So what just happened? Not just last night on August 22 at the Democratic National Convention but over the past five weeks since Joe Biden decided to exit the Presidential race for 2024 and cede the campaign to another candidate?
Americans of all political leanings should spend some serious time contemplating that question. It is likely the actual answers are materially different than any conclusion people might have had previously, and certainly different than any conclusion reached immediately after Biden's initial withdrawal. The actual answers might be best analzyed by thinking about four key topics:
- The Nature of Presidential Power
- Dynamics of the 2020 Presidential Race
- The Inter-Generational Balance of Power
- Timing and Talent
The thesis here builds up sequentially so it will be tackled in that order.
The Nature of Presidential Power
The office of President in American government certainly has unique power, particularly as Commander in Chief in a world dominated by nuclear threats. However, those powers were purposely constrained with numerous checks and balances that limit a President's ability to act unilaterally without obtaining legislative approval or at least political buy-in from Congress or judicial review. (At least, until the current Supreme Court began rejecting two hundred and thirty five years of constitutional precedent by limiting or eliminating entirely Presidential accountability for criminal acts...)
As a result, every Presidency involves a continual trade-off between decisions to exercise those unilateral authorities granted to the office with efforts to cajole the legislative branch and the judiciary to assist. That balancing is easier if a President retains some credible claim to having a mandate from voters. Any such claim decays exponentially as the interval grows between the present and the last election. As a result, the actual power of the President is not a fixed constant over a term or an entire (multi-term) Presidency. Instead, it ebbs and flows, partly based on the interval between the most recent election or the next election and partly based on how the President interacts with the other branches.
This point is CRUCIAL to understand because it underpins WHY decisions to RUN for office in the first place and decisions to run for re-election are so crucial not only to the candidate but to the political parties and We The People. No President will ever run for office a first time and WIN having declared up front they will only serve one term. Why? Because that President will never carry the threat through the first term of running for a second term and using any successes in the first term to trigger more losses for the opposing party. The President's power will be crippled from Day One, as allies and enemies alike begin looking past the current occupant to guess who will be next to curry favor with them or plot around the preferences of the current occupant.
Leaders of both parties know this and would NEVER knowingly allow the selection of a candidate who openly claims to be running for a single term. Party leaders are perpetually looking at the next election and grasp the advantages provided to an incumbent so they would never allow their party to nominate a candidate who openly promises to only serve one term. Equally importantly, any potential candidate with any understanding of the Presidency also knows this and even if they wanted to run for a single term, would likely NOT because such a secret would be impossible to keep and, once exposed, would cripple their power in office.
This is also why significant legislation for challenging issues is virtually NEVER enacted during second Presidential terms. Significant changes to the status quo require defeating powerful lobbies which is usually only possible if a President has first-term clout from winning election and carries the "threat" of winning a second election (mid-terms or the next Presidential election) to extract concessions from the opposition to make something happen.
Dynamics of the 2020 Presidential Race
Based on the above theory of Presidential power, calendars and terms, now contemplate the situation leading up to the 2020 Presidential election. The country had experienced four years of chaos from the Trump Administration, including an impeachment and failure to convict over attempts by Trump to extort a US ally for Trump's political benefit. In exchange for delivery of military gear Congress had already approved for Ukraine to defend against a looming threat from Russia, Trump wanted Ukraine's president to announce criminal investigations into Hunter Biden as a means of smearing Joe Biden who was running for the Democratic nomination for President.
As fate would have it, Trump's fixation on Biden as a possible opponent likely made Biden the front-runner and eventual winner. By the time calendar year 2020 arrived, a pandemic came with it and the country faced a political crisis and a human crisis simultaneously, all amidst a Presidential campaign cycle.
