from 180 million people and raising taxes to boot. The path to universal health care lies elsewhere and yes it will be a bit of a Christmas tree also.
“JW: The really interesting question is, what do you think is in Trump’s tax returns? Why do you think he’s trying so hard to keep them secret?
DCJ: There are at least three reasons here. Number one, Trump’s tax returns will show that he is not anywhere near as wealthy as he claimed. Remember during the campaign he kept saying he was worth more than $10 billion. But after he became president, he signed under oath his financial disclosure statement, and 90 percent of his wealth vanished. Even that statement, which I’ve analyzed, overstates his wealth. There’s never been a scintilla of verifiable evidence that Trump is a billionaire. And I’m the guy who revealed, back in 1990 when he said he was worth $3 billion, that he wasn’t a billionaire. We eventually found that he had negative net worth of about $295 million—minus $295 million.
Secondly, Donald Trump is a tax cheat. He had two civil trials for income tax fraud, one by the State of New York and the other by the City of New York. In both cases he lost. In one of those trials, his own long-time tax attorney and accountant, Jack Mitnick, testified against him. Mitnick was shown the filed tax return, which was a photocopy, and testified, “That’s my signature on the return, but neither I nor my firm prepared that tax return.” That’s as good a badge of fraud as you’re ever going to find. It indicates that Donald Trump took the tax return that was prepared, changed it, and then with a photocopy machine put the signature of Jack Mitnick on it. Donald Trump is also a confessed sales tax cheat. Mayor Ed Koch of New York said he should have served 15 days in jail for his crime. Trump has a long history of hiding records from auditors, cheating governments, using two sets of numbers. So his tax returns are highly likely to show tax cheating.
Finally, the returns may well establish how much money he has been getting from Russians, Saudis, people from the Emirates, and elsewhere. They may show whether he has been engaged in money laundering for these people through real estate transactions and other actions that make no business sense, but, when closely examined, show exactly what we see when there’s money laundering. I think the record is pretty clear that he has been doing that.”
Meanwhile, Washington state, New Jersey and Illinois have advanced state laws requiring President Trump to release his tax records to get on their state ballots. Dems should encourage other states to do likewise.
Well, they represent themselves quite well. The rest of us not so much.
This important article from Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy focuses on how left Twitter posters differ from not just the American public as a whole but also from their fellow Democrats. Frankly, this has always been obvious to anyone reasonably acquainted with actually-existing public opinion. But it’s nice this pointed out in a major article with solid data.
Perhaps this explains how Biden remains popular among potential Democratic primary voters, despite the efforts of the usual Twitter flash mobs. Their view of Biden just does not represent how most rank and file Democrats feel about him.
One particularly striking finding: despite the efforts of many on Twitter (and their sympathizers) to argue that attacks on political correctness are just a campaign by the right against a fake problem, that is not the view of most Democrats. According to the data cited by Cohn/Quealy, 48 percent of Democrats on social media think political correctness is a problem in the US, compared to 70 percent of other Democrats. And those other Democrats outnumber the social media users 2:1. And this is among Democrats! Think about the rest of the country.
Contrary to the claims of the “woke” left, political correctness is most assuredly unpopular and most assuredly a problem. And in general, Democrats would be well-advised to heavily discount the views of those on Twitter. They’re far less important than they think they are.
One of the points I made in my book, The Optimistic Leftist, was that “the political dynamic unleashed by right populism will actually contribute to its own demise”. No one paid much attention at this time, since everyone was busy panicking about Trump. But perhaps I wasn’t so crazy, given the way things have been unfolding lately.
Along these lines, I was very interested to see this piece on Bloomberg from columnist Karl W. Smith. Smith is not a conventional leftist; he is rather a “liberaltarian” who is a fellow at the Niskanen Center, the split-off from hard-libertarian Cato Institute. Here’s some of what Smith had to say:
“Trump’s election was supposed to have heralded a political realignment in America. The Republican Party, long associated with the interests of business and more affluent Americans, would now be fueled by the white working class and a powerful nativist sentiment. In the Democratic Party, the interests of organized labor and the working class were giving way to those of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the cosmopolitan elite. The new partisan divisions would be based not on class but on openness to globalism.
