One phase of the 2024 presidential campaign came to an end while another very long one began, as I noted at New York:

Without a great deal of fanfare, Joe Biden and Donald Trump each clinched their parties’ presidential nominations in the March 12 caucuses and primaries. This sets up what is officially the longest general-election campaign ever, a 238-day marathon (2000 and 2004 were a day shorter) that will seem even longer because it’s a rematch between two universally known presidents.

Biden and Trump became “putative” nominees a week earlier when their last intraparty opponents, Dean Phillips and Nikki Haley, respectively, dropped out of contention. At this point, they are “presumptive” nominees pending the formal designation made at their national conventions (July 15-18 in Milwaukee for Republicans, August 19-22 in Chicago for Democrats). Biden has won 2,107 of the 2,130 Democratic delegates allocated so far (1,968 were needed for the nomination) with “uncommitted” running second with 20. Trump has won 1,241 of the 1,347 Republican delegates allocated to date (1,215 were needed for the nomination) with Nikki Haley second at 94.

The final day of the two nominating contests was a bit short on drama. Hawaii’s Democrats gave seven of 22 delegates to “uncommitted” after 29 percent of caucusgoers opted to make that gesture aimed at pushing Biden to support a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. But in Washington state, where a stronger protest vote had been expected, only 7.5 percent of primary voters went “uncommitted” (with 79 percent of ballots counted) and Biden was winning all 92 delegates at stake.

Former candidate Haley managed double-digit showings in two March 12 primaries in Georgia (13 percent) and Washington (22 percent), though keep in mind that both states allowed Democrats and independents to participate in the GOP contest and many of the votes were cast early, before Haley suspended her candidacy.

Because there have been rumblings in both parties about a hypothetical convention revolt against the presumptive nominee (Biden owing to electability jitters and Trump due to his legal problems), it’s worth noting that Trump’s delegates are “bound” to him by party rules (and can be liberated only by a candidate withdrawal or a two-thirds convention vote), while Biden’s are his strictly as a matter of moral obligation. Both conventions will, however, be totally wired by the campaigns of the two nominees. By the time these summer coronations roll around, Biden and Trump will be two of the most thoroughly known quantities in American political history.

Since J.P. Green covered the SOTU Address and response, I’ll end the week with a report on the potentially significant maneuverings of the No Labels organization, which I wrote up at New York:

The nonpartisan group No Labels has announced a decision by a group of “delegates” from around the country to move forward with a 2024 presidential ticket, despite having no discernible candidates lined up.

Former Dallas mayor Mike Rawlings, the chairman of the virtual convention that made this decision on Friday, put out a statement saying: “They voted near unanimously to continue our 2024 project and to move immediately to identify candidates to serve on the Unity presidential ticket.” At some point in the next couple of months, assuming the group can identify qualified candidates to fill out the “unity ticket,” it is expected to reconvene the delegates for an up-or-down vote that will conclude the deliberative process. Says Rawlings: “Now that No Labels has received the go-ahead from our delegates, we’ll be accelerating our candidate outreach and announcing the process for how candidates will be selected for the Unity Ticket on Thursday, March 14.”

The political logic of this two-step process is pretty simple: The idea of a bipartisan “third option” has always been more popular than any actual ticket. A poll from Monmouth last summer showed support for such a ticket dropping by half when specific candidates (in that case, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, both No Labels leaders) were identified. And just this week, Third Way, a centrist Democratic group that has been relentlessly warning that No Labels may pave the way to a second Trump administration, released new polling with the same bottom line:

“Only a third of the electorate would even entertain voting for an unnamed No Labels ticket. (Again, we tested this before we named Haley.) That recedes quickly when details are added …

“When we asked about a third-party ticket led by Nikki Haley, we found it to be non-competitive. Indeed, it performs worse than an unnamed moderate, independent ticket:

“Nikki Haley has 80% name ID and boosts a better net approval rating than either Biden or Trump. Despite her strengths, a No Labels ticket with Haley as the nominee gets just 9% of the vote, losing badly to Trump and Biden and trailing even RFK Jr. (13%). Thus, a No Labels ticket led by one of the most well-known and respected GOP leaders available is more likely to finish fourth than win a single electoral vote.”

