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Despite unpopularity, Biden remains the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination
Joe Biden is a historically unpopular president.
Two and a half years into his term, Biden’s average job-approval rating is a dismal 39.1%. His net approval – the difference between his approval and disapproval ratings – is -16.3%, the second lowest of any modern US president at this point in their term (the top spot goes to Jimmy Carter). Even former president and current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump was more popular than Biden.
Biden is struggling not just with Republicans (duh) and independents (whom he won by double digits in 2020), but he’s also unusually weak among Democrats and Democratic-leaning constituencies. More than two-thirds of Americans – including a majority of Democrats – say they don’t want the president to seek a second term. About half of these cite Biden’s age and mental fitness as major reasons why. Already the oldest president in history at 80 years old, Biden would be 82 on Election Day and 86 at the end of a second presidential term.
Biden’s unpopularity threatens to hurt his reelection bid. While he’s still the narrow favorite against Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – the top GOP contenders –Biden’s lead seems to be shrinking, and Democratic elites are increasingly worried that the president’s age, deteriorating health, and weak public standing will lose them the White House.
It follows that Democrats will nominate someone else to replace Biden at the head of the Democratic ticket and maximize their chances of winning in 2024. Right?
Wrong.
There are three possible pathways for Democrats to get a non-Biden nominee (well, technically four if you count a sudden serious health incident): Either he exits the race willingly, he’s forced to drop out, or he’s defeated in a contested primary. None of these scenarios is remotely likely to happen.
As long as he remains (broadly) healthy, Biden will lead his party next November. Here’s why.
Biden won’t exit the race willingly
While a growing number of Democratic leaders privately tell me they wish Biden would voluntarily step aside, their hopes will almost certainly be dashed.
The president officially launched his reelection campaign on April 25; his ongoing push to sell Americans on “Bidenomics” and the strength of the US economy signals that he has not changed his mind. Indeed, First Lady Jill Biden spoke of his motivation to run earlier this year, telling an interviewer: “He’s not finished what he’s started, and that’s what’s important.”
Barring a major health setback that forces him out of the race, Biden will remain fully committed to being the Democratic nominee.
Forcing Biden to drop out would be challenging and could backfire
Getting Biden to exit the race would require a coordinated pressure campaign among Democratic elites that leans on the president to make room for a candidate more likely to beat Trump. This campaign couldn’t be kept under wraps; to succeed, prominent Democrats would have to make their worries about Biden’s reelection prospects known in public and pledge considerable money to the effort, threatening Biden’s primary campaign by forcing him to compete for a limited pool of donor dollars.
There’s zero upside and big downside for any individual Democrat to go out on a limb like this.
If too few others join and the “coup” fails, the “plotters” would not only get frozen out of positions in a second Biden administration but also risk losing their jobs as party officials. Quoting Omar Little, “You come at the king, you best not miss.” At the same time, the attempt itself would risk causing a deep schism in the party that hurts the Democrats’ performance in the general election (like Sen. Ted Kennedy’s challenge hurt Carter in 1980 and Pat Buchanan’s challenge hurt George H.W. Bush in 1992).
Even if the “coup” against Biden were to succeed, the natural choice to replace him would be Vice President Kamala Harris, who is even less popular among the voting public and would be more likely to lose to the Republican nominee. Yet as the first woman, Asian American, and African American to serve as vice president, she would be a difficult candidate for prospective primary challengers to dislodge.
Replacing both Biden and Harris would require unprecedented behind-the-scenes coordination from a two-person ticket sometime in the next six months to provide sufficient time to qualify for the ballot in early primary states. But this strategy would risk alienating Black voters and progressives, both key elements of the Democratic base, which would put Harris’s challengers on the back foot from the outset.
The difficulty of replacing both Biden and Harris at the top of the ticket disincentivizes Democratic elites from trying to force Biden out in the first place.
Defeating Biden in a contested primary would be an uphill battle
The two current challengers to Biden – wackos Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson – have little chance of winning even a single primary. And while Democrats don’t lack for other good options to nominate, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, none of them can boast the national profile or broad appeal across the Democratic Party that Biden does.
The fact is that though Biden is unpopular, he has already defeated Trump once and is the only Democrat with the national profile to match the former president. Always strong with Black voters – he won 61% of Black voters in the crucial South Carolina primary in 2020 – and moderate Democrats, Biden has also done enough on the policy front to get progressives to endorse him (including $2 trillion in pandemic relief and billions’ worth of generational investments in manufacturing, infrastructure, climate, clean energy, and health care), as Squad talisman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) did earlier this month.
A new Democratic candidate would need to develop a national profile, gain nationwide name recognition, and win the trust of key constituencies like Black and moderate voters – all in a relatively short period of time. With state-by-state ballot-filing deadlines starting in the early fall, challengers would have to enter the race in the next two months. Even if they were ready to do that, Biden has rigged the primary calendar in his favor by moving key states that swung heavily for him in the 2020 primaries – including South Carolina and Michigan – to earlier in the season. This built-in advantage deters would-be challengers from entering at all.
Biden vs. Trump redux: what we know so far
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: A couple of obvious points to begin with US elections. One, of course, they take far too long. Two, they cost far too much money. Three, we are so, so tired of both of those facts because they are such a distraction from being able to get policy done for almost 50% of the entire electoral calendar. Having said all of that, this is a particularly unfortunate upcoming election because we have two candidates that very few people are enthusiastic about. It's Biden versus Trump redux. That's not absolutely certain yet, but you would bet on it. And a couple of points that I think are a little less obvious.
