The question now facing Democrats regarding the 2024 election is whether, in the face of Joe Biden’s unsightly polling, they’re panicking too much or panicking too little.
And as an obvious follow-up: If the answer is “too little” — and I’ve been thinking for a while that it might be — is there anything Democrats can do at this stage?
Hint: Not much. But we’ll get to that later.
The clear problem, of course, is Biden’s age. At 81, he breaks the record as the oldest president with every breath he takes. And, if my math is right, he’d be 86 years old at the end of a second term.
But the problem is not only numerical. As you may have noticed, Donald Trump is only three years younger and, based on every known measure, not nearly as healthy. The problem for Biden is that he presents not just as old but also, well, frail. And forgetful. And forever on the verge of seeming to stumble.
We can argue all day whether Biden is, in fact, sharper than Trump. Of course he is. Trump has slipped into a fascistic caricature of himself — just tune in to any Trump rally on C-SPAN as proof. And while Trump’s noxious ramblings may be pure gold for late-night comics, what matters is what voters think. And at this point, they think of Biden as too old and Trump as, well, just too Trump.
And since Biden has shown no interest in stepping aside — it seems like yesterday we were having similar discussions about Ruth Bader Ginsburg — it looks like Democrats and other assorted anti-Trumpists are left in the position, as one pundit put it, of everyone saying Biden is too old, but no one doing anything about it.
But that’s not quite right. Democrats are doing what they do — which is panic.
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If you follow politics at all, you know that panicking is the default position for many Democrats a year ahead of a typical presidential election. Normally, you should just ignore the panic that far out, when polls are rarely predictive. But these are definitely not normal times.
They can’t be. Not when Trump seems poised to be the runaway winner in the lifeless GOP primary, not when the Real Clear Politics polling average has Trump beating Biden by more than two points, not when FiveThirtyEight’s average favorable ratings has Trump’s at a lowly 42% but Biden’s at only 39%, and not when a respected poll shows Trump leading Biden in five swing states out of six.
It isn’t that Trump will win. It’s that he might win. Even Democratic strategist David Axelrod, who’s not panicked but also not a Biden champion, puts the race at 50-50.
You’ve heard the anti-panic, counter argument that Democrats just had a great showing in the latest elections — abortion rights winning in Ohio, a Democratic governor being reelected in bright-red Kentucky, Democrats winning both legislative houses in Virginia.
The counter-counter argument, though, is that while the election may have been good for Democrats, Biden was not on the ballot.
The main reason Biden, who had been running for president for most of his political life, finally got himself elected president in 2020 was because Democrats eventually decided he represented the party’s best chance to unseat Trump.
And so it’s not exactly ironic, but maybe legitimately panic-inducing, that the clear reason some Democrats are calling for Biden to step aside today is because they fear he is a Democrat who could lose to Trump.
How did this come to be?
It isn’t because Biden has been a terrible president. He has been far more effective than, say, the three incumbent presidents who have lost in the past 50 years — Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr. and Trump.
And while most people point to the economy, which, in truth, has done better than expected following the downturn during the COVID pandemic, I think it goes much deeper than that. Yes, inflation is still running high and wages are not high enough. Yes, too many Americans face real economic difficulties. Yes, Biden’s attempt to turn Bidenomics into a winning slogan has fallen completely flat.
But stagnant wages for working people have been a fact of life for a good half century. And so is the sense, in the case of most modern presidents, that the country is going in the wrong direction.
The problem for Biden is that Republicans have shown themselves over time to be brilliant at setting campaign narratives. And the narratives that Biden is too old, that the economy sucks, that the border situation is in crisis make the job fairly easy.
I don’t pretend to know how Trump survives as a candidate. But he does survive. Republicans will almost certainly nominate him for a third run.
But the best answer for Democrats and assorted anti-Trumpists is probably not for Biden to step aside. And for two reasons. One, because it’s almost certain he won’t. And two, because, as Walter Shapiro explained in The New Republic, it’s all but too late for that. Biden should have realized a year ago, when he was a mere 80, that his age would be a dominant issue.
If Biden were to step aside today, Democrats would be rushing to the starting line. But, as Shapiro noted, it’s too late to even get on the Democratic primary ballot in a few of the early states. And candidates would have fewer than 100 days before Super Tuesday, on March 5, when 11 states will vote, in order to establish themselves.
Plus, there’s no obvious successor for Biden. Kamala Harris polls as poorly as Biden. Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker, who all tried and failed in 2020, have done little to improve their standing. The road might be even tougher for potential first-timers like, say, Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer.
Sure, there could be a lightning race to the Democratic finish line, with a shiny new candidate emerging, but what are the odds?
But there is one candidate who can still turn things around for Democrats. And that candidate is, of course, Donald Trump.
Trump may be slightly ahead in the polls, but no one is really running against him yet. The Republican pretenders, other than Chris Christie, have to be provoked to even mention him. It took Nikki Haley days — and only after she was asked — to note that Trump’s use of “vermin” may not have been the best choice of words. I don’t think Ron DeSantis ever commented on it.
Even Biden has been trying to make the campaign about his own successes, which is the usual strategy for an incumbent. But there are two incumbents in this race. And what we know is that whenever Trump is on the ballot, voters inevitably choose between the candidate who is Trump and the candidate who’s not Trump.
The candidate who is Trump is campaigning as a would-be strong man, as a democracy-defying defendant facing 91 charges in multiple courtrooms, as an immigrant basher who promises to round up undocumented immigrants by the millions, as the president who appointed the Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade.
That should be enough, but we learned in 2016 how these things can go.
The way to beat Trump is to remind voters that he is Trump, as Biden did four years ago. A younger, more vibrant Democrat could probably have done that better. But at this point the question is not whether it’s time for Democrats to panic, but what they do to make sure Biden can pull off that trick, and beat Trump, one more time.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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