Nikki Haley, of course, spent a good part of her last week as an active presidential candidate disclaiming any interest in a No Labels candidacy, reminding everyone that she is a lifelong “conservative Republican” who would never consider running on a ticket with any kind of Democrat. But if her name isn’t capable of mobilizing support for a unity ticket, whose would? No one comes to mind.

The presidential general election has just entered a new phase, with Joe Biden and Donald Trump dispatching their final opponents on Super Tuesday and the incumbent throwing down the gauntlet in a State of the Union Address that seemed to galvanize Democrats. This contest is too volatile to tell exactly how a future No Labels ticket would affect the outcome, though Third Way and other Democrats will continue to warn of its perils. For now, it does make sense for No Labels to make every effort to show support for a no-name presidential ticket before taking the final plunge, even if it knows an identified ticket is likely to lose altitude once the blanks have been filled in.

At the moment, No Labels has ballot access in 16 states: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah. ABC News reports the group believes it is still on a trajectory to secure a spot on the ballot in 33 states ultimately. It’s a high-stakes, dangerous game No Labels is playing, and there remains a chance it will flip the board at the crucial moment and back off the unity-ticket plans. Everyone connected to No Labels claims to be revolted by the idea of playing spoiler, and most say they’re particularly horrified by the idea of Trump as the 47th president. But the lack of empirical data that their “third option” would actually work with real candidates is a problem these self-styled “problem-solvers” need to address definitively very soon.

Again, I don’t regularly share posts here that are strictly about Republicans, but it’s important that Democrats don’t share Nikki Haley’s misconceptions about the GOP, which I addressed at New York:

After being trounced by Donald Trump on Super Tuesday, Nikki Haley announced on Wednesday morning that she is suspending her presidential campaign. Haley outperformed low expectations in the 2024 race. Initially, she didn’t stand out in a crowded field of candidates who hoped Trump would self-destruct or that Republicans would return to the old-school conservatism of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. But as other candidates (notably Ron DeSantis and her fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott) flailed around in Iowa trying to resurrect archaic strategies for winning the nomination, Haley timed her brief moment in the spotlight well. She survived a demolition derby among non-Trump candidates via strong debate performances and an increasingly explicit appeal to Republicans who cherished their party’s past and dreaded its MAGA future.

But Haley never resolved her perpetually ambiguous attitude toward her vanquisher, promising to support him in the general election even if he’s a convicted felon yet criticizing him in increasingly sharp and personal terms as her own campaign lost steam. The ambiguity continued in her announcement of that campaign’s end; she refused to “endorse” Trump right now but pointedly observed that she has always backed her party’s nominees. Her demand that Trump “earn” the votes of her supporters doesn’t make much sense; half of them are Biden supporters, and the other half want Trump to become somebody else….

So despite her habit of congratulating herself regularly for the courage she has exhibited in promoting her own career, Haley is ending her campaign in a state of strange irresolution. She might have made her peace with Trump earlier and climbed aboard his bandwagon, perhaps even becoming his running mate and heir apparent. Conversely, she seemed to have the money to continue losing to Trump in post–Super Tuesday primaries, for a while at least. And she definitely could have made a very big splash by offering to head up a unity ticket sponsored by the nonpartisan No Labels organization, which may be deciding this very week whether to run a candidate for president. Instead, she’s just going away, surely leaving some of her backers wondering what Haley 2024 was all about.

Perhaps, as David Freedlander’s recent foray into Nikki-land for New York suggests, Haley shares the delusion of some of her core supporters that her campaign represents a righteous remnant of Goldwater-Reagan conservatives who will recapture the Republican Party when the temporary madness of the MAGA movement melts away. It’s often forgotten that Haley originally emerged from the right-wing DeMint-Sanford wing of the South Carolina Republican Party and won her first gubernatorial race as the protégé of Sarah Palin. As she insisted in slapping aside overtures from No Labels, she’s always viewed herself as a “conservative Republican,” not any sort of moderate. And in her brief announcement ending her campaign, she gave shout-outs to the drab agenda of fiscal discipline, term limits, and national-security hawkishness that characterized the conservative movement before Trump came along and blew up “entitlement reform” and “forever wars” as the unpopular causes they undoubtedly are.