In 2020, all of the candidates who made such impressive appearances at the 2024 DNC convention were available to Democratic primary voters. So why did Biden run away with the Democratic primary race? First, there was no way the Democrat's prior top candidate, Hillary Clinton, was going to run again. When you lose to someone like Trump in a race thought to be a blow-out in your favor and that opponent turns out to be FAR WORSE than most imagined, you don't regain stature, you lose more. Clinton likely would not have won a single primary had she run, purely out of "Clinton fatigue" and lingering anger on the part of Democrats for her having lost to such a flawed candidate in 2016.
The likely reason for the truncated Democratic primary race in 2020 was likely due to a hope on the part of Democratic Party leaders that avoiding a contentious primary season lasting through June would make the selected candidate appear stronger and a more inevitable victor against Trump, helping to focus spending on efforts to defeat Trump rather than winning an intra-party war that generated fodder to Republicans to use against the winner in the general election. Ooooooookay..... But why BIDEN?
Despite leading polls throughout 2019, Biden actually performed below expectations in the first three contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. Only after winning the South Carolina primary did Biden's arc swing positive, curiously after doubts about Bernie Sanders' age began to take root. Biden was 77 years old at the outset of the campaign. That was "old" even by 2020 standards. By Super Tuesday on March 3, 2020, Biden won 10 of the 15 primaries and Bernie Sanders bowed out a month later, essentially ceding all remaining primaries to Biden.
Certainly, the mix of candidate preferences in the first three states could have been an anomaly and Biden might have always been situated to run away with the race once voting covered more states. However, the country was one month deeper into the pandemic by March 3 as well. Deaths in the US did not begin spiking until later in March but cases and hospitalizations were already growing exponentially. News from other countries confirmed the impacts headed to the US and the US response was already becoming highly politicized and confusing.
Did Democratic primary voters pick up on those omens and internally decide "to hell with politics, let's just pick an adult and get this part of the process out of the way so we can focus on beating Trump?" If that logic affected votes on Super Tuesday, those voters clearly did NOT contemplate the prior analysis about the essence of Presidential power, terms and age. To voters, Biden appeared mentally and physically healthy and that was enough at the time. But more importantly, it isn't clear how Joe Biden reflected those factors in his decision to enter the race either.
By Biden's account, he decided to enter the race from disgust stemming from Trump's remarks about "good people on both sides" after Nazis organized a Unite the Right protest and triggered riots in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017. At that point, the 2020 election was still three years out. The second term election was still seven years away. The end of that second term was still eleven years away.
Biden might have felt in perfectly good physical and mental shape in 2017, but it is impossible to extrapolate actual health three, seven and eleven years into the future. But it isn't hard to extrapolate OTHER PEOPLE'S possible concerns about your age and acuity if you are already 75 years old. Regardless of how you feel or present, it's clear OTHERS are going to have more concerns when you are in your seventies and eighties over the timeframe involved.
The Inter-Generational Balance of Power
Even prior to Biden's horrendous debate performance in June 2024, the Presidential race was shaping up to be a toss-up, a particularly frustrating prospect for Democratic Party leaders who felt the Biden record could have been performing much better had it been attached to a younger candidate. Arguably, a large number of voters who might otherwise have showed up to support a candidate with that record were disturbingly ambivalent in their support, despite the nature of Trump's candidacy and likely policy directions and a landmark abortion ruling already creating anguish for women across the country.
When Biden faced an incredibly low bar -- beat Trump in a debate -- and completely whiffed and appeared unable to complete thoughts or bat back against such obvious lies, Democratic leaders, Democratic candidates up and down the ballot and potential voters had to throw out all prior calculus and re-evaluate from scratch the state of the election and their strategy going forward.