To be blunt about it: This didn’t happen. (To be fair, some were skeptical at the time.) Instead, the entire country is shifting in a more populist direction, and Democrats are dominating the policy debate.
Exhibit A is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her off-the-cuff mention of a 70 percent tax rate, which has sparked a national discussion. Polls show that it’s popular not only with Democrats but with a plurality of Republicans. Celebrated left-wing economists argue that high tax rates are necessary to prevent the U.S. from slipping into an oligarchy, a message that is likely to resonate strongly among anti-globalist Trump supporters.
Likewise, Ocasio-Cortez has forced elites on both sides to at least grapple with the economic tenets of modern monetary theory. MMT, as it is known, suggests that a government with its own currency does not need to raise taxes in order to increase spending. So far MMT has faced strong pushback from elites of the left and right. But its basic contention, that deficit spending isn’t as bad as you have been led to believe, is gaining support.
These two propositions — that the government should check the power of private-sector billionaires and should spend freely to alleviate social ills — form the core of the classic leftist platform. And these positions are becoming more influential, not less, in the Democratic Party….
If their nominee in 2020 is someone like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or Sherrod Brown, then I predict a rapid shift. Democrats would win back many of the white working class voters they lost and cruise to victory. Centrist pro-business Democrats would be sidelined, and the only resistance to the president’s tax and spending priorities would be from Senate Republicans. That would just drive more populists out of the Republican Party and into the Democratic Party, which would enter a period of almost complete electoral dominance.
If, on the other hand, Democrats nominate a more centrist candidate, such as Kamala Harris or Cory Booker, then the uneasy status quo would remain…..
In the long run, however, the end result in both cases would be largely the same. America is moving leftward. And that shift infuses the left of the Democratic Party with an energy that is unmatched anywhere else along the political spectrum.”
Donald Trump’s blatant and vicious appeal to pure prejudice regarding immigrants and immigration has led many progressives and Democrats to respond in an equally categorical way, describing all objections to immigration as simply a smokescreen for racism.
Since opinion polls have consistently shown that most Americans are not bitterly anti-immigrant and do not support draconian measures like mass deportation, this reaction does not immediately seem to present a major problem for Democrats in 2020.
But, in fact, it does. While most Americans do not share Trump’s visceral loathing of Latin Americans and actually support a range of positive measures such as providing a path to citizenship for long time, law-abiding undocumented immigrants, a very substantial group also supports the demand that America regain control of the southern border and prevent further “illegal” immigration.
Simply dismissing all these voters as racists who do not deserve any response other than condemnation is a profound mistake–one that will endanger Democratic hopes of winning the presidency in 2020 and almost certainly place the Senate entirely out of reach. Democrats need to provide a reasonable response to the concerns that do exist, particularly among working class Americans.
Attention is a limited resource in politics, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., commands a lot of it. She has almost 2.4 million Twitter followers, and media outlets breathlessly cover her statements and policy proposals as well as feckless attempts by Republicans to throw her off her game.
For a lot of Democrats in Washington, this is disruptive. Normally, a freshman member of Congress would command little if any public attention and would quietly sit in the back benches, slowly building seniority over time with the hopes of one day running a powerful committee.
Huertas notes AOC ‘s unique appeal to millennials, who “grew up with a political system that has proven incapable of addressing student debt, income inequality, or climate change. We aren’t waiting for change; we don’t have the time. And there are more of us voting every single year.” Further,
That’s why it’s a mistake for Democrats to try to “rein in” the party’s biggest rising star, as this Politico article put it. Instead, the party should be looking to Ocasio-Cortez for guidance on how to effectively speak to working people, collaborate with activists, and beat Republicans soundly in 2020 and beyond.
Huertas cites an article on Politico, dissing NY-14’s new congresswoman for being popular on Twitter, and argues that “This idea is so backward. Twitter stars can be great legislators, and having nearly 2.4 million Twitter followers is a very effective way to get out the message about legislation.”
Activists, like Ocasio-Cortez and John Lewis, who have a genuine grass-roots connection to their constituents, have an advantage in educating them and mobilizing volunteers. Huertas adds, for example,
Ocasio-Cortez’s advocacy for a Green New Deal is a great example of combing inside and outside influence from activists to advance an agenda. Several progressive House candidates campaigned on a Green New Deal last year, but the topic received little interest during the campaign. It only grabbed public attention after Ocasio-Cortez joined Sunrise Movement protesters in Nancy Pelosi’s office who were demanding a special committee create a Green New Deal…Did the Sunrise Movement and other Green New Deal advocates get exactly what they wanted right away? No, definitely not. But now the Green New Deal is a new standard for what serious climate policy looks like, and presidential candidates are starting to line up behind them.