Nikki Haley would be well advised to adjust to the evolution of her party or to leave it. Instead, she is suspending her political career along with her campaign, and it’s anybody’s guess if she knows where she is going next.

Congress is narrowly avoiding a government shutdown for the moment, but the bigger news this week is elsewhere, as I explained at New York:

Not even Mitch McConnell is eternal. He has decided to avoid further concerns over his fragile health and his fraught relationship with party boss Donald Trump by stepping down as Republican Senate leader in November. McConnell announced the news in a Wednesday-afternoon speech on the Senate floor.

McConnell has been in that position since 2006, the longest tenure of any Senate leader from either party. But unlike his former House counterpart Kevin McCarthy, McConnell isn’t quitting his job altogether the moment he’s no longer top dog. As he told the Senate, he plans to finish his current term, which runs until the end of 2026, “albeit from a different seat in the chamber.”

The timing makes sense. This hasn’t been a very enjoyable congressional session for McConnell, who cherishes his reputation as a master deal-maker like his Kentucky idol, Henry Clay. His extended effort to put together a bipartisan and bicameral foreign-aid and border-security package failed almost entirely (though it’s possible some of its component parts can yet be resuscitated). He is in the process of negotiating a humiliating endorsement of Trump, whom he denounced in no uncertain terms for the then-president’s misconduct of January 6. In return, the former president has let it be known he’s not sure he could work with McConnell if both are in power in 2025. A coup to take down the man Trump has often called an “old broken-down crow” could have been in the offing just down the road, particularly if the 82-year-old senator’s recent health problems were to recur.

You would have to assume McConnell will have some influence over the identity of his successor. The most likely aspirants for the job are the senators known as the “three Johns”: John Cornyn of Texas, John Thune of South Dakota, and John Barrasso of Wyoming. Cornyn — who on Thursday confirmed he is already campaigning for the job — was McConnell’s whip from 2012 to 2018, until he was term-limited out of that position and replaced by Thune, who has also announced he is considering a campaign to become leader. Barrasso is currently the third-ranking Senate Republican as chairman of the party conference. Cornyn is 72, Barrasso is 71, and Thune is a relatively youthful 63. All of these men have been loyal McConnell sidekicks while maintaining better relations with the party’s MAGA wing than has their chief. All three of the Johns have already endorsed Trump’s presidential candidacy, though Barrasso is viewed as closer to the 45th president.

It’s possible that MAGA senators could offer their own candidate as leader. Rick Scott unsuccessfully challenged McConnell in November 2022 after advocating an extremist policy agenda that annoyed other Republicans significantly. Scott could try again, but he’s likely preoccupied with securing his own reelection this fall. Trump could intervene to promote a loyalist, but even in this MAGA era of the GOP, senators have a puffed-up self-regard that limits too much open subservience to others. By the time Republicans finally choose a McConnell successor, they’ll know whether they have a majority in the chamber, and barring another contested presidential election, they’ll also know whether their party enjoys a governing trifecta that would enormously expand their power.

Mitch McConnell was a powermonger of the highest order. But whatever happens in November, his own powers had become too faint to satisfy himself or his fellow Republicans.

There was some planned overreaction to the Michigan Democratic presidential primary on February 27 that I tried to address at New York:

It’s rare that someone winning a primary with around 80 percent of the vote has to be on the defensive. But that’s where Joe Biden is after a smashing victory in Michigan marred by an organized effort to protest his Middle East policies via “uncommitted” votes.

Organizers of anti-Biden protests in Michigan wanted to show that his largely unconditional support for Israel in its war with Hamas might alienate enough voters (especially the state’s large Arab-American population) to cost him the election in November. So they urged a vote for “uncommitted” in the February 27 primary. And they were really smart to set expectations low, as Politico Playbook explained:

“We’re told that phone bankers for the Listen to Michigan campaign contacted some 100,000 voters, but their big takeaway was that most said they were simply going to stay home. Some backers of the protest campaign have publicly set a goal of 10,000 uncommitted votes, but that is a low bar: In 2020, without any organized effort, there were over 19,000.”

