The perversity of obsessing over Biden's electability

We went from "only Biden can win" to "only Biden can lose" pretty quickly

There have been quite a few articles lately expressing concern about Joe Biden standing as the Democratic presidential nominee for 2024. Here’s Damon Linker with a strongly worded one. Here’s Nate Silver warning about Biden’s age. Jonathan V. Last had a nice summary of the arguments here. There are more!

And a lot of these are based on similar sets of data. Specifically, recent polls show that the likely Trump/Biden rematch is basically a tie, and that a lot of Americans are concerned about 80-year old Biden being too old for the job (far more so than are concerned about 77-year old Trump being too old). This collection of evidence is leading many to say that Democrats should push Biden toward retirement and find a new (younger) champion for 2024.

So a few points on this:

First, yes, the 2024 presidential election is going to be close, and you don’t need a poll to predict that. We live in an era of close elections. As I wrote here, the vote share for Republican presidential candidates in the 21st century has ranged from a low of 45.6% (McCain in 2008) to a high of 50.7% (Bush in 2004). Trump got between 46 and 47 percent of the vote both times he ran. The national vote just doesn’t vary all that much. All the polls are telling us right now is that it’s going to be close, and we know that going in.

Relatedly, the effect of an individual candidate on the presidential vote is almost certainly massively overstated. We should really know this by now! For all the craziness of the 2016 election, the results looked pretty normal. A Democratic nominee trying to keep her party in the White House for a third consecutive term in an okay economy is always going to have a hard time, and Clinton actually slightly over-performed relative to economic forecasts. Chances are that if the 2016 matchup had been between, say, Martin O’Malley and Jeb Bush, the outcome would have looked pretty similar.

It was the same story in 2020. Incumbents usually win reelection, but the economic and social chaos of a pandemic can undermine vote share, and that may have been enough to cost Republicans a second term in 2020. You don’t need to know about the candidates’ personalities to explain that.

Now, that doesn’t mean there’s no candidate effect. Democrats were broadly convinced in 2020 that Joe Biden was more electable against Trump than the other candidates vying for the nomination were, and they were willing to look the other way on a number of things (his issue stances, his campaigning abilities, his age, etc.) precisely because they thought he could win. It’s hard to prove that wrong — we don’t get to re-run 2020 with Liz Warren or Cory Booker on the ticket to see what would have happened. Chances are the results wouldn’t have been all that different. But of course the election was close, and even a pretty small difference could have tipped the outcome.

Relatedly, there may be an incumbency effect. That is, Biden might do better in 2024 than he did in 2020 just by virtue of being the incumbent. But incumbency advantages have been on the decline in recent years. And it’s notable that Both Donald Trump and Barack Obama did worse in their second election bids than they did in their first.

But it’s a funny thing about Biden — if you compared him to almost any of the other Democratic presidential candidates running in 2020 in terms of campaign skills, he looks worse. He’s not a particularly strong debater. He’s a weak public orator. He wasn’t the most successful fundraiser. His mastery of policy was fine but hardly the best. His social media strategy was adequate at most. The fact that he still beat the field (and won the general election with record voter turnout) should tell us something about the perceived importance of those various skills.

Another thing about that: He’s actually quite skilled at presidenting. (Huh, campaign skills have very little to do with actual governing, who knew.) He has racked up significant policy accomplishments on the economy, the environment, guns, Covid, labor, infrastructure, student loans, and other areas of longstanding concern to Democrats — some of these with bipartisan support. His record compares extremely favorably to that of other Democratic presidents of the past 50 years. He’s very good at managing diverse coalitions. With the notable exceptions of his troubled son and a weird bag of cocaine, his White House is remarkably well-run and scandal-free. And not for nothing, but he won in 2020 and, under his leadership, Democrats had a surprisingly non-awful 2022 midterm cycle.

In sum, he wins elections (against Trump, which others cannot claim) and delivers when in office. So why on Earth would Democrats talk about dumping him? Well, basically, he’s not that popular. That is, they’re concerned that he’s unelectable. Which is honestly hilarious. The reason he’s president today is because Democrats were convinced he was the only electable candidate in 2020. That they would dump him for the same reasons three years later seems absurd. (Also, polls show Americans don’t want a Trump/Biden rematch. Which, fine, they don’t. On the other hand, Americans almost never want the matchup they get. They’ll still largely vote and pick one of the two options.)

And in terms of popularity, as I noted, modern presidents seem to be doomed to have approval ratings in the 40s. It’s the nature of a strongly polarized public.

So here’s the thing: If somehow people convinced Biden to bow out (or if it became medically necessary for him to do that), what would that look like? He would probably pledge his support to Vice President Harris, but that wouldn’t end the discussion. She would get challenged because Democrats are also concerned that she’s not electable. So then Pete Buttigieg likely jumps in, and then maybe Amy Klobuchar, and then maybe a host of governors (Gavin Newsom? Jared Polis? Gretchen Whitmer?). And whoever emerges from that Thunderdome will… likely end up polling around the same as Biden did against Trump.

Now, all this said, there’s little evidence that Democrats are planning to dump Biden. No serious Democratic candidates are running against him, the larger party establishment seems unified behind him, and he’s popular among Democratic voters. And importantly, even if a chunk of them would prefer a younger candidate, basically all of them will rally behind him once he’s their nominee, just as has happened in previous elections. The “Dump Biden” movement might well just be limited to people with op/ed columns and Substack accounts.

But could this movement somehow convince Biden or other prominent Democrats that he should step aside in favor of a more electable nominee? We’d do well to remember that the best (and arguably only) measure of electability is whether someone has won an election. And this election will likely feature two such candidates.