Gerald Herbert/AP Photo
Debate night in Atlanta, June 27, 2024
In one particular way, for me, the first Trump-Biden debate had a distinctly positive outcome: It enabled me to hear from many old friends, including some old girlfriends I hadn’t heard from in years. Within 15 minutes of the debate’s beginning, I began receiving text messages from them. The first read, “Now I agree with you: Biden needs to go. This is so so painful.”
The second, just five minutes later, read: “He needs to step down. Immediately.”
The third—from a girlfriend of 25 years ago—read: “I made the mistake of thinking that if it was said by Fox News, it had to be wrong. So I wasn’t prepared to see Biden like this. I had to turn the TV off.”
There were many more, but you get the picture. Donald Trump had a preposterous debate, never answering the questions put to him about the climate crisis, child care, and other such trivialities, and coming up with such day-for-night absurdities as historians rating his presidency as the most successful in American history. And yet, he emerged the undisputed winner, because Biden was simply too old and infirm to counter even Trump’s most blatant fabrications or to persuasively defend his demonstrably superior record and positions.
The reason the first texter wrote, “I agree with you: Biden must go,” is that for months I have argued that while I thought his actual presidency was largely stellar, Biden no longer possessed the campaigning chops required to win the election. Recent polls showing Democratic senators and representatives in close races outpolling Biden by between 5 and 15 points bolstered my case: The public hasn’t turned against the Democrats; it’s turned against Biden. I’m writing before even the quickest post-debate polls have been tabulated, but I’m certain that they’ll show Biden’s already low levels of support cascading downward.
In my view, there is now no plausible way that Biden can defeat Trump. But there are plausible ways to defeat Trump with a different presidential nominee.
Losing the White House to Donald Trump isn’t like losing it to Mitt Romney or John McCain or George W. Bush. It means losing a crucial share of American democracy. The party must nominate somebody else for president, or else it has no raison d’être.
So: What should the Democrats do?
Yes, I know, the primaries, such as they were, are over and done with. There are party rules, which can be suspended, and some state laws, which are not so easily dismissed, that require delegates to the party’s national convention to cast their votes for Biden. If, after they cast those votes, the delegates pass a resolution asking Biden to refuse to accept the nomination, and he heeds their wishes, then the procedural problem, at least, will have been eliminated. If Biden is determined to stay in the race, my expectation is that all hell will break loose. If the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention was marked by rioting (mainly by the cops) outside the hall, the 2024 Chicago Democratic Convention will be marked by riots inside the hall.
My suggestion is that Democrats should heed the lessons imparted by leading Republicans in 1974, when they persuaded then-President Nixon to resign because there was virtually no one in the party who would oppose impeaching and convicting him after the most clearly incriminating batch of Watergate tapes had been released. Sen. Hugh Scott (the Republican leader in the Senate), Rep. John Rhodes (the leader of the House Republicans), and Sen. Barry Goldwater (the leader of the party’s conservative wing, which had been the wing that had stuck with Nixon until then) converged on the White House to convince Nixon that he’d lost all support and it was time for him to quit. Which Nixon promptly did.
Now, it’s up to the Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Leader Hakeem Jeffries (or better yet, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi), former Presidents Obama and Clinton, all need to converge on the White House to tell Biden that his time is up, too, unless he wants to go down in history not as a president who enacted landmark legislation with the slimmest of congressional majorities, but as the man who handed America over to its first genuinely autocratic (not to mention vindictive and deranged) president. They probably need to be assisted in this task by the quiet urgings of Dr. Jill Biden; we must hope she understands that her husband’s reputation depends on his dropping his candidacy.
And then? My hope is the party opens up a new race, to be decided by the delegates to its upcoming convention, rather than just give the nomination to Vice President Harris. After all, if the case for Biden dropping his candidacy is that he cannot win, the same case can very plausibly be made against Harris. What makes more sense would be having a slew of governors throw their hats into the ring. I think Gavin Newsom would be hard-pressed to connect with working-class voters; I think that Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer or Kentucky’s Andy Beshear or Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro would have better prospects of winning.
But there’s a problem with this scenario, too. Passing over Harris—the first Black woman to hold the vice presidency—would be a blow to a key segment of the party’s base: Blacks, and Black women in particular. But the entire rationale for replacing Biden is that he stands no real chance of keeping Trump out of the White House, and unless Harris can somehow demonstrate that she’s up to that task, the same rationale applies. A contest among the plausible replacements for the support of the party’s delegates affords her that chance, and it’s the only way to square denying her the a priori right to claim the nomination with the necessity of denying Trump state power.
For now, though, the message from Democratic Party leaders (and not from those Democrats who are considering becoming the last-minute replacement) has to be: Biden must step down. If that’s not what they’re working on even now, they have no business being party leaders.