From a percentage point of view, the “uncommitted” vote in Democratic presidential primaries in Michigan peaked at 10.7 percent when Barack Obama was running for reelection in 2012. It was only slightly higher this time around: “Uncommitted” took 13 percent of the vote, with 95 percent of the vote tallied. And it has been predictably strong in pockets of strong support for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and a break in unconditional U.S. support for Israel. “Uncommitted” is winning heavily in Dearborn, where Arab American Muslims are a majority of the population, and it’s doing relatively well in Washtenaw County, where the University of Michigan is located.

Still, Biden trounced “uncommitted” — not to mention actual named opponents Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson — handily. If you translate the “uncommitted” vote into support for Biden’s general-election opponents (either Donald Trump or the multiple non-major-party candidates likely to appear on the ballot), these results are ominous. That’s exactly what “uncommitted” organizers hoped would be the case in order to influence the administration’s policies toward Israel and Gaza or punish Biden for his recalcitrance.

Biden’s reelection campaign is a vast gamble on the power of comparisons between the incumbent and Trump, even among voters unhappy with Uncle Joe’s record or current trajectory. Losing less than one in every five votes in a Democratic primary may become a data point for the general-election campaign in Michigan, and even a reminder to Team Biden that it cannot take Black, youth, Arab-American, or Muslim-American votes for granted. It sent a message to the president’s campaign, but it’s not quite the crack of doom you may hear suggested by Biden-haters in and beyond both parties.

I ran across a story on faulty focus group memories of Trump, and I wrote about the implications at New York.

As an unpopular president facing a sour electorate, Joe Biden really needs to make 2024 a comparative election rather than a straight referendum on his presidency. Luckily for him, his likely general-election opponent, Donald Trump, is equally unpopular for reasons that are quite vivid. He’s as well known as Biden, and he works very hard to reinforce the traits that might make an undecided voter (even one unhappy with Biden) reluctant to put him back in the White House. So half of Biden’s work in drawing contrasts is done for him, and part of the other half is made easy for him by Trump’s strongest supporters, the “deplorables” (to use the Hillary Clinton term that has become a MAGA badge of honor) who enjoy shocking the world by advertising their hero’s most questionable characteristics.

It is becoming apparent, however, that Trump’s potential coalition is being augmented by low-information voters with a hazy understanding of the Trumpier features of the 45th president’s record, character, and agenda. By that I do not mean the non-college-educated voters who make up so large a part of the Trump base. Many if not most of them are pretty educated about their candidate. But there’s evidence that disengaged and/or deeply alienated folks who may nonetheless vote in a presidential election (if not any others) don’t know as much about Trump as you might assume, as the New York Times’ Patrick Healey has observed:

“Our latest Times Opinion focus group discussion with 13 undecided independent voters included a striking result: 11 of the 13 said they would vote for Donald Trump if the election were held now, and only two said they would vote for President Biden. The reason: overwhelming concern about the economy.

“But I was less surprised by the big vote for Trump than by this: The group didn’t blame Trump for things he was responsible or accountable for.

“For instance, several people linked their economic troubles to COVID, but they didn’t put any blame on Trump for that. Some were upset with the end of abortion rights nationally, but they didn’t tie that to Trump’s Supreme Court appointments. Several wanted bipartisanship, but they didn’t blame Trump for his hand in sinking the recent bipartisan border deal. One person, a Latina, blamed Trump for worsening racism in the country and recounted a searing incident that happened to her — but she was among the 11 who would vote for him anyway.”

Healey concludes that “a lot of our focus-group participants — and many voters — see Trump as an acceptable option in November, yet they don’t know or remember a lot about him.” This makes them, of course, highly susceptible to Trump campaign messaging asserting that the economy during his presidency was the greatest ever; that he’s a natural peacemaker who inspired respect for the United States everywhere; and that he’s a decent, law-abiding businessman (and family man!) whose near-constant forced court appearances are uniformly the product of his persecution by the other party.

Democrats, of course, will have opportunities (and increasingly, an obligation) to set the record straight about Trump and his presidency. But the difficult thing is that low-information voters also tend to be low-trust voters, which means they don’t tend to believe traditional arbiters of objective reality like the mainstream news media, and may not grant more truthful politicians superior credibility. Further distorting understanding of the Trump administration (and thus its possible return) is the huge trauma associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, which gives everything that immediately preceded the disaster an undeserved glow, while immolating memories of less powerful traumas associated with the former president’s tenure.

