Joe Biden Ginsburg

This time, the Democrats really are ‘in disarray’

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Thanks for reading Political Calculus. This week I am moving away from British politics to look at the US election, after last night’s debate. And as many of you know, I am hosting a show with Tortoise called ‘What’s Wrong With Democracy?’ and I suspect we will have a lot of America-themed episodes over the next few months! But this week, I spoke about money in politics (that would never happen in America…) with Mark Malloch-Brown, the recent President of the Open Society Foundations, and Valentina Pop, Europe editor at the FT. You can listen here.

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Finally the penny cent has dropped.¹ No longer can the upper echelons of the Democratic Party continue their years long dance of denial. No more is enemy number one Nate Silver, or Ezra Klein, or any other commentator who has the temerity to point out the obvious. Joe Biden’s debate performance last night has made one thing very clear - Biden’s age and frailty are electoral poison.

Last night I appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight program to talk about the impending Presidential debate with a wild cast of characters - obviously the host Kirsty Wark, whose masterful command of the studio is amazing to witness live. Nick Watt, the program’s political editor was there too, fresh from a day of cancelled trains (the risks of covering British elections) with a detailed list of every poll that had come out in the previous six hours. So I was in good hands with the Newsnight team. The other guests were all America-based and then it was like entering another dimension.

For example, I can now say that I have appeared on TV with Megyn Kelly - in a way, she was obviously calling in from the States. Still, this is as close as us political scientists usually get to famous cable news folks. And then there was Nile Gardiner, who has the unique role of being a British guy at the Heritage Institute and hence a lodestone for a series of Conservative MPs who are about to lose their seat and wonder if there is something lucrative they could do in DC. And finally, from the Democratic side there was four-term Congressional Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, who was gamely defending Biden’s record and his ability to make hay in the debate. Let’s hope he managed to avoid spin-room duties afterwards.

I went into this trying to think about where a political scientist could add most value - but Nick Watt covered that! - so broadly I was asked about Biden’s policy weaknesses and the possible foreign policy implications of Trump winning office. Immediately afterwards, I thought perhaps I was a bit tough on Biden, not least given the slight imbalance on the panel towards conservatives.

But you know what… it turns out that maybe this was a message that Newsnight viewers needed to hear. Biden began the night in really quite serious trouble for an incumbent President. He is now in great peril. There has been a longstanding joke in US liberal circles that the ‘mainstream media’ love nothing more than a ‘Democrats in disarray’ op-ed. Well this time they really are in disarray.

Like cicadas awaking from a near fourteen year doze, for the first time since Obama’s re-election, the Democrats are having to face up to the consequences of not being able to move beyond Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden to a new generation of candidates. This is the original sin of the contemporary Democratic Party. Rather than Barack Obama (born in 1961) heralding a new era of Gen X and younger Democratic Presidential candidate wannabes, the ensuing three campaigns have been dominated by Boomers - indeed in Biden’s case, Silent Generation politicians.

Now of course it’s true that Trump is a Boomer and not much younger than Biden. Trump was born in 1946, Biden in 1942. But I think the important thing is to look at the runners and riders for the Presidency in each party other than the two who will - we think for now - be facing off in November.

Obviously Biden was more or less unchallenged in the 2024 primaries - Representative Dean Phillips from my old state of Minnesota managed to garner half a million votes to Biden’s fourteen million. But in 2016 the battle was between Clinton (born 1947) and Bernie Sanders (born 1941). And in 2020 between Biden, Sanders, Elizabeth Warren (born 1949), and Michael Bloomberg (1942) (and a couple of others, we’ll come back to…). It’s as if the 2004 Democratic Primary - between John Kerry (1943), Howard Dean (1948), Wes Clark (1944) and John Edwards (a youthful 1953) were still going on decades later.

What about the Republicans? 2016 saw Trump beat out Ted Cruz (1970), Marco Rubio (1971), Jeb Bush (1953) and John Kasich (1952). In 2024 Trump defeated Nikki Haley (1972), Ron De Santis (1978) and Vivek Ramaswamy (1985). Other than Trump, not a single competitive candidate was born in the 1940s. Among the Democrats, since 2016, they have all been.

