Ting Shen/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
President Joe Biden appears at a meeting of national union leaders at the AFL-CIO in Washington, July 10, 2024.
In 2020 and 2022, there were at least six dead candidates who won election. They had all died within a few days or weeks of Election Day, and so their names stayed on the ballot.
What they had in common, apart from being dead, was the partisan tilt of the local electorate. If you lived in Wyoming, you tended to vote Republican, so in this case you reflexively voted for good old Roy Edwards for state rep, who turned out to be deceased. If you lived in Pittsburgh, you voted for longtime Democratic state rep Tony DeLuca, even though he died a month before the election.
It’s a cruel analogy: Joe Biden is alive, but his candidacy is moribund. For now at least, the effort to induce him to step aside in favor of a stronger candidate has been blocked.
So if Biden is the candidate for president, does the institutional Democratic Party, especially in swing states, have enough energy to turn out voters to support Senate, House, and other down-ballot candidates—and hope that nearly all will also vote for Joe Biden, however unenthusiastically?
Think of it as reverse coattails. One impressive feat, especially since Trump’s election in 2016, has been a massive effort to increase the size and turnout of potential Democratic voters. Most of this has been done outside the institutional Democratic Party, though in a few states such as Wisconsin the party has been a major force.
A model is the New Georgia Project, created by Stacey Abrams in 2013. There are similar efforts in dozens of states, as well as national ones such as the Movement Voter Project. Better turnout on the Democratic side, especially among “low-propensity” groups, such as young people and voters of color, far more than winning over swing voters, was key to helping Biden win in 2020 and allowing Democrats to do better than usual in the midterm elections of 2018 and 2022.
The problem is that it is precisely these voters who are deserting Biden now. “When people who are not frequent voters are feeling grumpy, they stay home,” says Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO. “But if they decide that Trump is a real threat, maybe they will vote anyway.” This conclusion is based on detailed analysis that Podhorzer regularly circulates.
Even in states with energizing Senate races, however, such as Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, the risk remains that Biden will drag down viable Democratic Senate candidates, rather than them pulling him up.
In the cases where voters elected a dead candidate, most such candidates were obscure. Many voters cast their ballots for them, unaware that they had died.
In Biden’s case, anyone who pays attention to politics is aware of his frailty. In a sense, given the increasing sense that he might not be able to complete a second term, voting for Biden is almost like voting for Kamala Harris.
Yet Trump is so odious that voters still might vote for an impaired Biden. That’s the gamble.
But it is definitely a gamble, and a huge one. How much better it would be if Biden stepped aside.