First, whether or not Biden should run again. Everyone is saying, "Oh my God. Can't we get somebody else? He's 80 years old, he's going to be 82 if he wins. That's too old for anyone to be a CEO. Why would we be putting that person in a job that has such incredible importance globally?" And I get it. I absolutely get it. I think it's too old for the position. I'd rather have younger people running. But if you are interested in running the candidate that's most likely to win, do you go with an incumbent president or do you go with somebody else having no idea who that someone else is? And the answer seems to me is reasonably likely you go with the incumbent president. There are huge benefits in the US political system in running as an incumbent. If Biden decides he isn't going to run, Kamala Harris, who is much more unpopular than he is and certainly much more untested, and to the extent that she's tested, she's much more unproven than Biden, would be a weaker candidate, I think almost everyone would agree, than Biden would.
I do think there are better candidates out there. Gretchen Whitmer, for example, the governor of Michigan, Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado. There are others that I don't consider as effective, but nonetheless would be strong candidates like Governor Gavin Newsom of California. There are plenty of others, Gina Raimondo, for example, the secretary of commerce, it would be a pretty wide group, but would they be more effective and more likely to win if they aren't the incumbent president? And there, I think the answer is no, especially because the incumbent president isn't going to be doing a lot of campaigning for whoever that person is, and Biden is not up for that kind of a schedule, intense schedule, whether he's running or it's somebody else. I'm sympathetic to the view that even though Biden has capacity to be present until he is 86, is a serious concern that he might well be the most effective person for the Democrats to run. And especially running a relatively uncontested campaign. When you're running against Kennedy and Williamson, you're basically running an uncontested campaign.
Now, I also think that those people who say that Biden is incoherent and incompetent, that's performative, that's partisan, that is certainly not anyone who has spent time with Biden in conversation as president. I have, many, many people I know have, whether you're talking about members of cabinet or senators or other heads of state, Biden's ability, his mental coherence and cogency to handle the basics of the job and the importance of those meetings and decisions has not, in my view, substantially eroded over the last couple of years. I also do think, though, that there's a real question mark. He has lost a step or two, certainly physically in the last 10 years, and I do worry that this could be an issue over the course of his presidency. So if Biden becomes president a second time and he's going to run with Kamala again, is there a real likelihood that Kamala Harris becomes president? Of course, there is, and that's something that I think is going to be a concern for a lot of certainly independent voters.
Then on the Republican side, Trump is not a slam dunk, but at this point, he's at least a layup. He's a jumper from the free-throw line. He's likely to get the nomination. In part, he's likely because he's running a relatively smarter campaign, he's trying hard to lock up key endorsements early that will crowd out others like DeSantis maybe from even deciding that they're going to run, but certainly makes it more of an uphill struggle. He's raising a lot of money. He's spending that money already in targeted advertisements to go after, to kneecap those that would be potentially the stronger folks in the race.
I think it's likely that he is the nominee. I think he's too old. Though he strikes me as much more physically robust than Biden, I think his unfitness is primarily not about his age, though it's a concern. His unfitness has to do with everything else about the quality of his person, his lack of ethics and morals, and of course, what we have seen from his first term in governance and not his administration, but how he personally has acted in that office. Something that I think would be a concern to a greater degree if he runs again. Now, a lot of people I hear saying, "Well, if Trump gets the presidency again, then he's going to have no one good around him because they will refuse to work with him, and it'll be a completely incompetent administration." I think that's precisely wrong. I think once Trump gets the nomination, almost all of the GOP will line up behind him.
I think Nikki Haley, it's very clear that her run is an effort to become Trump's VP, and if she gets that, she's one of the most capable and competent Republicans out there through when she was governor, when she was UN ambassador. There's no question about that. And do I think that she would be effective as a VP? Frankly, more so than Pence. I think Pompeo would still be there. I think that a shocking number of GOP members, maybe not Chris Christie, maybe not Asa Hutchinson, certainly not Liz Cheney, not Mitt Romney, but the strong majority of Republicans would support Trump, and they would even be willing if they got the right position to join the administration. The bigger danger, I think, is that a Trump administration, having been through four years, will know what they need to do to have much more impact in what they want to get done, not just in terms of policy, which is generally less problematic, but in terms of eroding democracy.
For example, really hollowing out civil service in a lot of administrations that they think are stopping them from doing things they want to do. The brittleness of US institutions after another four years of a Trump administration, I think, would be a lot greater than they were after the first four, where his impact on those institutions as a whole was relatively limited.
What happens? Damned if I know. I'm not going to sit here and tell you I think I have a strong view of who's going to actually win the election. I think we're far off from that. I saw the Washington Post poll like everyone else did, that shows that right now, Trump is actually leading Biden head-to-head. It's the first major poll that showed that. Before, most have showed that Biden would win head-to-head against Trump. I think part of it has to do with how Biden holds up from a health perspective. Part of it has to do with how well the economy looks. Part of it has to do with how Trump is able to campaign. And we've got a long, long way to go with a lot of moving parts and also some fairly substantial global crises that we and others are dealing with on the global stage before people go to the ballot box on November in 2024.
Having said that, a lot of people are going to get really exhausted by this campaign, and I'm sorry for everyone, but we are at the beginning of it, and it's a long slog, and I'll be talking you through. So everyone, be good. I'll talk to you soon. Bye