The Most Crucial 48 Hours of Joe Biden’s Political Life

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 08, 2024

 

“Whatever we decide, we need to get it done within the next 48 hours,” Democratic representative Brendan Boyle told his colleagues on a private call with his congressional colleagues on Sunday, “because right now we are in the worst of both worlds.”

 

It probably seemed at the time that the decision Democrats would collectively make would be to jettison Biden and take their chances with another nominee. At the time, at least nine Democrats in the House of Representatives had called, either privately or publicly, for Biden to pass on his party’s nomination to the presidency. It seemed likely that more would follow as lawmakers reconvened in the capital. But in the hours since, the Biden White House has received all the signals it likely needs to convince itself that it can ride out the storm of apprehension and discontent overtaking the president’s party.

 

One of the Democrats on that Sunday call, whose transcribed remarks feature him calling Biden “fragile” and accusing him of having “trouble putting two sentences together,” walked back his comments and blamed the press for misquoting him. “The people who arranged this call knew it would leak. Some Dems think that was the whole point of it, to pave the way for others,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman marveled. “So, this backtracking is . . . odd.”

 

In the interim, some Democrats, including moderates like Representative Ritchie Torres, have divorced themselves from the counterproductive backbiting within the party’s ranks. “Weakening a weakened nominee seems like a losing strategy for a presidential election,” he said in a statement. The Congressional Black Caucus, of which Torres is a member, has stood rather firmly behind Biden — at least since Representative James Clyburn walked right up to the edge of accepting the incumbent’s defenestration but has since gone silent.

 

“It ain’t going to be no other Democratic candidate — it’s going to be Biden,” Representative Maxine Waters assured an audience over the weekend. “Any ‘leader’ calling for President Biden to drop out needs to get their priorities straight and stop undermining this incredible actual leader who has delivered real results for our country,” Representative Frederica Wilson agreed. These assurances surely put the White House’s mind at ease. As Politico’s Jonathan Martin ascertained, the president’s team has every reason to believe that Biden can stick it out if he retains his base of support among organized labor advocates and black leaders. “The donor class may have their preference,” he wrote, summarizing the thoughts among Biden campaign officials, “but it’s older Black women in church pews who will decide the nominee, thank you very much.”

 

The quiet from Senate Democrats is perhaps similarly reassuring. Late last week, Virginia senator Mark Warner began reaching out to his Democratic colleagues with a plan to hold a meeting today, Monday, to discuss what the party should do about its ailing presidential candidate. That meeting was never scheduled, and its only agenda item has been folded into the subjects that will be broached at a regularly scheduled Democratic caucus meeting on Tuesday. As one source close to Warner told Axios reporters, the fact that the details of the meeting were leaked “made it impossible for there to be a private conversation.”

 

The “conversation” around the president’s prohibitive infirmities hasn’t been a “private” one for most Americans for years. As of June 27, it hasn’t even been a private matter among Democrats. For over a week, the party’s elected leaders and allies in media and activism eagerly composed Biden’s political epitaph. Even Biden’s defenders have engaged in this project halfheartedly. “Multiple people publicly vouching for Biden, at the behest of the White House and campaign, privately say there’s no path” to a Biden victory in November, the Washington Post reported on Saturday. If the party’s leadership is unwilling to take a leap into the abyss even though their own logic compels them to do so, it’s reflective of the kind of collective action problem with which Republicans are intimately familiar. And it’s a dynamic from which the Biden campaign will benefit.

 

It will be days, not weeks, before Democrats need to jointly band together to pool all the modest leverage over Biden they still retain. They need to make him an offer he cannot refuse — bow out now and enjoy the gratitude of a grateful nation or suffer reputational damage from which neither you nor your family name will recover. A failure to pull the trigger on this option sooner rather than later hastens the point at which Democrats will rationalize sticking with Biden as the path of least resistance. Further dissension will undermine the party’s chances in November across the board as public displays of disunion sap rank-and-file Democratic voters and persuadable independents of their enthusiasm for the party. The instinct among individual Democrats to be a team player, to preserve your reputation within the party and, therefore, your own future political prospects within it, will seem like the safest course.

 

That’s what Biden is counting on. In a forceful letter adorned with the president’s signature, Biden assailed the effort to toss out the results of the Democratic primary elections in 2024. “How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?” he asked. “The question of how we move forward has been well-aired for over a week now,” the letter closed. “And it’s time for it to end.” Pushing that message in a Monday appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Biden slightly undermined his own case. “I’m getting so frustrated by the elites,” the president confessed. “Run against me,” he implored his critics. “Challenge me at the convention.”

 

Democrats will have to conceive of a plan to do just that — a suicide run that may scuttle Biden’s prospects but will all but certainly take the Democratic Party’s with them — to force the president to cut bait. Absent something that dramatic, the Biden White House has every reason to believe the president can wait this one out.