It’s Time for Democrats to Hold Hands and Jump
Ever since President Biden’s calamitous debate last month, many Democrats who’ve lost faith in his candidacy have been frozen, fearing mutually assured destruction. They want Biden to step aside, but they worry that if they call on him to leave the race and he refuses, he’ll be left even weaker against Donald Trump than he is right now. “The worst of all worlds is if half of the members come out for him withdrawing, either in individual press conferences or even as a group, but then he doesn’t do anything,” one member of Congress told me Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity because the issue is so sensitive.
But if that’s the worst of all worlds, the one we’re in now is a close second. The Democratic Party’s agonizing discussion about Biden’s future has now been going on for three weeks. Insiders have spoken, at various moments, of a proverbial dam breaking, but so far, we’ve seen just growing cracks and leaks. Of all the party factions, only donors have been vocal about the need for a new candidate, which has let the Biden camp paint calls for his exit as elitist interference with the will of the voters. And with relatively few elected officials defecting — even as many vent to reporters off the record — both Biden and his remaining supporters have been able to pretend that the majority of Democrats are still behind him.
The result has been a despair-inducing slog. The president has had a few good moments in recent weeks, including a great speech in Michigan. But more often, his public performances have only underlined the profound pathos of man unable to accept his inexorable decline.
It’s time for Democrats who want a new nominee to hold hands and jump. There is no salvaging this campaign; Biden has lost his party’s confidence. On Wednesday came the bombshell news that Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, almost certainly speaking for his caucus, has urged Biden to end his campaign. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker and one of the most brilliant Democratic strategists, has reportedly told him he can’t win. In a recent Associated Press/NORC poll, 65 percent of Democrats said the president should withdraw. And though it shouldn’t be dispositive, donor money may be drying up. The campaign is in a death spiral that threatens to pull down-ticket Democrats into the vortex. They need to push for the quickest and most decisive end possible to this crisis.
The collapse of Biden’s support in the party is by no means total; there is still a substantial minority of Democrats who believe that whatever his weaknesses as a candidate, jettisoning him will only invite chaos. In recent weeks, I’ve argued both publicly and privately with some of Biden’s remaining backers, and they generally make several points.
They say that Biden’s polling, especially at the national level, remains within the margin of error; a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll has the president leading Donald Trump by two points. They say that there’s no proof that Vice President Kamala Harris or another Democrat would do better, especially when faced with the full force of Republican demonization. And they say that because Biden is determined to stay in the race, calls for him to make way for another candidate only help Trump. When I debated Dmitri Mehlhorn, the pro-Biden adviser to the Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman, last week, he said, “The time we’re spending talking about Joe’s new liabilities is time we’re not spending talking about Trump’s new liabilities.”