For some contingent of voters, the debate performance was maddening but it didn't change anything. Their thought process was something like this: In a world where the alternative is Trump and his collection of zeros, I have no problem voting for a Biden / Harris ticket because
- an impaired Biden is still not a corrupt Trump and a corrupt Trump is far worse
- Trump's mental fitness is demonstrably equally impaired, even ignoring his policy fitness
- we have clear lines of succession and that's what they're there for
We'll never know exactly what portion of the total electorate that population was because the forecasted margin of victory in this election was and still is so tight that the concerns of the youngest generation of voters grew to dominate all strategy discussions. That generation was already lukewarm in support of an "old guy." After seeing their "old guy" fail to take down ANOTHER "old guy" from the opposition in what should have been a slam dunk debate, that voting bloc was thought to have become despondent to the point of not showing up, swinging the election to Trump. But not only to Trump, but by not showing up to support down-ticket Democrats in federal and state offices, Democratic Party leaders were concerned about a blowout. A blowout that would hurt the country for sure but HURT CURRENT DEMOCRATIC OFFICE HOLDERS as well. Clearly, something must be done.
That fear makes some sense. The youngest generation of voters are routinely stereotyped as being ignorant of basic political processes, appallingly ignorant of history (civil rights, voting rights, labor rights), and blithely unconcerned with anything not involving their social media feeds. But is that true? Despite predictions of a "red wave" in the 2022 midterms, Democrats regained control of the Senate and the House flipped symmetrically, going from a 220/212 Democratic majority in 2020 to a 222/213 Republican majority in 2022. Not only was it NOT a blowout, but the 2012 mid-term election was one of the four best mid-term outcomes as measured by net seats gained/lost in the last one hundred years.
It appears as though any discussion conducted by Biden with those advising him within his family, his campaign strategists and from the Democratic party must have focused on the supposed correlation between age, apathy and fear. Were younger voters now so turned off by their option at the top they would stay away? Were younger voters so blase about the choice at the top they just couldn't be bothered to vote? Or were younger voters still able to parse the existential issues regarding elections, abortion rights, voting rights, assault weapon protections and climate change that they would still show up and vote Democratic?
Timing and Talent
In hindsight, it appears concerns over inter-generational apathy drove Biden's final decision. But what led to the decision being made at such a seemingly late, precarious moment in the process? Some have argued Biden has exhibited these limitations his entire term, this should have been obvious the entire time and he should not only NOT have run for re-election but should have resigned or been removed from office.
In one word... NO. The issues demonstrated during the debate have not been consistently obvious throughout his term. First, by any objective measure, the number of major deals enacted into law despite incredible levels of dysfunction in the House and Senate makes it clear Biden has been uniquely / historically effective in his role. Second, Presidents do not spend 100% of their day in adversarial debate mode, having to alternate between listening to random questions and answering in 1 minute sound bytes. Their day is chopped up into dozens of short interactions and meetings to be sure but the agenda and topics are known in advance. This optimizes the use of EVERYONE'S time. The President can read the prep material BEFORE the meeting to avoid wasting the staff's time coming up to speed and "context switching" while equally busy staff twiddle their thumbs. The President's senior staff can ensure participants did their homework BEFORE the meeting to avoid wasting the President's time with insufficient material. It is an equally chaotic and mentally taxing mode of communication and existence but still vastly different from debating.
It is possible that neither Biden nor his staff recognized his acuity gap for debate performances until the date of the first debate had been set and actual debate preparations began. That would have been mid May 2024. And it might have been later or never if his June appearance was a uniquely acute "senior moment". We'll never know until the memoirs and tell-all books start getting published.
But again, what was the final piece of information or final chat that drove Biden to exit the campaign? It is impossible to endure a run for the Presidency without an outsized ego. You have to believe you bring something truly unique to the table to tolerate the intrusion of the world's media upon your entire existence for a campaign and subsequent term(s). As long as Biden has been in politics, he had to understand the dynamics of Presidential power outlined previously and the precarious balance between age, tenure in office and electoral viability, both for a President and others on the ballot in the same party.
Did Biden mis-read the tea leaves eleven years out when he decided to run in 2017? Maybe, in hindsight. But maybe not. If the dynamics in 2019 and 2020 were such that only Biden would have motivated voters to defeat Trump, his decision to ENTER the race at that time gave the country four years to try to undo the damage from Trump Round #1. Had Trump won that round, we would likely having much different debates right now about far more dire issues.
