The Democrats’ Cravenness Is Worse Than the GOP’s

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, July 09, 2024

 

CNN’s Harry Enten declined to sugarcoat the predicament in which Democrats find themselves. Not only is Joe Biden going to lose the race in November, Enten said in his analysis of the post-debate polling landscape, but he will take his party with him. “The House would likely be gone,” he observed. Moreover, “the chance of Democrats holding the Senate is close to zero.”

 

That state of play contrasts with every presidential race this century, in which the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee has led his or her Republican counterpart at this point in the race. Moreover, the party’s down-ballot prospects have rarely been worse. As the reliable annual National Public Opinion Reference Survey recently found, for the first time since George W. Bush’s first term, more Americans identify as Republicans than Democrats.

 

There is an earth-killer asteroid on a bound trajectory for the Democratic Party. Its members can see it coming, and there is still time to divert it from its apocalyptic course. But its elites and influencers are unwilling or unable to act collectively in the interest of their own self-preservation. So, even with time on the clock, Democrats are resigning themselves to their fates.

 

The drawn expressions on the faces of the Democrats emerging from Tuesday’s House caucus meeting said as much. It “felt like a funeral,” one unnamed House Democrat said. “That is an insult to funerals,” another opined. “The morale of the caucus is at historic lows.” Some enterprising team players attempted to summon something resembling enthusiasm for Biden’s ailing campaign, but the performance poorly masks the scale and imminence of the disaster that is about to befall the party in power.

 

Many have aptly compared the Democratic Party’s conundrum to the one Republicans faced throughout 2016. There are uncanny similarities — from the collective-action problem among party elites to the disparate and, to varying degrees, fanciful plots designed to extirpate the party’s unpopular presidential nominee from the political scene. But one thing that distinguishes the Democrats’ quandary from the one the GOP faced amid Trump’s ascension is the fact that Joe Biden’s party is not tasked with begrudgingly executing the will of their voters. Rather, they are defying their own voters by deferring to Biden’s recalcitrance.

 

Never throughout the 2016 primary race, a messy convention, and even in the wake of the infamous Access Hollywood tape did Republican voters express a mass appetite for a presidential nominee other than Donald Trump. That is not the Democratic Party’s problem. Depending on the poll, you can find plurality or even majority support among self-described Democrats for replacing Biden with another nominee. The opinion that Joe Biden is too old to occupy the Oval Office is a majority proposition across all American ideological subgroups.

 

There is no grassroots groundswell of support for Biden that Democratic elites cannot overcome. The Democratic Party is not surrendering itself to a dismal fate because self-destruction is the course on which its voters are determined (an argument Biden himself made in his desperate bid to hold onto power for whatever time he has left). In that sense, the party’s leading lights are making an even more craven calculation than the GOP.

 

Yes, collective action is always difficult. It’s harder for individual members to risk the career course they’ve spent decades crafting and observing in favor of a theoretical collective good that they themselves may not be around to enjoy. But at least Republicans could claim that their individual political prospects would have been threatened because their voters would punish them for it. Outside Biden-friendly precincts, Democrats are not subject to the same inducements. Their concerns are purely parochial.

 

The insular status games on the center-left will persist in a second Trump administration, and currency in that world will be the degree to which your zeal for a revivified resistance is evinced by the sweat on your brow. One day, they reckon, recriminations for the Democrats who allegedly “helped Trump” by acknowledging their side’s deficiencies will be meted out. Better — indeed, safer — to resign themselves to defeat now than find themselves on the wrong end of elite Democratic opinion later.

 

That’s a reasonable forecast. The wagon-circling has already begun. The effort to bully Democratic dissenters into submission will succeed if only because there is no will to resist it. But Democratic voters should be livid with their pusillanimous representatives in Congress today. Rather than jockey for the best possible position in this challenging environment so that the party can continue to represent the interests of its constituents, Democratic lawmakers would prefer to be steamrolled because stepping out of the way is uncomfortable and taxing.

 

It’s hard to imagine that the Democratic Party and its allies in the press would make it this easy for Donald Trump to be restored to office with a popular mandate and a GOP-controlled legislature, but they seem to be talking themselves into it. Even if their own voters are discomfited by such an outcome, the alternatives are just too darn hard.