Let's dwell on electability until the Sun explodes and every proton decays

What we know about Biden and what we "know" about Biden

Let’s start with the thing that is obviously true — Joe Biden had a really bad night on Thursday. Even he recognizes that. It was deeply unpleasant to watch. And it was a format that he chose. And while pretty much all incumbent presidents seeking reelection have bad first debates, what stands out about this one is that it resonated with and reinforced every belief out there that he’s too old and frail to run for a second term.

Now let’s go to the thing that isn’t obviously true but everyone seems to treat as such: His bad debate performance means he can’t win the presidency and he needs to step aside and allow the Democratic Party to pick a new nominee.

A lot of pundits, Democratic leaders, Democratic voters, journalists across the ideological spectrum, people in my social media feeds, etc. are making the leap from the first point to the second one. I’m not here to tell you that the second point isn’t true; it’s just that we really don’t have much evidence to prove or disprove it, that trying to address it could be far costlier than most want to admit, and that it’s nonetheless fascinating how convinced people are of its truth.

Allow me to jump into a sports metaphor. (I am terrible at these.) Let’s say there’s a major NFL playoff game coming up between, say, the 2016 Denver Broncos and New England Patriots, and the teams’ then-quarterbacks are giving press conferences before the game. Peyton Manning gives a charming performance in which he’s witty and funny and seems to have a great sense of how his Broncos are going to prevail over New England. Then Tom Brady gives an uncomfortable and stilted press conference, giving awkward one-word answers to questions and just looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.

Should you assume from this that the Broncos are going to win the game? Of course not. How the quarterbacks speak to reporters has nothing to do with what’s going to happen on the field.

But Seth, you say, that’s different — we know that candidates’ speaking ability has much more to do with how people vote than quarterbacks’ speaking ability does with how their teams play. To which I respond, do we really know that? What evidence do we have of this?

Adlai Stevenson, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, to name just a few, all lost the White House to candidates who were considerably worse public speakers than they were. This does not mean that it’s helpful to be a bad public speaker. It just means that the impact of public speaking on the presidential vote is likely somewhere between extremely small and zero. And by the way, would you want to be in a democracy where people regularly shifted votes on an office that has so much impact on their lives based on public speaking ability?

Which gets me to my next point. If you’re convinced that this debate performance will cause people to change their votes, I would ask you if it caused you to change yours. If it didn’t, and you are just assuming it will change other people’s votes, well, fine, but that’s a huge assumption.

And that assumption comes back to the Democratic Party’s favorite pastime: dwelling on electability. Electability is, of course, not a measure of whether you would vote for a candidate, but whether you believe other people (usually people you don’t know who live in Wisconsin or Arizona) would vote for the candidate. Electability is obviously important, but it is very difficult to determine with any precision, and very often, we just use a lot of stereotypes and prior beliefs to substitute for actual evidence. And for some reason, if electability is an obsession, Joe Biden’s name turns it into a full-blown disorder.

The main reason Joe Biden is president today is because Democrats were absolutely convinced in 2019 and 2020 that he was the most electable candidate. They were willing to forgive all sorts of sub-par debate performances and gaffes in that nomination cycle, and willing to look the other way at some policy stances that were not quite what they wanted, because they believed that Biden, and Biden alone, was capable of defeating Trump. And the wild thing is, not only did he beat Trump, but Biden turned out to be far better on policy for Democrats than they had any reason to expect.

Today, of course, Democrats are convinced that Biden is incapable of defeating Trump, and that almost any other Democrat would have a better shot. What continues to be remarkable to me is how one-sided this conversation is. Republicans have not, to any serious extent, publicly called for Donald Trump to step down as his party’s nominee after his felony convictions, or after being found liable for rape, or after refusing to promise to abide by the election results, or anything else. Unlike Biden, Trump was actually challenged by a number of highly qualified candidates in his party’s primaries and caucuses — voters had a choice but they were not interested. Nor does there seem to be a coordinated media campaign to convince Republicans to dump Trump at their convention this summer.

Also largely absent from this discussion is any sort of specificity of what would follow Biden’s withdrawal. The most obvious solution would of course be Vice President Harris, next in line in the order of succession, but many of the folks who want Biden to step down also want to nudge Harris out as well, replacing them both with some sort of fantasy electability ticket in a process that unites the party and doesn’t alienate core constituencies. And this is all within a party system that is historically highly deferential to presidents who seek re-nomination and that hasn’t settled a nomination at a convention since Joe Biden was 25 years old.

I have heard a lot of smart folks each name a different new Democratic presidential ticket, with no overlaps, which gives an idea of what such a convention would look like. And a week of arguing, only to end with, “What we need is a safe old white guy who progressives think they can work with and Black leaders basically trust... hey wait a minute” is an entirely plausible outcome from such an event.

I’m not saying the party can’t pick someone new. If, God forbid, Biden should pass away tonight, the party would need to come up with some kind of process to pick a new ticket. (See the DNC’s brief scramble in 2016 to replace Hillary Clinton when they were worried about her health.) But it’s really not clear that would be a better ticket, that the process wouldn’t tear the Democratic coalition apart a few months before a presidential election, and that it wouldn’t result in a nominee doing worse against Trump than the tie Biden currently finds himself in.

But the most notable thing in all these arguments is the certainty. People just know that Biden can’t win now in the absence of (or even in contradiction of) the existing evidence.