(1st of 2 Diaries on the Relative Risks of Keeping Biden vs. Replacing him)
So this whole Biden debate kerfuffle has gotten me worked up enough that I decided to actually do a diary, which now looks like it’s turning into TWO diaries!
My original idea was to do a diary on the reasons there is actually very little risk to sticking with Biden if we are fully aware of our options, but that led me to trying to figure out just what the risks actually are to either keeping Biden or ditching him.
And it seems to me that there are A LOT of risks with any plan to replace Biden, such that the diary started becoming much longer than I expected. So now I guess it’s going to be two diaries, this one exploring the risks associated with each option before us, and another diary more specifically focused on why I think sticking with Biden is the least risky choice. So here’s the first diary:
A Sober Analysis of the Risks Of Ditching Biden
So these are our choices:
Option #1: Stay the course and Ride or Die with Biden
The pOSSIBLE risks:
- Biden fails to recover from that one horrible debate.
- Even if he does recover, at some point he shows more signs of his age, comes across as confused and inarticulate in another debate, another speech, another interview, or on multiple occasions.
- America becomes convinced that Joe is just too old, and his poll numbers take a nosedive.
- Or it may even turn out that Joe really IS too old. It’s revealed that he is of such diminished capacity that he can’t serve, or he suffers some health crisis related to his age such as a stroke or heart attack or accelerating dementia and he becomes incapacitated.
- But there’s nothing we can do because it’s just TOO LATE to replace him as the candidate.
Option #2: Dump Biden, swap him for Kamala Harris
The pOSSIBLE risks:
- Voters lose confidence in the Democratic Party, because we are either idiots or liars. Either we were just too dumb to figure out that Biden was the wrong guy BEFORE we went through the entire primary process, or the White House and the Democratic Party have been HIDING Biden’s true condition and lying about it to the American people.
- As part of the administration, Harris would be particularly susceptible to this line of attack: “If you DIDN’T know Biden’s true condition, what does that say about your judgement? If you DID know, then doesn’t that mean you’ve been lying and covering it up?”
- By swapping out Biden, we forfeit 4 keys to victory, according to Allan Lichtman’s extremely reliable model:
- Incumbency
- Major policy changes enacted by the incumbent
- No party contest (because choosing Harris over Biden makes it a contest)
- No scandal (because a President who must step aside because he has been hiding his cognitive decline would definitely qualify as a scandal)
- We lose another key because our party lost seats in the midterms, so that’s five
- When you lose SIX, you lose the election, according to Lichtman
- (The other keys relate to economy, foreign policy, and charisma, which have an element of subjectivity, but even if we assume that incumbent Biden’s rating on those keys would be positive, we can’t assume that would transfer to nonincumbent Harris)
- So Harris goes on to lose the election, because voters don’t trust her after a Biden bait and switch, or because she proves to be as poor a campaigner as she was in 2020, or because she can’t shake off her unfavourability in the polls, or because there is too much resistance to another black president or a woman president or a black woman president, or just because she is an unfamiliar candidate and there just isn’t enough time for the voters to get to know her.
Option #3: Dump Biden AND Harris, have some SORT of speed-dating primary and/or open convention
The pOSSIBLE risks:
- All of the risks of Option #2, along with quite a few more.
- Again, the voters think the Democrats are either idiots or liars who have been covering up for an impaired President
- The same 4 keys are forfeit: incumbency, major incumbent policy changes, no party contest, no scandal, along with the 5th key of gaining seats in the midterms, and any other keys Biden may have earned that don’t transfer from the incumbent.
- Then there is a mad scramble to get the new candidate on the ballot in all 50 states.
- You can be sure that Republican Secretaries of State will do everything they can to disqualify any last minute candidates from their state’s ballot.
- Then in a matter of weeks the new candidate must put together a campaign, an infrastructure, and a fundraising operation that must go up against a candidate who has been building his war chest for years.
- If Kamala Harris is passed over, there’s a risk that demoralized black voters, especially black female voters, just won’t turn out with the enthusiasm needed to win.
- Turnout from demoralized Biden supporters might also fall short.
- An open convention will divide the party, quite possibly resulting in a plurality candidate that not even a majority of Democrats actually want, leaving the majority of Democrats disappointed that their faction’s favorite candidate didn’t win, further dividing and demoralizing Democrats with no time to rebuild unity, and thus depressing turnout.
- Then there’s the risk that whichever candidate is so hastily chosen without any vetting or campaign testing just turns out to be the wrong choice.
- We might choose a perfect candidate who is just too inexperienced with Presidential campaigning with too little time to learn.
- Or with only a plurality candidate, we could end up with someone who is too far to the left to win over independents.
- Or we choose a charismatic candidate like Newsom, but California charisma comes off as West Coast elitism in the rust belt swing states we need to win.
- An open contest might give us a more charismatic candidate, but that one key doesn’t win the election. (And to be fair I wouldn’t say that either Biden or Harris are totally lacking in charisma.)
Mo Candidates, Mo Problems
So there you have it. The risks of sticking with Biden can be defined with about 5 bullet points. Defining the risks of swapping for Kamala takes about 11 bullet points. Most of those 11 points apply equally to ditching the entire Biden-Harris ticket, along with another 10 or so that we’d get with an open convention.
The risks of a continued Biden candidacy can be counted on one hand, whereas the risks of a Harris candidacy require both hands, and I can’t count the risks of an open convention without being naked.
IMO, the best choice is the one with the fewest risks. Rather than changing course and multiplying our risks, let’s limit our risks and then be smart about managing those risks.
Switching to a new candidate invites countless new problems, only some of which we can predict, and all of which need to be solved by November in order to win.
Only ONE Problem:
But if we stick with Biden, there’s really only ONE problem we need to solve:
We just need to convince the American people that it’s actually ok to vote for somebody who is old.
That’s it. And that really shouldn’t be so hard.
The first step should be for Biden and his campaign to completely OWN the fact that Biden is old with no apologies. They should NOT try to convince us that the debate was “just a one-off” occurrence. Rather they should say:
“Actually, it might not be a one-off. The President is old. If you ask him a question when he’s jet-lagged with a cold, and give him 60 seconds to reply, he might give you an inarticulate answer, just as might happen with ANYONE his age, or for that matter many people who are much younger. But an inability to always give snappy answers to stupid questions does not in any way diminish what our President has and will accomplish for the American people.”
Biden should say:
“Damn straight, I’m old. I might walk slower. I might speak softer. I might need more power naps. Sometimes I might forget someone’s name. Sometimes I might stutter or mix up my words or lose track of what I’m saying. Sometimes I’ll mess up when I’m speaking, although if you see some clips of me from 20 years ago, you’ll realize that’s really nothing new! I might mess up when I’m speaking, but I won’t mess up when I’m doing my job as your President. I never have, and I never will.”
That should be the message from Biden, that should be the message from the campaign, and that should be the message from all of us:
Yes, Biden is old. Now get over it, and get out and VOTE for him, because he’s a great President.
That’s all we have to say. That’s all we have to do.
(Actually, I do have a bit more to say about why we really don’t need to worry so much about those risks I’ve listed that come with keeping Biden, but that is the subject of Diary #2, A Drunken Analysis of Why we can Ride with Biden with ZERO RISK )