Before last night’s debate, I didn’t even plan to write a column about it. The reasons were various: it’s only June, debates rarely move the needle that much, and everyone’s view of the candidates is already so baked in that it didn’t seem likely they were going to change much. But what happened last night was a car crash of epic proportions. Donald Trump has, according to snap polls, lost every single presidential debate he’s ever held - one against Hillary Clinton and two, in 2020, against Joe Biden. Yet last night, CNN’s snap poll had him beating Biden 67-33, an absolute trouncing. Trump’s performance wasn’t great either - and, as usual, was completely packed with falsehoods - but Biden’s trainwreck overshadowed it.
So, this feels like a genuine inflection point to me. And here are some thoughts on it:
The Joe Biden who was on that stage last night will most likely lose this election to Donald Trump. If you can’t acknowledge that, you’re deluding yourself.
Maybe the Biden who can defeat Trump is still in there somewhere. But the window in which he can re-emerge is rapidly shrinking, and each week or month in which he doesn’t will increase the risks facing America dramatically. It doesn’t help that the White House has deliberately adopted a conservative strategy, planning few events and counting on Trump to implode on his own rather than actively working to dispel concerns about Biden.
The only way to salvage Biden’s candidacy now is high-risk: Biden needs to be out there frequently, doing high-profile events and knocking them out of the park. That’s the only way to change the narrative. But the possible downsides to this are huge: if he bombs again, the narrative only gets reinforced. The closer we get to the election, the more important it will be to dramatically over-perform - but the greater the downside will be if he messes it up. I wouldn’t even call this strategy “high-risk, high-reward”. It’s more like “high-risk, possible chance of averting disaster”.
Heading into the debate, I hoped Biden was going to pull something out of the bag. He has tended to do so in the past when he really needed to, such as during the State of the Union address. He clearly has good days and bad days. But he can’t risk having a bad day like this ever again. And can anyone honestly say that if he stays in the race, he isn’t at least risking doing that?
I previously regarded the debate over whether to replace Biden or not to be a close call. There are plenty of other Democrats who would have a better shot at beating Trump, but the actual process of replacing Biden would be messy and divisive. Voters tend to punish divided parties come the general election, and counting on Biden to eke it out seemed a marginally better strategy.
Now, I no longer believe that, for one simple reason: Biden’s performance was so bad that the Democratic Party is going to undergo a messy and divisive public debate anyway. Leading Democrats are currently all over the airwaves and headlines talking about how their candidate needs to be replaced. That is not a sustainable situation. Voters are not stupid, and if one of the key things that they know about Biden is that even many people in his own party say he’s way too old to be president, they are not particularly likely to think he should be president either.
If Biden doesn’t get replaced, then the party’s alternative is to shut up and pretend that night is day, much as the Republican Party has for much of Trump’s ascendancy. House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates will try to distance themselves from Biden as much as possible, but at the same time campaign surrogates and other national Democrats will be grimly dispatched day after day to insist that actually Biden is sharp as a tack and they have no idea what the media is talking about. It will be embarrassing and ridiculous. It will lead to defeat.
So could Biden go? There are virtually no mechanisms to force him to. Instead, he would need to be convinced. A number of things count against this happening. Biden is famously stubborn and unwilling to listen to advice. He has spent the last 20 or so years of his life being told by the chattering class that he didn’t have what it takes to win a presidential election and shouldn’t even try, and he has the self-righteousness that comes from having proven them wrong once already. I find it hard to imagine anyone breaking through this barrier other than his family.
The last time a president decided not to seek a constitutionally-possible second term was Lyndon Johnson in March 1968. Lessons from that for our current situation are few and far between. In political terms, March is a world away from June - there was still time to replace Johnson with a regular primary. But if there is one lesson, it’s that decisions like this come suddenly and unpredictably - they’re down to the conscience of one person, and they seem impossible until suddenly they’re happening.
A lot of Democrats will now wait to see what the post-debate polls say, on the theory that maybe the public isn’t paying that much attention anyway. But it will take weeks to get high-quality polls that fully capture the impact of the debate, and by then there will be even less time to figure out what to do if the polls are disastrous.
This way of thinking is anyway wrong-headed. Heading into this debate, the race looked like it was somewhere between being a toss-up and leaning towards Trump. Biden needed to not just avoid avoid disaster, but to actively move the needle in his own direction. He demonstrably failed to do that, even in the unlikely scenario that he isn’t punished much in the polls for his dismal performance. So when, exactly, is he going to move the needle? You don’t need to wait for more polls to realize that, after last night, it’s starting to look like he never might.