Could Democrats do better than Biden?
It is a vexing feature of American politics that a country so vast, so diverse and so rich in talent seems incapable of producing a wide selection of appealing candidates for president.
It is a vexing feature of American politics that a country so vast, so diverse and so rich in talent seems incapable of producing a wide selection of appealing candidates for president. It was frequently observed in 2016 that Hillary Clinton was probably the only Democrat who could lose to Donald Trump and that Donald Trump was the only Republican who could lose to Hillary Clinton. In 2020 the Democrats had the sense to pick probably the only candidate who could beat Trump.
Four years on, the same unedifying options are on offer but, as things stand, it seems that Joe Biden is now the less appealing of two unappealing choices, and some Democrats are searching for an alternative.
It’s early days, of course, and nothing can be said with any confidence about an election in 11 months. The economy, the progress of wars in the Middle East and Europe, the impact on voters of Trump’s impending string of criminal trials: these are all the known unknowns that will unfold in the next year. There are surely unknown unknowns that will affect the outcome too.
But one thing we can say is that as far as the polls are concerned, Trump is in better shape at this stage of his third run for the presidency than he was at any stage of his previous two.
The daily polling average compiled by the political site Real Clear Politics (RCP) currently has Trump with a two-point lead over Biden. That doesn’t sound like much but consider the recent historical context. As Sean Trende, an elections analyst with RCP, noted, in 2016 Trump led Clinton in the polling average for just five days - immediately after the Republican convention that summer, when a candidate usually gets a bounce in the polls. Overall, Trump led in only 19 out of hundreds of polls that year. In 2020 he never led Biden in the polling average, and he enjoyed a lead in only five polls all that year. So in his previous two campaigns combined, Trump led in a total of 24 polls out of nearly a thousand. “This cycle? He’s led in that many since mid-September,” notes Trende. “He’s led in more polls in the past three weeks than he did against Biden in all of 2019-20.”
Remember, too, that Trump fared better in the electoral college vote that actually chooses the president than in the national popular vote (which he lost in 2016 and 2020). So if he now has a lead in the popular vote, he may well have an even bigger advantage in the electoral vote.
Some Democrats are getting vocal about Biden’s fading chances. David Axelrod, who was Barack Obama’s campaign chief in 2008, told The New York Times recently: “I think he has a 50-50 shot here but no better than that and maybe a little worse.”
And while most of the party continues to publicly rally around the president, demands for a change at the top of the ticket are growing louder. Dean Phillips, a hitherto unknown congressman from Minnesota, is challenging Biden in the primary. Phillips told me last week that he hopes a strong showing by him in the early primaries could show Biden that the writing is on the wall and entice other, more plausible, candidates to emerge.
But there’s a problem. Is there a more plausible candidate - and would they have any better shot at winning than Biden? The president himself said this week that there was no shortage of alternatives. “There’s probably 50 of them,” he told reporters when asked if there were any other Democrats who could beat Trump. But he doesn’t believe that for a moment. In fact, despite his age and infirmity, Biden still looks like his party’s best shot.
The most obvious contenders are Kamala Harris, the vice-president, and Gavin Newsom, the governor of California. Harris has been playing the loyal lieutenant to Biden, not even allowing talk of a possible candidacy to emerge anonymously from her team.
Newsom, by contrast, while professing public support for Biden, is being as subtle about his ambitions as a man parading around with a sandwich board. Last month he paid a visit to Beijing and glad-handed with President Xi, for all the world a president in waiting. He is hardly ever off the news. Last week he took part in a television debate with Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and a candidate for the Republican nomination against Trump.
But neither Harris’s discretion nor Newsom’s self-promotion is paying off in any visible way. The latest polling shows that Trump would beat Newsom by the same margin he leads Biden. He would beat Harris by even more - one poll last month showed him beating her by 12 points.
Worse, if Biden were to stand down now at such a late stage, it’s hard to see how a contested primary election for the Democratic nomination would help the party. It would probably be divisive and ugly.
The party’s identity politics-obsessed base would surely express outrage at the idea that Newsom, a wealthy white male, should seize the nomination from Harris, who is of mixed Indian-Caribbean heritage.
The ideological contest would be messy too, with a fight for the soul of the party on issues such as tax and spending increases, support for Israel, and the woke agenda. It’s difficult to see how a battle like that would help anyone other than Trump.
At another event this week, Biden hinted tantalisingly at another, parallel universe of presidential choice. “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” he said at a fundraiser in Massachusetts. But, he quickly reminded us, Trump is running - and another instalment of the contest unwanted by large numbers of Americans remains on.
The Times
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