Can Biden Still Lead the Fight for Democracy?
He can’t ignore the issue, but it looks like he can’t capitalize on it either.
NEARLY FORTY MINUTES ELAPSED before the issue of democracy came up during the presidential debate last week. Jake Tapper asked former President Donald Trump about his role in instigating the riot at the Capitol on January 6th. Trump responded by touting his record on the border, energy policy, taxes, foreign policy, and just about every issue besides the one he was asked about. Then he accused Biden of “weaponizing” the justice system and declared that “he [Biden] goes after his political opponent because he can’t beat him fair and square.”
Trump seemed to think that was all he needed to say, but Tapper followed up: “My question was: What do you say to those voters who believe that you violated your constitutional oath through your actions and inaction on January 6, 2021, and worry that you’ll do it again?” Then came the usual torrent of excuses, evasions, and accusations—Trump refused to take responsibility for the insurrection, lied about ordering the National Guard to the Capitol, and blamed Nancy Pelosi for the siege. When President Biden countered that Trump incited the riot, waited for hours to take action as his supporters stormed the Capitol, and now celebrates the insurrectionists as “patriots,” Trump accused him of imprisoning “innocent” Americans.
This was a historic moment—a sitting president accusing his predecessor of trying to overthrow American democracy in front of the entire country. But it somehow felt simultaneously surreal and routine—Biden softly mumbled his accusations, Trump lied and deflected like he always does, and the debate quickly shifted to Trump’s non-coup-related legal troubles. Biden had a chance to remind Americans that Trump is a dictator-in-waiting who tried to overturn an election, but he only succeeded in reminding them of his own advanced age.
Democratic party leaders and donors are justifiably panicked about Biden’s dismal performance in Atlanta. The debate—which was the Biden campaign’s idea—was supposed to assuage voters’ concerns about the president’s age, cognitive capacities, and ability to govern, but it did the opposite. Biden has never looked older than he did on Thursday, from his geriatric shuffle onto the stage to his slurred, halting failure to answer questions coherently. Biden didn’t just miss a lot of opportunities during the debate—he turned opportunities into liabilities. When the subject turned to abortion, a topic that should have allowed Biden to pounce on Trump, the president started talking about Americans who have been killed by undocumented immigrants (an issue that plays to Trump’s political strengths). When he attempted to explain the benefits of his tax plan, he lost his train of thought and blurted out, “We finally beat Medicare” as his time expired.
But Biden’s biggest failure was his inability to hold Trump accountable for his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. He stumbled through a series of heavily rehearsed allegations about January 6th and called Trump a “whiner” for refusing to accept the results. He said nothing about Trump’s pressure campaign targeting election officials across the country, the attempt to weaponize the Department of Justice, plans to seize voting machines, the fake elector scheme, and all the other ugly facts about America’s first coup attempt. While it’s depressing that American voters are more concerned about Biden’s age than Trump’s authoritarianism, Biden had a chance to alter this perception. He failed, and the consequences could be devastating.
There’s no telling what will happen within the Democratic party in the coming weeks and months. No matter how many journalists demand that Biden pull out or how widespread the panic about his candidacy becomes within the party, the decision to continue or not is his alone. But regardless of who ends up facing off against Trump, that candidate will have to remind voters that this is no ordinary election—it’s a referendum on American democracy.
DESPITE HIS FAILURE DURING THE DEBATE to remind Americans that Trump tried to destroy their democracy, Biden has rightly made the subject central to his campaign. The landing page on his campaign website invites voters to “save our democracy.” He opened his State of the Union address this year by announcing that “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today.” On January 5, he delivered a speech near Valley Forge in which he declared that “we’re here to answer the most important of questions. Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” He said this is the “most urgent question of our time.”
Many pundits, politicians, and pollsters don’t agree. Sen. Mitt Romney says the “threat to democracy pitch is a bust” and dismisses it as a “dead political horse.” Axios recently reported that “Many Democrats think the president and his closest aides learned the wrong lessons from Democratic wins in 2020 and 2022”—instead of focusing on democracy and the “soul of the nation,” they think the campaign should prioritize the economy and inflation. In an article published the day after the debate, political scientist and commentator Ruy Teixeira argued that the protection of American democracy “persistently trails the economy/inflation as the issue voters think is most important” and “does not rate very high” as a voter priority. Teixeira’s core argument is that “Biden and his campaign are unduly influenced by what they believe should be true rather than what is true.”