In other words, low-information voters who dislike politics so much that they are not inclined to dig into facts and evidence touching on political topics are highly vulnerable to the kind of disinformation that benefits Donald Trump. And if they are in a bad mood in November, they could help turn the election into a negative referendum on Joe Biden even if they are inviting something — and someone — far worse. Democrats will have to work hard to break through with the truth.

There’s been a lot of buzz about a recent Ezra Klein podcast spinning a particular fantasy about the 2024 presidential race, so I examined it from a historical perspective at New York:

Pundits once loved the idea that somebody might challenge and defeat Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination. However, those hopes died after primary deadlines came and went while the Dean Phillips candidacy went nowhere very fast. The 46th president is going to lock up enough pledged delegates to make him the nominee very soon, and for all the private kvetching about the polls and the incumbent’s age, Democrats are for the most part publicly gearing down for a good, vicious Biden-Trump rematch.

But fantasies of something different happening haven’t totally gone away, and they don’t entirely depend on the remote possibility of Donald Trump being denied the GOP nomination because he’s a convicted felon or a bankrupt loser. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein has suggested Democratic fears about Biden’s age could be addressed by a real unicorn of a development in August: a wide-open Democratic National Convention that would choose a Biden replacement based on who wowed the delegates in Chicago.

Klein doesn’t go into great detail about how this would happen (he promises to do so in a future podcast), but his premise is that Biden would voluntarily withdraw from the contest and release his delegates not too long before the convention without dictating a successor (like, say, his hand-picked vice-president, Kamala Harris, who would presumably have to fight for the nomination if she wanted it without a heavy-handed presidential assist). In that case, Klein says, Democrats could choose from a deep bench of talented politicians in an unscripted televised drama that would capture a nation that had been dreading a 2020 rematch.

The first thing to understand about this scenario is that it would be entirely unprecedented. Yes, as Klein notes, conventions rather than primaries chose major-party nominees from 1831 through 1968 (from 1972 on, nearly all states have chosen delegates via primaries or caucuses with the limited exception of the Democratic experiment with “super-delegates”). But in each and every case, the conventions were preceded by carefully planned candidacies, some as sure a bet as any multiple-primary winner; the apparent spontaneity of the choice of a nominee was often as contrived as the bought-and-paid-for “spontaneous demonstrations” for candidates that abruptly ended in 1972. In addition, long before primaries dominated nomination contests, they still on occasion had a big impact on the outcome (way back in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft slugged it out in a long series of primaries before dueling in a closely divided convention that wound up splitting the GOP).

The last major-party convention in which the presidential nominee wasn’t known in advance (putting aside a few convention “revolts” that were doomed to fail) was the 1976 Republican confab. And there the gathering was the very opposite of “open”: All but a handful of delegates were pledged to Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan, and the battle was over that undecided handful. Most delegates had zero “choice” over the nominee. There was “drama,” but no sense in which the party was free to choose from an assortment of possible candidates who proved their mettle at the convention itself. The only surprise was Reagan’s decision to announce a proposed running mate (Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker) before the presidential balloting. This was an innovation at the time, which (as it happens) failed.

Yes, the further back you go, there were plenty of major-party conventions that were “deliberative,” in the sense of the nomination not being locked up in advance. Occasionally, the outcome was something of a surprise, most recently in 1940, when a whirlwind propaganda effort by a few wire-pullers and packed galleries produced Indiana utility executive Wendell Willkie as a Republican nominee. But again, the delegates themselves weren’t generally free to deliberate, since many were controlled by state political leaders and others were chosen in primaries.

If you want a truly wide-open convention, the eternal ideal is the Democratic convention held one century ago in New York. The 1924 gathering featured 103 ballots before the exhausted remainder of delegates who hadn’t run out of money or patience chose dark horse James W. Davis as its nominee. Davis went on to win a booming 29 percent of the general-election popular vote and lost every state outside the former Confederacy.

