Call me naive, but I believe Joe Biden could have won the 2024 election.
Nothing is guaranteed, of course, and no one can foretell the future. Every politician has a unique set of strengths and weaknesses. And in a nation as split down the middle as America, it’s almost impossible for any candidate to take an insurmountable lead. However, I’m convinced that the Democratic nominee has a solid chance of beating Trump again, whoever it is.
I didn’t buy into the intense dooming among liberals after the first debate. I remember a similar collective freakout in 2012, after Barack Obama underperformed in his first debate against Mitt Romney. Look how that turned out.
I don’t believe elections are decided by debates. As a rationalist, I wish voters chose who to support based on which candidate made the best argument. But they don’t. The vast majority of voters cast their ballots because of established partisan loyalty, specific issues they care about that are aligned with one party, and/or personal satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the state of their lives that they project onto political leadership.
In 2024, these structural factors favor Team Blue.
Start with basic math: there are more Democrats than Republicans. The Democrat won the popular vote in five of the last six elections. Slow but steady demographic turnover only bolsters this advantage, as old white conservative Christians die off and the electorate becomes more diverse and more secular.
It’s only the anti-democratic Electoral College that gives Republicans any chance. Even so, Trump’s win in 2016 – squeaking by in a few crucial swing states, while losing the popular vote by millions – was the equivalent of getting a royal flush on the first hand in poker. It was pure luck, not the result of a well-thought-out strategy. Since then, he’s done nothing to bolster his appeal or expand his base (as his VP pick, J.D. Vance, demonstrates).
A recession can spell doom for an incumbent, but President Biden’s economy has defied the pessimists. His policies have strengthened unions, reduced the burden of student loan debt, and stimulated investment and infrastructure spending on a grand scale. GDP is growing at a robust pace, job creation has skyrocketed, wages are rising, and inflation is cooling off.
At the same time, Democratic voters are fired up over abortion bans. The Dobbs decision sparked a massive backlash that’s propelled Democrats to numerous election victories over the last two years, including in purple and red areas. The midterms, which almost always go badly for the incumbent’s party, instead resembled a blue wall in 2022. In my congressional district, abortion carried Tom Suozzi to victory, despite an all-in effort by Republicans to inflame a racist, anti-immigrant panic.
There’s no reason to believe things will be different this time around. If anything, this effect will be stronger. One of the most potent motivators in an election is negative partisanship: hatred and fear of the other side. That’s something Republicans have been exploiting successfully for decades, portraying every Democratic candidate as a threat to good, white, Christian Americans. Now, for once, they’re on the wrong side of this. Democrats hate Trump with a fiery passion; they’d vote for literally anyone other than him.
All these structural factors combine to give the Democratic nominee an advantage. The identity of the person is less important.
That’s why, at first, I was neutral between Biden and Harris. Biden’s age is a liability; I can’t deny that. On the other hand, as much as I hate to think this way, there are sure to be voters on the margins who would have supported a white guy, but won’t vote for a woman or a person of color. And we can be sure Republicans will resort to the most vile racist and sexist attacks they can imagine. I may be too cynical – after all, Barack Obama won twice – but for those of us who lived through 2016, the scars are deep and lingering.
However, after digesting the response and mulling it over for a few days, I’m coming to like Kamala Harris more. There are two major reasons that changed my mind.
The first is an immense surge of grassroots enthusiasm. The party immediately coalesced behind Harris, and in the wake of her announcement, she raised record-shattering amounts of money from small donors. Young voter registration also spiked to record numbers. Those signs of unity, passion and enthusiasm bode well for an election where turnout is sure to matter.
The second is that Republicans are outraged about it. They’ve spent months drumming up fake controversies to lay the ground for a campaign against Biden. They were caught flat-footed by his passing the baton. Trump, hilariously, whined that Democrats should reimburse him for the money he spent on anti-Biden attack ads.
Whatever I might think, they clearly believed they’d have had a better chance against Biden. In politics and in war, doing the opposite of what your opponent wants you to do is sound strategy.
Harris has some unique strengths of her own, as well. Not only does her candidacy neutralize the age issue, it flips it around and makes it a liability for Trump, who’s now the oldest candidate in the race by far. As a former prosecutor, she’s well-positioned to attack him as the convicted criminal he is. And as a woman, she has the power to make reproductive choice an even more potent issue than it already is.
Obviously, this is no reason for complacency. If anything, it’s an all-hands-on-deck moment. If you can knock on doors, or make calls, or write postcards, or donate money, or just talk to your uncommitted friends and family about the importance of voting, you should. America is on a precipice between democracy and fascism, and our choices will shape the future for our lifetimes. The stakes couldn’t be higher. But we can win, and save the future, if we work together and don’t lose hope.
Trump and the Republican party was obviously counting it’s chickens early after Biden was hammered by the press. I think Biden could have turned it around also. The polling barely shifted after the debate and incumbents tend to look bad early in the campaign. People focus on what has been bad news recently at the start of the campaign season but as the election gets closer they get more nervous about the flaws of the candidates and Trump has lots of them.
