Be Practical, Not Problematic

The debate is over; let’s get to work.

President Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden react to the crowd during a campaign event at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds in Raleigh on Friday. (EPA-Yonhap)

Editorial boards and much of the political punditry have continued to call on President Biden to leave the race after his disappointing debate performance last Thursday. Leading the charge is the New York Times, which claimed that while Biden is “a good man and a good president,” he is too old to be “taking on the threat of tyranny and defeating it.”

Missing from this was any discussion of what would actually happen next. That’s no accident. The media would like nothing more than the chaos and division of a contested convention to report breathlessly about.

As I wrote about Friday, I understand the impulse after a setback like we saw on Thursday to cast about for a different way forward. It took me a few hours to calm down, think it through, and realize that the best way forward is to stand by our candidate. Since then, what I’ve seen has only buttressed this conclusion.

Today I want to lay out some of the data and reasoning behind my position. I’m sure you have seen or heard from many friends who remain panicked about what happened, or are feeling defeated and want reassurances along with some way to think about this logically. 

I want to walk through some numbers that may surprise folks, both on polling and fundraising; to give a recent example of where an impaired candidate with health concerns came back to win; to paint a picture of the nightmare of what a contested convention would bring; and to show why continued calls for Biden to give up the nomination are both moot and unhelpful at this point.

Surprise! Support for Biden remains steady, say the polls.

First, a caveat. Polls are often cited for the wrong reason. Because of methodology and weighting issues, along with low response rates, overlooked demographics and a rise in political “outlier” respondents, polls really can’t be used as an absolute prediction of what will happen in the election.

But they are useful for one thing: to tell us if there has been any relative movement, within the same flawed poll, toward or against a candidate. As I’ve said before, think of a poll as a broken thermometer that can still tell you over time if it’s getting hotter or colder out, even if it can’t give an accurate temperature reading.

The post-debate polls so far show us that there was no such relative movement toward Trump. In fact, if there was any movement at all, it was toward Biden in some polls. 

As summarized in reporting by Fortune,

Biden actually gained some ground according to Ipsos polling: Trump and Biden were tied 44%-44% before the debate, but Biden took a 46%-44% lead afterwards. Morning Consult’s polling delivered a similar result: Biden was tied with Trump 44%-44% before the debate, and Biden led Trump 45%-44% afterwards. 

But wait, how could this possibly be?! It makes no sense!

Here are some things to consider. The claim that “Biden is too old” is a refrain voters have already heard. Supporters of the President choose him despite his age, because the alternative is unthinkable. The debate didn’t change that. 

You may have also heard, as repeated ad nauseum in the Times, that Biden’s support among Black and Latino voters has slipped. I have issues with the way they have reached this conclusion, particularly among likely voters from these groups. But the fact is, the vast majority of Americans, including millions of minority voters, didn’t watch the debate live. Yet within moments, those same minorities learned that Trump had warned America during the debate about illegal Mexican immigrants coming by the millions to take “Black jobs.” Social media feeds and group chats remain filled with memes and videos mocking Trump’s clear disdain for Black professionals and his cynical ploy to turn minorities against each other.

Even among debate watchers, the views of Latino undecided voters appeared to depart from the critiques of the political class. As Newsweek reported, a focus group run by Univision actually had undecided Latino voters in Phoenix moving toward Biden after the debate. 

Wait, what? How?

For starters, I’ve noticed that transcripts after the debate make Biden sound a lot more coherent than he did that night, while Trump sounds just like the evasive, mendacious bigot he is. It’s quite plausible, though I admittedly have no direct evidence of this, that Spanish-speaking viewers who paid more attention to the captions got the same impression.

As Matt A. Barreto, professor of Political Science and Chicana/o & Central American Studies at UCLA, posted on Twitter,

If you haven’t been watching the Univision FG of undecided Latino voters, nearly every single undecided voter said they now support Biden, not Trump! Latinos were watching and listening and Trump sounded like a crazy liar.

Granted, this is just one focus group from one news outlet. But this reaction could be indicative of a larger sentiment, and if those constituencies come home to the Democrats in November, Biden’s chances of reelection go way up.