AOC’s experience knocking on doors as a Bernie Sanders campaigner and her participation in the Standing Rock protests also served her well. It’s not a bad thing for elected officials to have had significant face time with grass-roots activists. “The simple truth,” says Huertas, “is that there is nothing preventing a lawmaker from actively working with protesters, dissidents, and activists to achieve serious political change. In fact, doing so is smart politics.”
Huertas argues that some of Ocasio-Cortez’s critics are more judgemental about women of color than they are about male office-holders, ignoring the reality that “A big reason Ocasio-Cortez resonates is that millennials actually have members of Congress who represent our generational interests now: eliminating student loan debt, income inequality, gun violence, and climate change…pundits and columnists should be asking themselves how they can market their own ideas more effectively. Because there is a zero-percent chance any leftist politician is going to take their free advice and hand the spotlight back to them.”
In addition, “In many midterm races, the youth vote was decisive as young people broke two-to-one for Democrats. Splits like that are a once in a generation opportunity to build lasting power,” as this chart illustrates:
Ocasio-Cortez “dunks on right-wingers who make stupid arguments with abandon,” notes Huertas. “While other Democrats ignore them or respond in somber, serious tones, Ocasio-Cortez rejects the premise that bad faith arguments should be taken seriously” — and boldly discredited.
This has created an incredible attention cycle online. Every time a prominent Republican takes the bait and attacks Ocasio-Cortez, they simply empower her more by giving her the opportunity to spend a few minutes composing a trenchant tweet, which then gets covered with short posts on dozens of media outlets.
When Republicans tried to bash Ocasio-Cortez for advocating higher taxes for the wealthy, “Instead of taking this argument seriously or posting charts and graphs, Ocasio-Cortez responded by debunking a powerful GOP legislator, questioning his knowledge about policy, and then pointing out why the GOP routinely lies about tax rates.”
It’s about getting engaged with adversaries, being confident and unafraid to confront them with well-informed refutations of their flawed defenses. She understands that “Politicians hate talking about their most unpopular policy positions, such as low taxes for wealthy people,” and denies them any wiggle room. Also, notes Huertas,
Calling out bad faith arguments has also extended to what Republicans call “working the refs.” In Ocasio-Cortez’s case, that means taking on fact-checkers who have rewarded her with four Pinocchios/Pants on Fire ratings for relatively mild errors. For instance, what’s worse: denying the scientific reality of climate change or not precisely representing budget figures from a media story about Pentagon accounting? How about scapegoating immigrants with hateful, dishonest rhetoric or talking about people who aren’t unemployed but are working multiple jobs to keep ahead of the cost of living?
tenIf you’re a fact-checker, it’s perhaps not something you’ve thought about because that’s a value-laden, moral question. But in challenging fact-checkers over what they choose to scrutinize, Ocasio-Cortez has exposed how an overly precise focus on facts can obscure the deeper moral questions at the heart of politics…When debates are broken, challenge the premise of the debate. Don’t obscure the real-world impact policy has. Confront it.
In addition, AOC “has helped foster more debate about the ways “how do you pay for it” rhetoric is selectively deployed for health, education, and environmental protection but not military spending, tax cuts, and other deficit drivers” — a good, and often overlooked point that adds needed perspective on spending debates that can help Democrats.
Huertas highlights the difference in communication styles between traditional liberal Democrats and Ocasio Cortez:
…Prominent Democratic Twitter users like Rep. Adam Schiff and Rep. Ted Lieu, both D-Cal., and Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, tend to strike a more serious tone and often point out their political opponents’ hypocrisy. These arguments have a lot of reach, but Donald Trump and other Republicans can’t really be hypocrisy shamed any more, so these messages don’t quite have the same reach or impact they had a few years ago.
They’ll also dabble in memes, leetspeak, and slang, but playing along with internet culture is distinct from being born into it, and as a younger person, Ocasio-Cortez’s use of these tropes resonates, is consistent with her bio, and is stickier for audiences.