The Democrats don’t have a deep bench of potential candidates. The Republicans do. If Trump keeled over tomorrow, no candidate could possibly replaces his idiosyncratic appeal of free-wheeling wise-cracking, and blood-curdling populism. Trump’s charm, or dark aura - depending on your political persuasion - is a one-off - like a bizarro Obama. But the Republicans could absolutely replace him with a credible, younger, energetic candidate who would probably beat Joe Biden.

But if Biden does decide to stand down - which after last night’s debate is finally being talked about as in the realms of possibility - who replaces him?

Let’s start with within the Biden administration. The most obvious choice would be the Vice President Kamala Harris. I didn’t mention her in the recounting of the 2020 primaries above because frankly she polled poorly and was not a credible rival to Biden in the way Sanders, Warren, or Bloomberg were. Indeed she pulled out before the primaries began (though she participated in the debates). Harris is much younger (born 1964) but she has failed as a VP - whether through her own fault or the fault of Biden’s team - to cut through or gain in popularity. Her approval ratings are sub 40%, almost as bad as Biden’s. In my mind it’s implausible that Harris would do any better than Biden in the presidential race.

One other possibility - had it been pursued much earlier - was the candidate from the primaries I didn’t mention above: Pete Buttigieg (born 1982, hence a Millennial). Buttigieg has done a decent job in a middling Cabinet role - Secretary of Transportation. The reason he might be credible is because he is a fantastic public speaker, particularly in debate-like formats, with real charm. He has some attributes that might make him less competitive in a general election - his only previous experience before government was a mayor of South Bend, Indiana - which for UK readers is sort of equivalent to having been mayor of the city of Durham - and he is gay, which unfortunately for a number of Americans may still be an issue (though fortunately probably only a minority really care according to polling).

But other than Buttigieg that’s basically it. If the Democrats want to replace Biden on the ticket - and who knows how viable that would really be, though since we have not yet got to the Convention, it is at least possible - they would need to look outside the administration.

But that’s not a lot better frankly. Unlike the Republicans who have been assiduously cultivating younger Governors, Senators, Representatives and businesspeople, the Democrats don’t have many obvious backups. The two names that float around the most are Gavin Newson, the Governor of California, and Gretchen Whitmer, the Governor of Michigan. Newsom, who was in the debate spin room last night, would be a polarising choice. He is not popular as Governor of California and he gives off the kind of ‘coastal elite’ vibes that generally imperil Democrats. Whitmer might be a more credible force but to be honest the reasons she is known are largely that (a) people talk about her as a credible candidate, and (b) a bunch of far-right maniacs planned on kidnapping her. The smart move would have been to have the party build up her national reputation over the past few years rather than hoping she can be spirited in as a Hail Mary this summer.

Most other well-known Democrats are in Congress and are polarising, old or both. Nancy Pelosi - who hits both categories - was born in 1940 and has only just stepped back from controlling House Democrats. Her replacement Hakeem Jeffries is doing well but doesn’t have the name recognition yet that pushed Paul Ryan, for example, to a Vice Presidential nomination. Chuck Schumer, the lead Democrat in the Senate, is a relative spring chicken at age 74 and has never been in the running for President.

Some of the possible contenders from the Senate, like Sherrod Brown of Ohio, are the wrong side of seventy. There are still some possibilities here - Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jon Tester - but none has ever really cut through with the public. Cory Booker, the New Jersey Senator is a possibility but he has always demurred from a Presidential campaign (Dan Hopkins, politics professor at Penn, reminds me that Booker did initially have a campaign in 2020, so scratch that). In the House the best known figures are generally ones that polarise - Alexanda Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) being the best known.

The problem is that while there are possibilities, especially among some of the younger Senators, for a potential Presidential candidate in four to eight years time, right now there is no obvious replacement. And if even if there were, we have another problem… the ticking clock.

The core problem is there is no real time left to have Biden exit gracefully. As a Crystal Palace fan, we recently went through this experience with football’s own Joe Biden - Roy Hodgson (born 1947). After having come back in midway through the 2022-23 season to rescue a flailing team, the 2023-24 season proved tougher.

Hodgson was always doing just enough to keep going - winning just when he needed to. But the vultures were circling and it was obvious he was going to be replaced. Unlike the Democratic Party and the President, you can actually fire a manager. But rather than that happening, it dragged on and on until just as it looked like Hodgson would in fact be replaced, he took training, felt unsteady and was sent to hospital. After which, gradually a mutual agreement emerged that he would retire - rather ungracefully.