I think Trump was shocked by Biden voluntarily stepping down because Trump would never do that. The idea of giving up power and fame is foreign to Trump. He would never do it himself and would never think that anybody else would either. Because of this his campaign had done no contingency planning for Biden stepping down.
The differences in polling so far have been within the margin of error most of the time. Which means it appeared to be a toss-up. The worst sign was that in several states Biden was running well behind the state Democratic candidate for senate. Which means there weremany people who supported the candidate for senate but not Biden. If such a person doesn’t ‘come home’ wrt the presidential candidate, they might decide not to vote at all, thus potentially tanking both races (and all others down the ballot). If Harris manages to get the support of these people, and get it early, that would mean the world.
I always liked Harris, but assumed that she’d serve her time quietly as VP and be shuffled out of sight when that was over by the party machine. When Biden was getting doomer-ed, I was annoyed but had to admit he hadn’t done himself any favours in the debate and some of his gaffes around that time were pretty bad. But it simply never occurred to me that the Dems would let Harris step up – again, I assumed they’d shuffle her off and find some white guy. When she stepped up, and more to the point when she wasn’t immediately dragged down by her own side like I expected, it was a joy to see. Seriously – I’m more optimistic now than I’d have dared hope just a week ago. I’m more optimistic than I was when Obama was running. She’s a great candidate and I hope she mops the fucking floor with Trump.
@3 sonofrojblake: I’m pretty sure this is a case where it didn’t matter what the Democratic party machine thought. As long as Biden recommended Harris in his step down speech the rest of the party didn’t have much choice. It’s accept Harris or total chaos that gives Trump a large advantage.
I suspect Harris just got incredible lucky. It’s likely she could never win an open primary for the nomination. In 2020 she seemed too left to the right and middle of the party but as a prosecutor and attorney general in California did some thing that angered the left leaning part.
I watched a speech by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez where she said that some of the big donors who pushed Biden to step aside didn’t want Harris either. They wanted some other white guy to be handpicked as the Democratic nominee, without even going through a primary.
That would have been the doom scenario for Democrats. It would have kicked off a civil war within the party that would have resulted in millions of voters staying home out of bitterness and hurt feelings, no matter who won.
If Biden isn’t the nominee, Harris was the only alternative. That was obvious from the beginning. I’m relieved that the Democratic party establishment recognized this too and embraced her immediately. If Biden arranged this outcome behind the scenes prior to stepping down, that was one last bit of political brilliance.
The most honest decision any politician can make is to acknowledge their accomplishments and leave politics to the next up-and-coming community member. As the founders intended.
How Kamala Harris Took Command of the Democratic Party in 48 Hours – The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/us/politics/kamala-harris-democrats-nomination.html
She worked the phones. Her team worked the delegates. When it was over, she had quickly locked down the nomination in a “well-orchestrated cascade,” as one party leader put it.
On the morning of Sunday, July 21, she learned from President Biden that he was dropping out of the race. She called in her closest advisers and allies and they worked out a plan. When he announced his withdrawal, at 1:46 pm, she and her supporters were ready to go. Over the next 10 hours, she called some 100 prominent Democrats: ex-presidents, potentially rival governors, Congressional leaders, heads of committees, … thus showing much more vigor than the President, who made some 20 calls to Congressional Democrats in the 10 days after his disastrous debate.
VP Harris soon got an endorsement from Rep. Cori Bush, and by the next day, some 3/4 of Democratic governors and Congresspeople had endorsed her. The day after that, every one of those governors and most of those Congresspeople endorsed her, and in the following day, 2 stragglers endorsed her, leaving 9 not endorsing her and 5 having made no statements about her.
Some of her staffers did a similar operation with the Presidential-race delegates, and in a few days, they got committed votes from nearly all of them.
I think it’s a delusion to think Biden had more than a tiny chance of winning. The Democrats had been trying for months to shift the narrative away from “Biden’s too old” and failing completely – and that narrative was obviously hugely reinforced by the debate fiasco. What I saw from Bidenites was a lot of “It’s so unfair! The MSM are ignoring Trump’s lies and obvious cognitive decline.” Which was of course true, but since the MSM wasn’t about to change, irrelevant to whether Biden should go. The Democrats’ only chance was to change the narrative – which replacing Biden with Harris has clearly done. There was also a lot of “Well if Biden goes, who replaces him, huh? HUH?” accompanied by predictions of chaotic infighting – followed by ignoring those (including me) who replied “Harris”. I’m sure Harris had long had plans in place for a range of contingencies, from Biden deciding for non-medical reasons that he would retire, to him dropping dead. Of course there’s absolutely no guarantee she will win: she could easily stuff things up (e.g. by choosing Shapiro as running mate and hence pissing off most of those grassroots democrats who have rushed to support her), and the MSM are bound to tire of playing with their new toy and decide breaking it would be more fun before too long. But it’s an immense relief to have a candidate who could well win rather than one I felt was destined to lose.
Democrats are now saying that Republicans are weird.
This attack has been surprisingly effective, and Republicans have found it hard to counter it.
For instance, Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance has a long history of attacking childless people, like claiming that the Democratic Party is dominated by “childless cat ladies”. It will be hard to show that that is not weird.