Despite Teixeira’s insistence that voters don’t really care about protecting democracy, many polls have shown that democracy is a major issue going into the election. The first poll Teixeira cites to demonstrate that “preserving/defending/whatever democracy” isn’t all that important was published by CBS/YouGov last month. While it’s true that voters cited the economy (81 percent) and inflation (75 percent) as their top two issues, the “state of democracy” was right behind at 74 percent. Voters were more concerned about democracy than crime, the U.S.-Mexico border, gun policy, and Trump’s conviction. Democracy also ranks high on lists of voter priorities according to recent surveys conducted by Ipsos and Georgetown.
Teixeira also cites an April New York Times/Siena poll that asked voters what they “remember most about Donald Trump’s presidency.” Here’s how he summarizes the findings: “That most definitely was not January 6th. Just 5 percent mentioned it, again dwarfed by other events and trends.” While it’s true that 5 percent of respondents cited January 6th, we should put this finding in perspective: A mere 4 percent said the COVID-19 pandemic was what they remember most. These strangely small proportions probably have something to do with the nature of the question—what do you remember most?—and the fact that one of the answer categories was extremely broad: “Behavior/leadership/personal characteristics.” Given Trump’s constant erratic and norm-breaking behavior, it should be no surprise that more voters chose this response (39 percent) than any other by a huge margin. January 6th was one of many moments when Trump’s behavior, leadership, and personal characteristics were on full display.
Teixeira cites a Fox News survey which, as he puts it, found that “Biden is preferred over Trump by a modest 6 points on ‘the future of American democracy.’” He neglects to mention that the survey also found that a remarkable 88 percent of voters say the “future of American democracy” is very or extremely important in “deciding [their] vote for president.” Teixeira argues that the issue of democracy doesn’t “cut very much in Biden’s direction unlike, say, abortion rights or health care. This is because preserving/defending democracy means different things to different voters.” Beyond the fact that every issue “means different things to different voters,” Teixeira is ignoring the deep civic crisis exposed by some of the polls he cites.
It’s true that Biden has slim leads over Trump on the issue of democracy in many surveys, while a recent Washington Post/George Mason survey found that Trump has an 11-point advantage over Biden on the issue in key swing states. Teixeira appears to believe this is an argument for dropping the issue of democracy altogether, but it’s actually an argument for making the case against Trump’s anti-democratic behavior and plans all the more forcefully.
Let’s accept Teixeira’s argument that Americans aren’t especially concerned about the health of their democracy. Even if this were the case—and we have ample reasons to believe it is not—leadership often means confronting a dangerous status quo. It means taking a principled stand on an issue that matters, even if the issue is divisive or politically risky. It means doing the difficult but necessary work of convincing fellow citizens that they’re overlooking a serious threat. This is another reason Biden’s diminished powers are so alarming—we’re living through a historic moment that requires inspired and compelling political leadership, which Biden has proven incapable of providing. At the beginning of his State of the Union address, Biden said his purpose was to “alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment.” Is he still capable of doing so?
Given the salience of democracy as an issue in 2024, voter confusion about who poses the gravest threat to American democracy is evidence of a profound failure to inform the country about what happened at the end of Trump’s presidency. It wasn’t just the chaos and violence of January 6th. After a years-long effort to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the American electoral system—which began when Trump thought he would lose to Hillary Clinton in 2016—Trump launched a scorched-earth campaign against American democracy in 2020. He used every political, legal, and institutional lever at his disposal—plus a violent mob—to remain in power and prevent his rightful successor from taking office. This campaign represents the most flagrant abuse of power in American history, and treating it like just another campaign issue would be a historic mistake.
THE ONLY QUESTION ABOUT TRUMP’S effort to overturn the 2020 election asked during the debate focused on January 6th, and Biden kept the focus on that day in his response. He observed that Trump encouraged the rioters and watched the siege of the Capitol on TV. He said Trump wants to “forgive them [the insurrectionists] for what they’ve done.” Even when Biden brought up the sixty failed voter fraud lawsuits filed by Trump’s team, he awkwardly connected this effort to Trump’s inaction on January 6th: “He went to every single court in the nation, I don’t know how many cases, scores of cases, including the Supreme Court, and they said, ‘No, no, this guy is responsible for doing what was done.’ He didn’t do a damn thing.”