Don’t get me wrong. There are warning signs in the polling for Biden, too. The Ipsos poll showed a seven point drop in the number of respondents saying Biden’s mental health was good to excellent. But most of that comes from Democrats, where the drop was 12 percent. And in the Morning Consult poll, 47 percent of Democrats polled thought Biden should drop out or be replaced.

Those are numbers that will weigh Biden down, certainly for as long as the question remains “open” about whether he will or should drop out. But this reminds me a bit of polls that showed Republican support for Trump would drop after his felony convictions. But even after the verdict came down, the race remained more or less tied for a simple reason: Trump’s criminality was already baked into voters’ considerations of him.

And the same is very likely true of Biden’s age. Voters don’t like it. Voters tell pollsters they don’t like it. But it won’t change their vote.

Remember the Fetterman / Oz Debate?

There’s a recent and useful analogy worth mentioning here. In the 2022 midterm cycle, Sen. John Fetterman was fighting for his political life after suffering a stroke. The health crisis impacted his ability to speak. And his debate against Dr. Mehmet Oz painfully highlighted his impaired faculties. Fetterman struggled to put together coherent sentences. The Washington Post noted that Fetterman started the debate by saying “Good night” instead of “Good evening” and had difficulty completing his thoughts, often using the wrong words. Politico ran a headline that Fetterman “struggles” and Axios called his performance “painful.”

Democrats panicked because the entire control of the Senate could rest on that race. But there was no going with another candidate by that point in October. They just had to do the best they could. So Fetterman went on the offensive and called out Oz’s debate statement on abortion. Here’s what Oz said:

I want women, doctors, local political leaders, letting the democracy that’s always allowed our nation to thrive to put the best ideas forward so states can decide for themselves. 

Local political leaders? Deciding abortion? Ruh-roh.

Illegal Mexican immigrants? Taking “Black jobs”? Hmmm.

Long after a debate, people usually remember what was said, especially what was repeated in ads and memes over and over, far more than how it was said. A good example is the singular phrase people took from the Trump/Biden debate in 2020, when Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” Very little else comes to mind from that debate.

In this case, the GOP can try to use clips of Joe Biden looking old and confused during Thursday’s debate, but they have plenty of those videos already, some even selectively edited. But the Biden campaign now has dozens and dozens of new clips of Trump’s lies and extremist positions that it can deploy. 

Here’s a new ad from the Biden Campaign, using Trump’s words against him, underscoring this point, especially around January 6, which he refused to disavow.

For his part, Sen. Fetterman blasted critics of Biden for calling on him to step aside, citing his own experience with a bad debate performance. “Morning-after thermonuclear beat downs from my race from the debate and polling geniuses like 538 predicted I’d lose by 2. And what happened? The only seat to flip and won by a historic margin (+5),” he posted.

Biden’s fundraising is up. Way up.

If Democrats were abandoning Biden, you’d also expect to see his fundraising plummet. Instead it set records as supporters rallied to his defense.

In an email sent on Sunday, a Biden campaign official reported they had raised north of $33 million since Thursday’s debate, including $26 million from grassroots donors. Digging a bit deeper, nearly half of its grassroots donations came from first-time donors in the 2024 election cycle. Thursday wound up being “our best grassroots fundraising day ever, while Friday was the second best,” according to the campaign.

Again, what?

Biden suffering a big personal defeat and being pilloried by the political pundits doesn’t sound like a recipe for fundraising. But then again, neither did Trump getting convicted by a Manhattan jury for felony business falsification. But the two candidates’ supporters seem far more willing to step up when their candidate is knocked down, and both campaigns are able to take the hit and turn it into a selling point.

The Biden Campaign seems to understand this. In speeches on Friday after the disastrous performance the night before, Biden acknowledged that things went badly, and that may have helped rally people even more to his side.

“I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” Biden said as the crowd began to cheer in support. “I don’t walk as easy as I used to, I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to, I don’t debate as well as I used to.”

“But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth,” he thundered, to a huge response. “And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down you get back up.”