That brings to mind another note of caution about the idea of an “open convention”: a nominee chosen not by primary voters or by a consensus of party leaders is just as likely to produce a calamitous general-election campaign as some burst of enthusiasm among united partisans. The last multi-ballot Democratic convention nominated Adlai Stevenson in 1952. He lost. The last multi-ballot Republican convention chose Thomas Dewey in 1944. He lost. The record of nominees chosen by deliberative (much less contested) conventions isn’t that great generally. Gerald Ford (winner of the aforementioned 1976 Republican convention) lost. His vanquisher, Jimmy Carter, lost in 1980 after a tough primary challenge and then a convention full of buyer’s remorse. The biggest general-election winners in living memory (Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1996, Barack Obama in 2008) were the products of conventions that were virtual coronations.

The 2024 convention will end on August 22 (assuming it doesn’t go into overtime like the 1924 affair), leaving ten weeks before the general election on November 5. Would a Democratic Party fresh from an “open convention” be able get its act together in that span of time, particularly if the nominee is someone other than a universally known figure? What if there are Democrats who are unhappy with the nominee? When does that get sorted out?

I’m interested in learning more about “open convention” scenarios. But at first and even second blush it seems a far riskier proposition for Democrats than just going with the incumbent president of the United States.

 

You might have missed a potentially significant political story involving a non-candidate for president, so I wrote about it at New York:

One variable in the fraught and complex 2024 presidential election has now been put to rest: Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has announced he will not pursue an independent or “unity ticket” candidacy for president this year, as USA Today reports:

“Manchin made the announcement during a speaking engagement at West Virginia University for his recently created nonprofit group Americans Together, which is aimed at connecting and empowering moderate voices.

“’I will not be seeking a third-party run, I will not be involved in a presidential run,’ Manchin, 76, told the crowd. ‘I will be involved in making sure that we secure a president who has the knowledge, has the function and has the ability to bring this country together.’”

He argued that “the system right now is not set up” for candidates not affiliated with either major political party to win the presidency but said that in the “long game” there could be room to make a third party viable.

Manchin’s vow not to be “involved in a presidential run” seems also to preclude a vice-presidential candidacy, which had seemed a possibility if No Labels, the nonpartisan organization with which Manchin has been closely associated, winds up sponsoring a ticket headed by a Republican. His subsequent comment about the kind of president he wanted to help the country secure could indicate that for all his third-party flirtations and ideological heresies, Manchin might endorse a second term for Joe Biden. He could not possibly have been talking about Donald Trump by referring to a president who had “the ability to bring this country together.”

In any event, Manchin’s decision was good news for his party’s 2024 prospects. There’s likely a ceiling on Trump’s support well short of a popular majority, so it’s a strategic imperative for Biden to corral anti-Trump voters without too much competition from minor candidates, and particularly from a well-known Democrat.

The announcement obviously takes away one option for No Labels, which is reportedly in the process of interviewing potential candidates, even though the group has not formally decided whether to undertake a campaign (it has, however, secured ballot access in 13 states so far).

It also likely means Manchin has run his last campaign. He chose not to run for a third full term in the Senate this year, likely because West Virginia had turned so bright red that even a relatively conservative Democrat would have no real chance of winning, particularly in a presidential-election year. With no electoral base, the 76-year-old former governor will wind up his Senate service and presumably retire to his houseboat. His family already dodged one calamity this year when Manchin’s wife, Gayle, survived a serious car accident. A futile presidential run would not have improved their quality of life.

Since the idea of President Biden being “replaced” as the 2024 Democratic nominee was all the rage for a moment, I took the opportunity to explore the little understood mechanics of the issue at New York:

A byproduct of the panic over Special Counsel Robert Hur’s suggestion that President Joe Biden is an “elderly man” with memory issues has been media efforts to understand and explain how Democrats could replace the 46th president as their 2024 nominee, either with or without his consent. From a political perspective, the idea that Biden might be dumped from the ticket is extremely far-fetched. But technically it is possible, though increasingly complicated, right up to Election Day.

When it comes to changing horses in the middle of a presidential race, Democrats differ from Republicans in one fundamental respect: While GOP rules bind delegates to the candidates who win primaries or caucuses, Democrats have a moral rather than a legal obligation to remain faithful to their candidate. Fourteen states have laws that seek to bind delegates to the winning candidate, but it’s reasonably clear that party rules supersede such laws when they are in conflict. And in most states, delegates are released from their obligations if a candidate withdraws from the race.