Finding one’s online voice is different for every politician, but emulating Ocasio-Cortez in this regard means finding novel, deeply personal ways to talk about the news of the day and a progressive policy agenda. That means effective communicators don’t just play along with how social media works. They embody it. Finding ways to be authentic online is incredibly hard, especially for politicians, but that’s the difference between being good on social media and being great.
Huertas distills her debate strategy as, “When debates are broken, challenge the premise of the debate. Don’t obscure the real world impact policy has. Confront it. And speak to people’s moral values and the type of world we want to live in.”
No doubt the nit-pickers will continue to needle Ocasio-Cortez at every opportunity. But there is zero chance that they are going to distract the new Rep from NY-14. Democrats would do well to study and emulate her energetic engagement and refusal to give them the last word.
In his conclusion, Huertas advises Dems to “Embrace that change, including change from the outside, and don’t be afraid to compromise with the next generation.” Good advice, right on time.
That would perhaps be a better headline than the Post headline on the web which says: “Trump voters now blame him for the government shutdown“. That sounds like all of them and of course that’s not true. But the fact that outlets like the Post are starting to run stories not about how Trump voters are still rock solid for their man but rather about how some of them are getting fed up is a good thing.
The article while anecdotal is still worth reading, especially since it’s written from Macomb County in Michigan, a storied locus of white working class discontent with the Democrats going back decades. As the article notes, while Trump carried the county by 12 points in 2016, Democratic Senate and governor candidates carried the county in 2018. Perhaps something is going on there and, by extension, in other similar areas in the Midwest.
The article also correctly points out that Democrats would be unwise to simply count on fed up-ness with Trump to close the deal with wavering Trump voters, especially when it comes to the immigration issue.
“The 2020 Democratic presidential primary contest is expected to include a heavy dose of debate over how to balance attempts to win back white working-class voters — those who live here as well as in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which Trump also won — with the energy around ascendant women and minorities.
Those attempts will also draw into question whether Democrats can find a way to articulate an immigration plan in areas like this, where the issue resonates. Trump’s insistence on building a border wall has hardened Democrats, whose most prominent policy now is to stop the wall. They rarely tout their own views on border security, but that issue remains important to many voters in industrial states….
“People do want immigration managed,” said Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who has been studying Macomb County voters since the 1980s. “Trump makes it hard because he’s so outrageous. You don’t want to give him an inch. But immigration is still an important issue, and Democrats will have to speak to it.”
A similar point is made by Francis Wilkinson in a recent Bloomberg piece. You might summarize his article as saying “Democrats won’t always have the Wall to kick around” Wilkinson points out:
“[W]hen the shutdown, and the symbolic skirmish behind it, ends, the immigration debate will not. And it’s unclear how much progress Democrats will have made persuading distracted voters to embrace a realistic and humane alternative to Trump’s fantasy and aggression….
[W]ill Americans who have been encouraged to imagine an impregnable curtain of steel be better able to imagine the legal and topographical fiascos that would ensue from trying to build it? Or the handmade wooden ladder that would be used to vault over it? What about a comprehensive alternative that includes a path to citizenship for the undocumented and tighter controls on borders and employment?
There’s no way to make progress on such arguments if the Democratic line is simply that the wall is, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, ‘immoral.'”
Exactly. Time for the Democrats to get to it if they really want to win back wavering Trump voters in 2020.
The latest CNN poll finds him tanking among white noncollege voters, the very folks who tend to be his staunchest supporters and who–in Trump’s theory, if we can dignify his bizarre mix of gut instinct and reality show street smarts by the word “theory”–were supposed to be utterly delighted to have him shut down the government to get the border wall.
It doesn’t seem to be working:
“During the longest government shutdown in US history, President Donald Trump has been losing support among those who may be his strongest supporters — white Americans who don’t have college degrees.
Among this group, only 45% said they approved of the job Trump is doing as President, according to a recent CNN poll conducted by SSRS. That is the lowest level of support among this subgroup by 1 percentage point in CNN’s surveys and a dip from a poll conducted in early December, before the partial shutdown, when 54% of whites without college degrees approved of his job as President and 39% disapproved.
