The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 27
This week:
- Biden’s debate disaster
- Democrats basically cannot replace him
- Oops: Voters favor Trump on the “democracy” issue
Outlook
Debate debacle: We stated last week that Thursday’s debate would not make a difference in the presidential race, unless one of the candidates suffered a total meltdown. Little did we know that was precisely what would happen.
The debate could not have gone much worse for President Joe Biden than it actually did. It was an embarrassing spectacle that few voters will be able to overlook. All of the attempts by sympathetic commentators to paper it over are completely useless.
The debate bolstered suspicions, widespread on the Right, that Biden is not making day-to-day decisions in his own presidential administration. It confirmed for the Left that Biden cannot defeat Trump in this year’s election.
It also made former President Donald Trump, who uncharacteristically restrained himself, look outright presidential and capable of serving another four-year term.
When he was speaking, Biden frequently verged upon the incomprehensible. When he was not speaking, he looked like a zombie, staring blankly into space with his mouth hanging open.
The political fallout of Biden’s performance is not yet fully understood. What little new polling became available over the weekend — including a new poll of Michigan showing Trump opening up his largest lead in months, and a poll showing him and Biden virtually tied in New Jersey — was conducted fully or partially pre-debate.
Biden’s performance was so bad that the same partisans who had been defending him as perfectly mentally sound until 15 minutes earlier were suddenly calling actively for his replacement in the presidential race or even his removal from the presidency for unfitness to serve.
Someone in Biden’s camp — and who knows with what authority this was done — even appears to have floated a trial balloon in the mainstream media that would seemingly give Biden an off-ramp to quit the race. This has resulted in suggestions that Biden should fire senior campaign staff, further roiling a campaign that was already in chaos after Thursday night.
Replace Biden? But the truth is, it would be much harder than anyone is letting on for Democrats to replace Biden on the ballot. In truth, it would be impossible from a practical perspective.
Technically, assuming Biden consents and releases his delegates to the Democratic National Convention, Democrats could replace him on the ballot in all the states they need to, so that voters can technically pull the lever for some other Democratic nominee on Election Day. But the practical challenges underlying this feat make it impossible, or at least ensure that it would be an even worse disaster for Democrats than leaving him on the ballot.
Consider, for example, the $220 million Biden raised between January 2023 and May 31 of this year. That money, along with the $50 million-plus that Biden raised in June cannot simply be transferred to or re-raised for a new nominee. Campaign finance laws prevent the former, and practical realities prevent the latter. The millions in online ads already run on Biden’s behalf to burnish his image cannot be repurposed, either.
It took a lot of work to raise all that money, and now Democrats would have to go back to all of the same donors and do it all over again, starting at a startlingly late date on the election calendar. And that’s assuming the donors even want to give again after throwing thousands into the black hole of what would become Biden’s defunct campaign.
Thus, the removal of Biden from the ballot, even were he to consent to it (which he surely will not) would take hundreds of millions of dollars in already-raised funds out of the hands of the Democratic nominee.
If Kamala Harris, as a member of the same ticket, is permitted to repurpose the cash and continue to run as the Biden-Harris candidate, this would still not solve the Democrats’ main problem. In that case, they would only be throwing Biden over in favor of a candidate who polls even worse than he does.
What’s more, the campaign set up to re-elect Biden cannot simply be transferred to some other candidate as if it were a turnkey operation. It took months to build it up and hire appropriate staff committed to the cause — genuine Biden supporters.
There doesn’t exist a campaign on the ground ready to elect Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), or even Harris as president. And there won’t be enough time to put such a campaign together between the end of the DNC in mid-August, when this will putatively be decided, and November 5.
This is why presidential campaigns typically begin two years before election day or even sooner — because they take a lot of groundwork. You can’t just hot-swap the candidates as if they were interchangeable.
Who would want it? The other doubtful factor here is the willingness of potential new candidates to step into a losing race with insufficient preparation. Imagine you are Newsom and you feel confident that you will be your party’s 2028 nominee. Why would you take the risk of stepping into this year’s race midstream and attempting a half-cocked run at the presidency in 2024, on a severely compressed timeline and with little chance of victory? Bear in mind that a crushing defeat would make you damaged goods in 2028. So it would be a mistake to get involved in a race where you’re just being set up to fail.
This is without even considering the optics of casting the first black female vice president aside for a white person, which at least some Democrats are unlikely to take well. Note that if Newsom is the nominee, there will be additional constitutional problems with Harris (another California resident) even remaining on the ticket, since it would mean forfeiting California’s electoral votes for vice president.
This is why Newsom will not go into the convention with his claws out trying to seize the nomination, nor will Whitmer nor any other viable Democrat who has plans to run in the future.
For anyone in the Democratic Party with an actual political future, this year’s nomination is fool’s gold. It carries with it the risk of being tainted as a massive loser ahead of one’s time.
The result is that Democrats, as we have been saying for months, are well and truly stuck with Biden; if they replace him, their chances get even worse. In practical terms, they just don’t have the option of replacing him on the ballot.
Their nomination process has just become a slow-motion train wreck that everyone sees happening and no one is able to prevent.
‘Democracy’: If Biden does lose in the end, history may come to view this debate performance as his downfall. But in that event it would be more accurate to say that it was the tipping point for an already-losing campaign. We have been pointing out for weeks the dire Electoral College situation Biden faces, having to win as many as 75 out of 75 swing-state electoral votes in order to survive.
And then the unkindest cut of all: Before Biden and Trump took the debate stage on Thursday night, the Washington Post came out with a poll of swing-state voters that pretty much shattered Biden’s campaign messaging plan about how democracy is in peril unless he wins the election .
The result? Voters generally agree that democratic is in peril, but evidently not for the reasons the chattering classes think it is.
The poll found that more voters trust Trump (44 percent) than Biden (38 percent) to preserve democracy. In other words, the narrative that Trump is a dangerous dictator who attempted a coup d’etat on Jan. 6, 2021 and will never allow another election if he wins has been pretty much discredited with the American public despite all their efforts.
On the other hand, the belief that Democrats are trying to persecute Trump legally to force him out of the presidential race, disqualify him, and perhaps even jail him, is widespread enough that it is seen as the bigger threat to democracy.
This is only a surprise if you live inside their bubble, but so many in media do.
Electoral Map: In the absence of sufficient evidence to make any post-debate changes or make New Jersey a lighter shade of blue, we are sticking with the same electoral map as last week, courtesy of 270toWin.com. Given the assumptions that go into this map, Trump must lock down just a single additional electoral vote to become president again, and Biden must win all unallocated electoral votes to be re-elected.
