Upset at Biden for Sticking It Out? Blame the Voters.
The president’s ability to survive has little to do with the steps he’s taken. It’s because voters can be weird and inconsistent.
A NARRATIVE HAS TAKEN HOLD THAT JOE BIDEN, at his presidency’s nadir, has managed to freeze Democrats in place, stop a mass abandonment of his campaign, and defiantly keep his White House bid afloat.
It’s nonsense.
Not just because Biden’s political position remains incredibly tenuous (Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday offered some widely spaced lines between which she invited everyone to read). But the post-debate survival of Biden’s campaign has had relatively little to do with the president and his team.
Credit for that goes instead to a large swath of Democratic base voters, who have responded with incredulity to the idea that the president (whom they don’t particularly adore) should step aside. Call it post-hoc rationalization or tribalism if you’d like. But even the Biden team admits those voters have spooked enough elected Democrats to keep the president in the game.
“How easy it is for people to forget that voters get the final say!” one senior Biden aide told me.
Not all Democrats are protective of Biden. Nor are all of them eager to see him try to make it through November. Polls show a significant chunk of the party is deeply concerned about the president’s prospects and health, and want him to quit the race. Angst over his standing hits a certain galactic level the higher one goes in the ranks, distilled in George Clooney’s article on Wednesday that both called for Biden to step down and stripped bare any effort by the White House or campaign to spin the debate performance as a one-off.
But the defining feature of the debate aftermath has been that a large chunk of the Democratic party simply rejects the doomsday prognostications of the political class. They’ve managed both to believe that he lacks the capacity to serve another four years as president and rationalize support for him to do just that.
Veterans of the campaign trail say they’re hardly surprised.
“About a third of [Barack] Obama ’08 voters thought he might have been born in a foreign country. They still voted for him,” said Stu Stevens, the longtime GOP political operative who, under Donald Trump, grew disaffected with his party. “How many 1992 [Bill] Clinton voters thought he was trustworthy and honest? How many 2024 voters think a convicted felon should be president?”
“We have a strange human ability to hold contradictory ideas and decide which to ignore,” he added. “People are weird and inconsistent.”
What Stevens outlined is something that Democrats in the field say they have witnessed too.
Voters may believe that Biden can still win. They may also see a strategic error in dumping an incumbent president four months before an election. But a lot of the motivation they have for keeping Biden atop the ticket is being driven by id, not ego.
“There has been a perception for a long, long time that Republicans will fight and Democrats won’t,” said Cornell Belcher, Obama’s former pollster who is currently assisting the group Black PAC, which is trying to turn out black voters for Democrats. “This is a prime example of this. We all know Donald Trump could have stepped on that stage and taken a piss and [Republicans] would have said it is a beautiful piss. And the guy who has delivered more of the progressive agenda, certainly more than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, [Democrats] will cut and run from him at the first sign of trouble.”
“I think that is a reinforcing narrative: that Democrats don’t stand and fight,” he added. “Regular people in their regular lives don’t cut and run that easily from people they are associated with. It’s not all transactional.”
This type of voter behavior has clearly impacted Democratic lawmakers in recent days; threatening to turn the “family conversation” that the party claims to be having right now into something approaching civil strife.
The vast majority of Democratic lawmakers are convinced that Biden is a likely loser. They’re also convinced that Trump is an existential threat to democracy. But they came back from the July Fourth break unwilling to say as much in public. More to the point, the more progressive lawmakers and the members of the Congressional Black Caucus—the officials closest to the party’s core base—actively came to Biden’s defense.
Why?
It wasn’t because the Biden team had staunched the bedwetting. It was confounding to see aides leak that the president had personally made 20 calls to lawmakers to reassure them about the debate as if it were some sort of Herculean task. There are more than 260 Democrats in Congress!
It’s because those Democratic lawmakers are responsive to their own constituencies, too.