Did Biden mis-read the tea leaves in 2023 and 2024 by entering the race and running for re-election? If one assumes issues of old age are linear in progression and equally obvious across all areas of activity, maybe he did, in hindsight. But maybe not. Again, legislatively, Biden has accomplished much for his party and its voters in his first term. Had he bowed out in 2023, the paralysis in the House and Senate would be worse, as Republicans hunkered down to avoid wasting time with a lame duck President. While Congress hasn't accomplished anything regarding immigration, assault weapons, etc., it has at least been able to renew military aid to Ukraine and avoid possible defaults from budget battles that would trigger billions per day in additional interest payments on the national debt.
Did Biden do the right thing, considering all facts in evidence available AFTER his poor debate performance? What were the facts in evidence?
- drop in campaign donations from big donors
- drop in "energy" among core democrats and young voters
- a race that was falling below statistical tie thresholds in swing states
- press coverage fixated on concerns about HIS acuity but not Trump's
- little sign of policy dissatisfaction, with the possible exception of Gaza
And clearly, Biden had one more fact in evidence in front of him that the majority of the press, the party, the opponents and the voting public were NOT clear on. Biden understood the human asset available in Kamala Harris. The press and public at large thought Kamala had failed to impress as VP. Of course, this ignores the reality that the Constitutional duties of a Vice President are explicitly and intentionally dull to ensure the President slash Commander in Chief has undiluted authority in exercising those powers assigned to the President. There's no "co-Presidenting." And no President with an ego sufficient to trigger a run for office would tolerate a Vice President grabbing the spotlight.
Biden clearly understood her communication abilities, her policy preferences and her resume enough to understand that if he had to exit the race, she was as perfect as anyone could hope for in a replacement candidate. She held the same core positions, had a background as DA and Attorney General to compete on "law and order" issues, had case activity that also cemented her focus on economic issues and was a far better communicator than most realized. And let's not forget, from a state and federal election law standpoint, her name was already on all campaign account balances and she was co-ticket resident on primary ballots and WOULD have a legitimate claim to delegates. And finally, let's also not forget that having the existing VP take over the race rather than some prominent Governor or Senator means no existing role held by a Democrat would be vacated, requiring a replacement candidate or backfill appointment that might trigger other strategic difficulties at the federal or state level.
One additional bit of insight in hindsight from after the convention is that Biden's decision to exit achieved TWO crucial goals. It not only communicated to that fickle demographic that even though they may have thought Biden was a old fogie and didn't get it, he DID get it. He DID "get them" and understood their concerns about him and their issues and reacted accordingly, putting THEIR priorities above his ego. But with the convention in the rear-view mirror, this change also demonstrated to liberal and independent voters how phenomenally deep and YOUNG the Democratic bench is.
Rather than a four night chaotic brawl focused on PARTY issues, the public had four nights to watch a parade of young, upcoming leaders expressing with laser like clarity their support for issues the public cares about. I could easily pick out five or six names that would be equally popular to that same fickle demographic and be solid Presidential candidates TODAY. There were probably three or four more that will reach that point in another eight to twelve years.
Contrast that with any Republican with name recognition today. Cruz? Hawley? Graham? Johnson? Greene? Boebert? DeSantis? Abbot? The only person active in the current Republican Party I could see having the character to compete in a Presidential run would be Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Geoff Duncan? Adam Kinzinger? Sure, but they are no longer holding office as Republicans. John Giles? Sure, but he is mayor of Mesa, Arizona and has zero national profile.
The impact on enthusiasm from these "fickle voters" getting to see the larger bench and seeing the party didn't just swap out one figurehead while the rest remains sclerotic cannot be underestimated, both for the 2024 election and beyond.
Biden saw the political challenge, (finally) assessed it correctly, saw the talent available and made a historic decision. Again, we won't know if it produced the desired result until November but part of the history is already crystal clear. Joe Biden made an incredibly selfless decision and will be remembered and commended for it far into the future.
WTH