Another difference between the parties is that Democrats have an established set of “unpledged” delegates who hold convention seats by virtue of elected or party offices they hold. These “superdelegates” don’t get to vote unless there’s a second presidential ballot. At the 2024 Democratic convention in Chicago this August, there will be 744 superdelegates out of a total of 4,532 delegates.

The idea that superdelegates might vote for anyone they want is largely fictional. They are chosen by campaigns to be 100 percent loyal to their candidate. This loyalty is even fiercer when the candidate is the incumbent president of the United States. There’s a reason no sitting president has been denied renomination if he wanted it since Republican Chester Arthur in 1884. So the idea that Democratic delegates are going to look at the polls in August and decide they can do better than Biden is nonsense; it’s not going to happen. Even if faced with the emergency of avoiding a Trump presidency, the Democratic Party will remain a coalition of interests and principles, not just a vehicle for winning one election.

But if Biden, for whatever reason, chooses to “step aside” — as a self-defenestration is euphemistically described — it’s another matter altogether. The problem for Democratic delegates won’t be liberating themselves to look elsewhere (with the possible exception of those from a few states with stricter “binding” statutes than others); it will be agreeing upon a successor. And the closer to the convention that this decision has to be made, the likelier it is that these 4,000-plus Biden loyalists will back whoever he designated as his successor. Fantasies of a President Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom or J.B. Pritzker or Pete Buttigieg or Michelle Obama notwithstanding, that successor will almost certainly be Vice-President Kamala Harris. Any other choice would not only infuriate Harris and her supporters; it would also retroactively label Biden’s first decision as party leader in 2020 as a mistake. For better or worse, the party will unite around its new leader; the Trump factor will, if anything, give Democrats an abiding hope of victory no matter how things look a few months out.

It is possible, I suppose, that Biden and Harris could decide to “step aside” together as an act of patriotic self-sacrifice and help design a spanking new ticket that’s dressed for success. But that’s more likely the stuff of potboiling novels from the kind of writers who pretend there are such things as spontaneous candidate drafts and moderate Republicans.

The cleanest Plan B scenario would involve some cataclysmic event happening to Biden that leads him or the party to reconsider his candidacy after the Chicago convention. In that extremely remote contingency, the Democratic National Committee would have the power to name a replacement nominee, just as it did in 1972 when vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton “stepped aside” after revelations of DUIs and shock therapy. The DNC isn’t going to dump a renominated incumbent president, no matter how poorly he’s doing in the polls; back in the days when presidential elections weren’t almost always desperately close or vulnerable to post-election challenges and insurrections, one party regularly went to battle after Labor Day knowing it was likely to lose. But if Joe Biden cannot take up the cudgels for the last stages of a rematch with Trump (assuming the 45th president isn’t himself dumped for his vast record of misconduct, if not for some physical ailment), the party can quickly move on with Kamala Harris.

When the brouhaha over Robert Hur’s slurs about Joe Biden’s mental faculties broke out, I took it personally, and replied at New York:

Like Joe Biden, I got my dream job at a stage of life when most folks are planning or entering retirement. After writing many hundreds of thousands of words for politicians and organizations without getting much credit for it, I became a rather geriatric blogger and then a political writer for New York Magazine (and The Democratic Strategist) and blew right by the age at which I could have packed it all in. Best I can tell, I still produce more words — though perhaps not higher-quality words — than my whippersnapper New York colleagues. So I am naturally sympathetic to the president’s desire to stay in the saddle as long as he can, and naturally hostile to partisan efforts to depict Biden as senile or incompetent, particularly when the beneficiary of undermining confidence in his abilities is Donald Trump.

Let’s just get this right out on the table: Barring some unprecedented development, the 2024 presidential election choice will be between an 81-year-old Democrat and a 78-year-old Republican. In terms of grammar, syntax, logic, and recall of important events, the former is more cogent on his worst days than the latter appears to be on his best days. So anyone planning to support Trump is welcome to do so on policy or partisan-power grounds but should be ashamed to claim that they just cannot vote for Joe Biden because he’s too old. Is Trump more “vigorous” than Biden, in terms of self-confidence and aggressiveness? Yes, but in the way that Attila the Hun was more “vigorous” than St. Francis of Assisi. It’s also germane that while Biden is a pretty faithful representative of the mainstream views of his political party, Trump eccentrically defines the views of his political party, much as Attila defined the Hun Weltanschauung.

