By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, February 05, 2024
Rich writes:
I understand why so many smart
people assume that Democrats will switch out Biden — because he represents an
insane bet for their party. I don’t think that’s going to happen, though.
I don’t think it’s going to happen, either. It’s not an
accident that Joe Biden was voted in as the Democrats’ presidential nominee in
the first place, and, even now, it’s not at all obvious to me that anyone else
would represent an improvement over him. That isn’t because Biden is strong —
he’s not, he’s a disaster — but because the Democratic coalition doesn’t
actually make a great deal of sense, and to remove Biden from its head would be
to start a fight over the direction of the party that the party would be
foolish to start deliberately in an election year. I don’t think they’ll do it.
Broadly speaking, the Democrats’ current coalition
consists of woke upper-middle-class white people; the majority of the country’s
racial minorities; old-school class-war types; labor-union rent-seekers; young,
single women; enthusiastic pro-choicers; anti-Trumpers who used to vote
Republican; and the tens of millions of normal Americans of all races who
aren’t especially into politics, but who, on balance, prefer Joe Biden to the
alternative. There are real disagreements within this motley crew — note, by way
of example, that as the party has attracted more middle-class and
upper-middle-class voters, it has walked away from its promise to increase taxes on
middle-class and upper-middle-class voters — but they mostly agree on one
thing: That Joe Biden is preferable to Donald Trump — or, at least, that he is
preferable to voting third party or to not voting at all.
Would that hold with a different candidate? Again: I’d
invite you to look back to the last competitive set of Democratic primaries, in
which, at a relatively late stage, Biden was engineered into the nomination by
a team of palpably panicking party power brokers, who intuited correctly that
he was the only candidate who could unite its various factions and have a shot
in the general election. At that time, the alternatives to Biden were Bernie
Sanders and Pete Buttigieg. Even now, does anyone really think that the
Democrats made the wrong choice?
I don’t. And, because I don’t, I am highly skeptical that
the party will want to take the same risk four years later. In the modern era,
the party that changes its candidate later on in an election year — or, for
that matter, that saddles its incumbent with a competitive primary — is the
party that loses. It happened to the Democrats in 1968, to the Republicans in
1976, to the Democrats in 1980, and to the Republicans in 1992. Evidently, it
does not help to have the profound divisions that exist within one’s political
coalition placed prominently on display at the same time as the general
electorate is voting.
While he remains their candidate, ambitious Democrats
have an incentive to pretend that everything Joe Biden has done while president
has been magnificent. The moment he steps down — whether voluntarily or
otherwise — those incentives change dramatically. If the Democrats were to
begin a replacement process now, that process would raise all manner of thorny
questions that the party would presumably like to avoid answering. Why isn’t
Kamala Harris the obvious choice for the nomination? Is it racist and sexist
that she isn’t? Should the party go in a Bernie Sanders direction or a Pete
Buttigieg direction? Is Gavin Newsom’s California really the model for America?
Should the party be transparently woke? Where should it stand on Israel? It is
true that, for most Democratic voters, “not Donald Trump” will be enough in
November. But elections at the moment tend to be extremely close. Which voting
bloc would the Democrats be willing to risk at this stage? Absent an
unignorable political cataclysm, I don’t think there are any.
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