The Grass Is Greener On Other Democrats
Swapping Biden For Someone Else Is As Dangerous A Game As Running Him
The 2024 election is going be President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Accept it, process it, deal with it, move on. Barring an act of God, one of those two men will be inaugurated in 2025.
This isn’t unprecedented. The second and third elections in 1796 and 1800 were a contest between Founding Fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. It was the first of many times voters had to choose between the same two candidates in two consecutive elections. It happened again in 1804 and 1808; 1824 and 1828; 1836 and 1840; 1888 and 1892, 1896 and 1900, and 1952 and 1956. The Democrats nominated Grover Cleveland three times in a row. He won two of the three times.
Most of you will bemoan and lament it: “Is this the best we can do?”
Yes. Deal. In democracies, it’s often the case that party leaders stay in leadership for a long time and these leaders face off against each other multiple times. In the UK, Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee faced each other three times. The British public had to choose between Harold Wilson and Edward Heath four times.
You really can’t say we didn’t have a choice. Over 50 people have run for president since 2016. Seventeen Republicans ran in 2016 and 29 Democrats ran in 2020. We could’ve picked Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or Ted Cruz or Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley. We could’ve had Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg or Elizabeth Warren. Voters choose Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump – twice.
Republicans have a pretty packed primary this year: the sitting governors of Florida and North Dakota, the former governors of Arkansas and South Carolina, the latter of whom also served as U.N. Ambassador; the former governor of blue New Jersey; the only black Republican in the U.S. Senate; the former Vice President. Yet Republicans voters seem intent on nominating the guy who lost the previous election and is under indictment in four jurisdictions on 91 felony charges.
As for Democrats, well, the history of primarying a sitting incumbent is not good. Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush faced intraparty challengers and won, only to lose the general election. Lyndon Johnson dropped out in 1968 after facing a strong primary challenge from Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy. What resulted was one of the most bitterly fought primary elections in American political history culminating in a chaotic convention and ultimately a Republican victory that shattered the three-and-a-half decade-old New Deal Coalition.
Democratic voters therefore are going to defer to Biden. If he’s in, they’re in. Polls show that Democrats want another candidate, but there’s no consensus on who, and even progressives who fought against Biden in 2020 admit he’s done better than they expected. The Inflation Reduction Act was the biggest investment in climate mitigation we’ve ever made. After a decade of “infrastructure week” being a running joke, Biden muscled through a sprawling infrastructure bill that will update our outdated roads, rails, and power grids. He ended the war in Afghanistan and took the lumps his predecessors were too cowardly to take. He castrated Russian President Vladimir Putin – geopolitically that is – building a massive coalition against Putin’s aggression in Ukraine that brought longtime NATO holdouts Sweden and Finland into the alliance, humiliating Putin on the world stage. Though his attempt to cancel student loans was blocked by the Supreme Court, he did use executive power to cancel debt for millions of young adults. He appointed over 100 judges to federal courts, mitigating the judicial branch’s conservative bent, and aggressively used the power of the Justice Department to defend voting rights. Under his leadership, the Democratic Party had the best midterm performance of any incumbent party in generations. This is more than many of his detractors expected from him.
It’s Biden’s age – he’ll be 82 next November – that concerns voters, but Democrats have a hard time believing another candidate wouldn’t also face headwinds. Democrats believe, with a lot of historical evidence to back it up, that whoever they nominate will be subject to the buzzsaw of the right-wing propaganda machine and a media obsessed with looking nonpartisan and unbiased at all costs. There is no guarantee that another Democrat wouldn’t face the type of attacks Biden faces concerning his age, and end up just as damaged. They fear being tricked into giving up the advantage of incumbency.
The Democrats are not without a bench, but very few candidates have the national stature to mount a campaign against the few who do. Attractive candidates like Govs. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Jared Polis of Colorado, Tim Walz of Minnesota and Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Commerce Secretary and former Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo and U.S. Sens. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Raphael Warnock of Georgia probably won’t have the time or money to compete against the big names and would wait for 2028.
One of those big names is Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a favorite to replace Biden. It’s obvious why; Whitmer has won two statewide elections in Michigan, a state that Trump narrowly won in 2016. She led her party to a landslide victory in 2022, sweeping all statewide races for the second election in a row and winning control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time since 1982. When Trump attacked her, she wore his attacks as a badge of honor. (During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Trump referred to her as “the woman in Michigan” which Whitmer later turned into a t-shirt).
Whitmer would be a dynamic candidate who is more than qualified to go toe to toe with Trump. She is young, sports a thick Rust Belt accent, and I tend to agree would make an excellent president; but Democrats were snake bit by 2016 and past heartbreaking losses, and Whitmer has some negatives. She was the architect of some of the most draconian COVID mitigation policies in the country. She was a target of a kidnapping and assassination plot, so she would face an energized opposition, and there’s zero guarantee she will be able to win the nomination without a fight from progressives itching for one or black voters upset Vice President Harris is being frozen out. Further, just being a popular governor of a competitive state who won a big reelection doesn’t always translate nationally, as a certain Florida governor is proving right now.
Still reeling over Bernie Sanders’ two consecutive losses, the left would field a candidate, who likely wouldn’t do nearly as well as him. That candidate though would almost certainly inspire a rabid band of terminal online pseudoactivists who will shitpost and troll the others. (See what’s happening to Texas congressional candidate Isaac Martin right now) They would send the primary into the gutter much to the pleasure of the aforementioned right-wing propaganda machine. The media, chomping at the bit for a divisive primary (the GOP one will be boring) will amplify all the drama. We won’t get through the South Carolina without some leftist bros posting racist and sexist memes about Whitmer or Harris. “Copmala” will make a comeback and we’ll hear about Whitmer’s ties to health insurance companies, the line of attack leftists used in the 2018 primary for governor. If any other candidate ran, say California’s ambitious governor Gavin Newsom, the same line of attacks would come out. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg would no doubt look to run, and he has been on the left’s shit list since the 2020 Iowa Caucus.
There are powerful forces, from Belarus to Beijing and Brooklyn to Berkeley, who desperately crave the chaos of another Trump presidency. They include vengeful right-wingers who want payback for 2020, accelerationist leftists who think Trump is the ticket to an anti-capitalist revolution, and grifters being paid by bad actors whose job security relies on Trump being in or near power. Does Cornel West drop out if Whitmer is nominated? Probably not. The barbs at Biden will be turned on her. It doesn’t matter how they look on paper. In 2014, Hillary Clinton was one of the most popular politicians in America. In 2020, Joe Biden’s favorability was near 70 percent.
Whoever manages to secure the Democratic nomination if Biden steps aside will emerge bloodied, without the political tailwinds Barack Obama had in 2008 or Biden in 2020. The public will likely still be down on the economy and the migrant crisis, and the 70 million+ Trump voters will be foaming at the mouth as their cult leader faces multiple criminal trials. There is no obvious upside to Democrats dumping an incumbent they feel has been successful for another candidate, so unless Biden decides to step aside himself, they won’t do it.
And the chips will fall where they may.