After Trump attack, what now for Biden?
How progressives are trying to steer the conversation
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Like everyone else, I saw the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. We don’t yet know the motive of the perpetrator, and I think that so soon after an event like this is a particularly bad time to start lobbing takes around. Rest assured I will eventually write about this at length, particularly if Trump and MAGA more broadly attempt to whitewash their own extensive record of promoting political violence. I absolutely deplore the use of violence in politics and its rise in the United States and I wish everyone else would consistently take the same stance whoever the target is.
In the short term, I think that these events make it even more important for Democrats to get Joe Biden off the ticket and replace him with someone who can win. Trump is likely to now experience a period of relatively subdued media scrutiny and probably a larger-than-normal convention bounce in the polls. I think it’s way premature to start flinging around takes like “Trump now guaranteed to win the election!”, because I expect many more shock events between now and November. In the last month, Biden’s candidacy crumbled and Trump nearly died; what will the next four months bring?
But I do think that Democrats’ job just got even harder. The struggle within the Democratic Party to force Biden out has settled down into a sort of ugly trench warfare, and it’s going to be stuck that way until his critics make a renewed, dramatic offensive. But one of the most interesting subplots in the fighting so far has been that it has not occurred along the sort of factional lines you might expect. Centrist Democrats - the ones who liked Biden in 2020 - have been at the forefront of calling on him to drop out, whereas his erstwhile progressive critics like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been some of his biggest defenders.
What gives?
Explaining the stance of the centrists is relatively easy. The thing that attracted vulnerable swing-state members of Congress and squishy centrist commentators to Biden in 2020 (hello! I was one of them) was that he seemed to have great electability. His popularity was in dire straits before the debate, and then the debate ruined it completely - so it’s no big surprise that vulnerable Dems are running away from him as fast as possible, trying to save their own political skins.
But explaining what the progressives are up to requires a little more thought.
A big step towards understanding has been taken by Jeff Stein, who reported yesterday that Sanders and AOC seem to have exacted a price for their continued loyalty to Biden: forcing him to endorse progressive policies. Just two days after Sanders met with Biden’s top aides and said that Biden should expand Social Security and seek to eliminate medical debt, Biden announced that he would do just that at a rally in Michigan.
So, it’s official: Biden is trading favors for ongoing support. But why are progressives asking him to do this? They ought to be able to see, just as anyone else with the slightest political antennae can, that Biden is not going to win in November. And for the sake of this thought experiment, we’re going to assume that they have those antennae.
I think there are a few ways to look at this. The first is that it’s probably good that Sanders, AOC and the rest of the Squad are not lining up to demand that Biden be ousted. If getting rid of Biden came to be seen as a narrow factional cause of the left, that would make it less likely for the mainstream party to sign on. The most helpful thing for this part of the party to do is keep its head down and let Biden’s removal unfold.
But what Sanders and AOC have actually done is something different: rather than keeping their heads down, they’ve tried to seize a moment of opportunity to steer the party in their favored direction. They probably realize that it’s very likely that Biden’s days are numbered, but by getting him on record on some of their favorite issues, they’ve made it very hard for any future candidate - let’s say, one named Kamala Harris - to walk these commitments back.
From the progressive point of view, moving the Overton window in this way makes sense because they realize something about Harris that many media commentators (particularly those outside the U.S.) forget: Harris is far, far from being a progressive. In commentary on Harris, there’s a lot of conflation of two different points:
As a black woman, Harris faces gender and racial barriers to winning the presidency due to prejudice, some of which is based on the idea that black women are inherently “radical”;
Harris herself is a figure from the far left of the party and will alienate voters with her radical views.
Point one is true. But point two is based on a misunderstanding of Harris’ record and of the 2020 election in particular. Harris has always been much more comfortable on the moderate wing of the party, and her background as a tough-on-crime prosecutor provided a tailor-made story for a run from the center in 2020. That run imploded in part because 2020 was a really bad year to run as a tough-on-crime prosecutor in a Democratic primary and Harris could never really tell a coherent story about where she sat in the party’s factional struggles.
If Harris ends up being the party’s standard-bearer in 2024, she will most likely take the centrist route. That’s the surest path to defeating Trump, and it would also be the smart way to counter some of the inevitable criticism that will come her way (see point one above). So it looks to me like part of what progressives are doing is trying to jam Harris into inheriting certain positions that it will be difficult for her to walk back if she becomes the nominee.
It’s canny factional politics. But is it helpful? Not really. And it’s a sign of how bogged down the debate over Biden has become. We desperately need some new shock and awe approach to getting Biden to step down, not this petty manoeuvring. The attempted assassination of Trump may be about to open up a new period of political instability in which it will be even more important to have a firm and trusted presence both in the Oval Office and at the top of the Democratic ticket. With the Republican National Convention about to begin, there’s a risk that the media shifts its attention and takes the heat off Biden for just long enough for him to cling on. Leaders in his party who know what a disaster that would be need to act quickly.
The clock is ticking - fast.