To put it another way, if a second-term President Biden becomes significantly afflicted by age or illness, his lapses are likely to be as mild-mannered as the man himself. I don’t think you can say the same about a second-term President Trump, who already seems to suffer from the malady once maliciously called “Irish Alzheimer’s” (or in some lore, “Appalachian Alzheimer’s”), wherein the victim remembers nothing but his grudges.

There is, of course, a more general and entirely legitimate debate over how old our presidents and presidential candidates should be. I personally thought both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were “too old” to run in 2020, though this judgment was mostly about their electability rather than their capacity to do the job. The advent of septuagenarian and even octogenarian presidents is in part a reflection of longer life spans (at least for people who aren’t too poor to receive decent nutrition and health care), as Alex Webb pointed out last year after Biden joked about being a contemporary of founder James Madison:

“When Madison became the nation’s fourth president in 1809, he was just 57. Bizarrely, however, Madison was by one measure considerably older than Biden when he took the hot seat: compared with the life expectancy of his contemporaries.

“Someone born in Colonial America in the 18th century had a life expectancy of just 28 — skewed heavily, of course, by the fact that so many people died in infancy. When Madison took office, he was already more than twice as old as most of those born the same year. He was, in relative terms, much older than Biden, who is just 15 years older than the average life expectancy of his year group.”

Biden (and for that matter, Trump) may also seem especially old because he happened to assume the presidency after a run (again, excepting Trump) of relatively young chief executives: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

But the thing so often forgotten when we obsess about the age of our leaders is that there are qualities associated with what the AARP used to euphemistically call “modern maturity” that offset whatever is actually lost when an old goat “loses a step”: most obviously work experience, but also lived historical perspective, a wide range of useful role models and “best practices,” knowledge of personal limitations, and even fires of ego-driven ambition tamped down by accomplishment. I know I’m a better political writer for having observed multiple eras of American politics, dating back to the day in 1960 when I watched John F. Kennedy barnstorm through my small Georgia hometown. It should be obvious that Joe Biden learned something in his famously lengthy career in public office, as environmental activist (and himself a founder of an advocacy group for seniors concerned with climate change) Bill McKibben pointed out in the wake of the latest age scare over the president:

“Obviously you lose a step physically as you age, but the presidency doesn’t require carrying sofas up the White House stairs. And science increasingly finds that aging brains make more connections, perhaps because they have more history to work with. …

“Biden was socialized in an era when government took on big causes, and you can see it reflected in his first-term commitment to rebuilding infrastructure on a grand scale, boosting a new sustainable energy economy with billions of dollars for solar panels and battery factories, dramatically increasing the number of people with healthcare, and standing up for gun control, voting rights and reproductive rights.”

There are reasons, in other words, that most societies embrace gerontocracy to one extent or another.

Sure, there are, of course, limits to the value of experience. When Casey Stengel was managing the New York Mets at the end of his career, as the story goes, one of his players was asked what it was like to play for such a living legend. “Casey has forgotten more about baseball than I’ll ever know,” the player said. “But that’s the problem — he’s forgotten it.” His team’s showing proved the point.

At the moment, Biden’s Team America isn’t doing all that badly unless you choose to look at it through a partisan lens, or can’t cope with the traumas and disappointments of the recent past or the uncertainties we face in the immediate future. The president deals with many, many people in the course of an insanely busy day, and if he’s as around the bend as the nonexpert assessment by special counsel Robert Hur suggests, we’d almost certainly know it, unless you believe in a conspiracy of silence as vast as any in U.S. history. I know a lot of very smart, very young people who struggle with remembering dates and names; I’ve never been able to recognize faces other than those I encounter regularly. Sure, Joe Biden’s age and competence pose legitimate questions. But they should be answered with comprehensive, not anecdotal, evidence and by observers who are not followers of the wild man who will become president if Biden is put out on an ice floe by voters in November for being too old. Take it from this old guy: Sometimes the last gallon in the tank can get you to your destination.