While January 6th was the culmination of Trump’s effort to deny and overturn the results of the 2020 election, it has never been more important to remind Americans that his coup went far beyond the attack on the Capitol. Trump and his allies organized slates of fake electors to fraudulently declare that Trump had been selected by the voters of their states—many of whom were later charged with felonies. Trump pressured election officials in multiple states to throw out legitimate ballots and increase his vote count—most notoriously in Georgia, where he told Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” Trump threatened Raffensperger with legal consequences if he couldn’t “find” the votes necessary to overturn the election results.
Trump also attempted to pressure Justice Department officials into pursuing baseless claims of voter fraud and faced mass resignations when he considered replacing acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey Clark—a loyalist who promised to help him undo the results of the election. After he became acting attorney general, Rosen says Trump called him almost every day pressuring him to investigate voter fraud allegations. “Just say the election was corrupt,” he told Rosen, “and leave the rest to me and the [Republican] Congressmen.” Trump urged the DOJ to appoint a special counsel, declare the election illegitimate, and even seize voting machines. He encountered intense resistance from the highest-ranking DOJ officials, but it isn’t difficult to imagine a different outcome in the future. Trump is intent on gutting the DOJ and many other agencies and filling them with his lackeys. He has repeatedly declared that he will use the power of the federal government to punish his political enemies and seek “retribution.”
Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that presidents have immunity for “official acts,” Trump would be even more emboldened to behave without regard to the rule of law in a second term. He described the ruling as a “big win,” as it pushes his election interference trial until after November—and makes it less likely that he will be convicted for any act that could be construed as “official.” In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor envisioned some scenarios that would fall under that heading: if the president “Orders the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.” Allowing Trump back into the Oval Office when he has been so clear about his authoritarian intentions—he has even called for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”—would place the United States on the precipice of authoritarianism.
There was a time when revelations about Trump’s anti-democratic behavior appeared to be the death knell for his political career. When Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” him the votes he needed to prevail in Georgia, the story filled the headlines for weeks. After January 6th, many Republican leaders echoed Sen. Mitch McConnell, who accused Trump of a “disgraceful dereliction of duty.” Over 20 million Americans watched the first January 6th hearing two years ago. Teixeira believes Biden should focus on “less abstract issues” than democracy. But there’s nothing “abstract” about a president who considered ordering the secretary of defense to seize voting machines. There’s nothing abstract about a defeated president obsessively searching for ways to stay in office after losing an election. There’s nothing abstract about the fact that Trump is the first president in American history to reject the peaceful transfer of power. There’s nothing abstract about shattered glass and blood on the floor of the United States Capitol.
Trump isn’t just leading in the polls despite his attempted coup—he’s on the offensive about the subject of American democracy and election integrity. During the debate, he said Biden should be “ashamed” that “peacefully patriotic” January 6th insurrectionists are in prison. A central theme of his campaign is that Biden has “weaponized” the justice system to prevent him from returning to the White House. Yet again, Trump has declared in advance that the election is “rigged” against him. When Trump was indicted in New York last year, he said, “This fake case was brought only to interfere with the upcoming 2024 election and it should be dropped immediately.” His supporters clearly believe this argument—when he was convicted in May, his campaign immediately received tens of millions of dollars in donations.
It would be a perverse abdication of responsibility for Biden or any other Democratic nominee to cede the subject of democracy to Trump. At a time when one major party is waging an information war designed to distract Americans from the most serious threat to their democracy in generations, it would be a catastrophic mistake for the Democrats to pretend like this is a normal election against a normal candidate. Despite a couple of perfunctory questions about January 6th and Trump’s criminal record, this is what CNN did with the first debate. And instead of challenging this new status quo—in which it’s normal for a presidential candidate to refuse to say whether he will accept the results of the upcoming election—Biden treated democracy like it was just another issue, along with inflation and immigration.
This is a travesty. Trump wasn’t just a loser in 2020—he was a loser who would sooner see American democracy destroyed than acknowledge the victory of his opponent. From his ceaseless behind-the-scenes efforts to overturn the election to his dramatic public demand for Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election—as his supporters shouted “hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol—Trump showed Americans what a coup looks like. The only problem is that they’ve forgotten. It’s Biden’s responsibility to remind them, and if he can’t do the job, the Democrats better find someone who can. American democracy depends on it.
 | A guest post by
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