The Hodgson outcome feels like it might be on the cards for Biden. A series of catastrophes and dark chatter about replacing him at the Convention leads the gaffer to call it a day. But like football managers, political figures are not keen to retire.

And this leads us to the title of today’s post - I’m sure you hoped we’d get there in the end. Back in 2010, the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (born 1933) became the oldest Supreme Court Justice at age then of 77. She had already had several bouts of cancer and Democrats worried that at some point she would pass away and need to be replaced. While Obama was President, that likely meant she would be replaced by another liberal on the court. But Ginsburg did not want to retire - not then in Obama’s first term, nor in his second, by the end of which she was 83.

The Democrats knew that Republicans in the Senate would make it difficult to replace her with a liberal even if the Democrats retained the Presidency - Obama was famously unable to get Merrick Garland appointed to the Court when the conservative judge Antonin Scalia died in early 2016. But of course Ginsburg did not choose to retire in Obama’s term and then the hope turned to, well maybe she will outlast Trump.

She didn’t. She passed away in September 2020, just months before the Presidential Election, and was replaced by the conservative jurist Amy Coney Barrett. Although the Democrats have held the Presidency for twelve out of the last sixteen years, Republican and Democratic Presidents both appointed three new justices each - retaining and deepening the Court’s conservative tilt.

There is a rather obvious lesson in here - it’s understandable that people would want to carry on serving in important public office. But their health issues - or just plain age - create a risk that they will die in office, or in Biden’s case, lose the election because the public think they will. Ginsburg was a Supreme Court Justice - nominally (if not in reality) a nonpartisan figure. The Democratic Party couldn’t really exert much control over her.

But the Party could have pushed Biden and chose not to. In part because the Democrats had a successful midterm election in 2022 relative to expectations. And in part because it’s uncomfortable and hard to. Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller wrote a well known book about the Presidential primaries, called The Party Decides. In this case the party decided not to decide.

Before last night’s debate, maybe the Democratic Party would have got away with it. The polling figures were poor for an incumbent. Yesterday’s polling average on 538 was 41% Trump 40.9% Biden. The 538 predicted simulations had Biden winning 498 simulations out of 1000, Trump winning 499, and three tied Electoral Colleges (just imagine…). The swing states looked worse for Biden but there was a path through - keep Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, even if he lost Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. But it was a very narrow corridor and it shouldn’t have been.

The unspoken truth is that Biden should be winning this election on the fundamentals. He is an incumbent President. Economic growth has been strong the last couple of years. Gas prices are moderate. American soldiers aren’t dying in foreign wars. Those four factors normally do all the work in predicting American election. Yes, inflation is high and that hurts. Yes, illegal immigration at the Southern border seems out of control. But all incumbent Presidents face some challenges.

The reason Biden is in trouble is personal, not political. He is old. He seems infirm. Americans’ expectations going into last night’s polls were low for him - Ipsos found that Americans thought he would perform worse than Trump. JL Partners found 70% of Americans thought he would mess up his words. Democrats hoped it would be like the State of the Union address where a pumped up Biden foiled his critics. It wasn’t. It was bad and the American public had their fears about Biden realised.

Where we go from here - how anything can be done - is very uncertain. The commentators Nate Silver and Matthew Yglesias - bête noires for the left of the Democratic Party - have both come out today to say Biden should step down (actually Silver has been saying it for months, taking a lot of flak online). But you will be shocked I know to hear that Substack posts won’t be driving Biden’s future.

It will be the party that decides - if it can decide to decide… I wouldn’t hold my breath. By hoping that they wouldn’t have to make a tough decision, the Democratic Party have neglected to have a backup plan. And as they search around for a suitable replacement candidate, I expect that in the absence of obvious options, they will give old Joe one more go around the block. As a Crystal Palace fan, I can tell you how that goes… and unlike Crystal Palace, the Democrats won’t be able to replace Biden with a younger German² model.

1. Actually, Americans call one cent coins ‘pennies’ so this correction was unnecessary.

2. Oliver Glasner is actually Austrian but that would have ruined the joke. As Rob Johns pointed out online, I could have made a good Arnold Schwarzenegger gag though.