The dip is notable since among whites who hold college degrees, Trump’s ratings are largely unchanged in the last month and remain sharply negative — 64% disapprove and 32% approve.”
As always, I’d like to see more data on this trend but these are certainly very interesting–and potentially important–findings.
In all the talk about whether Joe Biden should “step aside,” there hasn’t been enough discussion of the rationale he should present if he does so. So I offered one at New York:
The Democratic Party’s semi-public bickering over what to do with Joe Biden needs to come to an end very soon, lest it turn into a horrific party-rending conflict or a de facto surrender to Donald Trump. While he can technically be pushed out of the nomination, it would be nightmarishly difficult to do so given his virtually unopposed performance in the primaries and the lack of precedent for anything like a forced defenestration of a sitting president. It would also express disloyalty to a brave and dedicated leader. But Biden has already lost the united, confident party he needed to make a comeback. He’s trailing in the polls right now. And even more importantly, his own conduct and fitness for office will command center stage for the rest of the general-election campaign, which is precisely what he cannot afford given his poor job-approval ratings and the sour mood of the electorate.
So Joe needs to go of his own accord, and it needs to happen quickly before Republican and Biden-loyalist claims of a “coup” become all too credible. But it’s obviously a humiliating exercise. So if Biden comes to realize the futility of going forward, what can this proud and stubborn man say that will make him something other than an object of derision or pity?
I have a simple answer: He can tell the truth.
The truth is that Biden’s firm commitment to the pursuit of a second term, despite his advanced age and increased frailty, hardened into inflexible determination when Trump made his own decision to launch an initially unlikely comeback. When Biden took office, Trump was a disgraced insurrectionist whose very defenders in his second impeachment trial mostly denounced his conduct, even as they urged acquittal on technical grounds. The 46th president was in a position to serve one distinguished “transitional” term and retire with a wary eye on his fellow retiree festering in anger and self-righteousness in Mar-a-Lago. But as Trump slowly recovered and eventually reemerged as a more dominant figure than ever in a MAGA-fied Republican Party, Biden became convinced that as the only politician ever to defeat Donald Trump, he had the responsibility to do it again and the ability to remind voters why they rejected the 45th president in 2020.
As this strange election year ripened, Biden had a perfectly plausible strategy for victory based on keeping a steady public focus on Trump’s lawless conduct (including actual crimes), his erratic record, and extremist intentions for a perilous second term. The polls were close and Biden wasn’t very popular, but these surveys also showed a durable majority of the electorate that really didn’t want to return Trump to power, particularly as economic conditions improved and the consequences of Trump’s Supreme Court appointments grew more shockingly apparent each day.
Then came the June 27 debate, and suddenly Biden lost the ability to make the election about Trump. He needs to look into a camera and say just that, and conclude that just as the threat posed by Trump motivated him to run for a second term, the threat posed by Trump now requires that he withdraw so that a successor can make the case he can’t make as he’s become the object of endless speculation about his age and cognitive abilities. Biden does not need to resign the presidency, since his grounds for withdrawing his candidacy are about perceptions and politics rather than any underlying incapacity. Biden would be withdrawing as a weakened candidate, not as a failed president.
For this withdrawal to represent a stabilizing event for his administration and his party, it’s critical that Biden not equivocate or complain, and that he show his mastery of the situation by clearly passing the torch to the vice-president he chose four years ago. For all the talk of an “open convention” being exciting (for pundits) and energizing (for the winner), the last thing Democrats need right now is uncertainty. No matter what the polls show and how badly his old friends want him to succeed, it’s the prospect of 100 days of terror every time Biden makes unscripted remarks that is feeding both elite and rank-and-file sentiment that a change at the top of the ticket is necessary. The fear and confusion needs to end now, and Biden effectively made his choice of a successor when he made Kamala Harris his governing partner. The president needs to reassert his agency now, not look like he is abandoning his party and his country to the winds of fate.
A straightforward and honest admission of why Biden 2024 is coming to an end could go a very long way toward enabling Harris and other Democrats to shift the nation’s gaze back to the ranting old man whose acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention showed that he has not mellowed or moderated at all. Of course Biden wants to solidify and extend his legacy over the next four years. But right now, the clear and present danger is that it will be extinguished altogether. He alone can address that threat, not as a candidate, but as a president and a patriot who recognizes his duty.