I was personally present at the mega LGBTQ+ fundraiser event for the Biden Victory Fund Friday evening in New York City. The crowd was electric with energy for Biden despite—or perhaps because of—his debate performance. There was a palpable need to show even more support than ever. It was heartening to see, and it taught me a lesson about human nature and the power of overcoming a setback together.

A nightmare of a contested convention

I understand the emotions that might have driven initial horrified reactions and ill-considered takes on Biden right after Thursday’s debate. I had one myself, after all, and it was not my best moment. But it didn’t take me long to calm down and think about this logically and rationally, which is why continued calls for Biden to step aside make no sense to me long after emotions should have cooled.

If Biden declined the nomination, there would be no automatic nominee. Vice President Kamala Harris would likely have his endorsement, and she would have the inside track among convention delegates. She would also have the backing of millions of primary voters who cast their ballots for a ticket she was on. But she might not have the votes to win the nomination outright from the first round. That would mean a contested convention.

Those calling for Biden to give up the nomination are not often heard saying, “Let Kamala run with it.” That’s because they know it would likely become anyone’s race, with the delegates deciding who the nominee is at a brokered convention. 

We have an example in history where this happened. President Lyndon Johnson declined to run for a second term, throwing the question of his successor into doubt. The 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention is memorable for its protests, its police presence and its chaos, with Hubert Humphrey eventually emerging as the candidate of choice. There was a third party spoiler in the race then, too, by the name of George Wallace. In part because of the Democratic chaos, Richard Nixon was elected president in November of that year.

It’s possible that the Democrats wouldn’t relive this history, sure. But the risks of running someone other than Harris—someone else with low name recognition and no time to get up and organized—is very high. Any other nominee would start with zero money in campaign coffers and a big question about whether the Biden/Harris money could legally be transferred over somehow.

Further, the idea that the Democrats would pass over the Vice President and alienate Black women voters, whose votes and support are critical this November, should give everyone pause. It was division and recrimination within the party in 2016 that helped sink Hillary Clinton’s race against Trump.

Any new ticket would also have to get on the ballot in 50 states, a monumental and costly undertaking that might not happen in time. Just ask RKF Jr., who has yet to get on the ballot in many states, how hard and expensive it is to qualify. 

Add to this the fact that the Heritage Foundation is already preparing legal challenges. It argues that many states, including the battleground states of Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin, might not allow a replacement on the ballot. “We are monitoring the calls from across the country for President Biden to step aside, either now or before the election, and have concluded that the process for substitution and withdrawal is very complicated,” the Executive Director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project Mike Howell said in a statement. “We will remain vigilant that appropriate election integrity procedures are followed.”

These challenges, together, make for a daunting alternative route. This is why, in my view, if you want to talk about replacing Biden, you had better be also talking about going with Harris in the same breath. Anything else risks division and collapse.

This is all beside the point now.

Lastly, calls for Biden to give up are moot. Over the weekend, the Biden family huddled together at Camp David to discuss the debate. Members of his family blamed his staff for poorly preparing the president or for exhausting him. Biden characteristically shouldered the blame himself.

During that meeting, his family urged Joe Biden to stay the course, and he is listening to them. Top Democratic leaders have rallied behind Biden, and I have yet to see an elected official call for him to step down, even while the political punditry continues to set its hair on fire.

The truth at this point is this: So long as Biden has decided to remain in the race, there is no simply viable alternative, and talk of replacing him only serves to undermine his prospects. As a pragmatic progressive, it’s my practice to be clear-eyed about what is possible and then work hard to achieve it. So long as circumstances don’t change, this should be the path forward and the message for all who want the same result: Joe Biden’s reelection.

The sooner Democrats accept that Biden is the nominee, the more unified we can grow. In the end, even Biden’s harshest critics on the left concede that if he is the nominee, they will still fight hard to see that he defeats Trump, because nothing could be worse than a second Trump presidency. 

It’s time that they see that no amount of lamenting or handwringing is going to change the reality and to join with everyone else to help turn things around from Thursday. That work is already underway, and we need all hands on deck.