In the wake of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, there was a pause in the Democratic campaign to pressure President Joe Biden to drop his White House re-election bid. That moment of quiet was appropriate, as the nation took a brief break from politics as usual to take in what had just happened and sought calm to ensure the shooting did not spark further chaos.
But that slowdown has come to an end. On Wednesday, Rep. Adam Schiff of California called on Biden to “pass the torch” in one of the most high-profile objections to Biden’s candidacy to date. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., did not deny an ABC report claiming that in a meeting he had with Biden he pressed the president to step down. And CNN, citing four sources briefed on the phone conversation, reported that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California told Biden he cannot win the race and that his candidacy could ruin his party’s chances of winning the House.
The way to think about this issue is to acknowledge that Biden cannot do his job.
The renewed pressure campaign on Biden is welcome news. The case against Biden’s candidacy did not grow any weaker in light of an assassination attempt against Trump. All the reasons Biden is ill-suited to be a candidate — and ill-suited to be president for four additional years — remain intact. In fact, the case is stronger than ever.
The polls present an unceasing torrent of terrible news for the president. Trump continues to best Biden in the polls despite his felony convictions and authoritarian rhetoric. According to New York Times and Siena College polling records, Trump holds his largest lead over a Democrat since his 2016 White House bid. A poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that a remarkable 65% of Democrats want Biden to drop out of the race and allow his party to select a different candidate. Biden is still getting clobbered by Trump in polls of swing states and lagging far behind his Democratic colleagues in those states, indicating that he is a distinctly weak candidate within the party. Data for Progress’ latest survey finds that swing voters consider Biden’s age to be a much larger concern than Trump’s criminal charges. (The same survey conducted before the debate had found the reverse to be true — swing voters were more concerned about Trump’s charges.)
There are concrete signs of how frustration over Biden’s candidacy is already demoralizing the party. NBC News reports that major donations have “fallen off a cliff” and that grassroots fundraising is falling short of campaign needs. In a worst-case scenario, this downturn is a preview of how disenchantment over Biden’s age could dampen his appeal not only to independents and swing voters, but also to ordinary Democratic voters. This is why top Democrats are warning that they fear a full-on wipeout of Democrats in government.
Biden’s debate performance has generated a strange and shortsighted media game. Every one of the president’s media appearances these days is scrutinized to determine whether he presents any better than he did during his mumbling and at-times incoherent debate performance. Journalists and Democrats assess the timbre and smoothness of every word he utters and then grade the performance afterward typically on the spectrum of somewhere from “bearable” to “alarming.” The problem is that these performances are measured against the unacceptably low standard of Biden’s debate performance, and that Biden is ultimately not defined by his unremarkable moments, but his most troubling ones.
It is naive to think Biden can fix this. Widespread concerns about his age predate the debate, and for good reason: For years — and especially during the past year — Biden has displayed a striking decline in his capacity to communicate clearly and display the level of energy appropriate for the most powerful political office in the world. The perception of him as too old is thoroughly entrenched, and challenging Trump to a golf showdown is not going to remedy that.
Trying to game out how strong Biden is relative to other potential Democratic candidates is the wrong way to think about this issue. Every potential candidate possesses pros and cons, and electability is mostly poor-quality guesswork. The way to think about this issue is to acknowledge that Biden cannot do his job. These days Biden cannot explain his policy accomplishments. He cannot respond with confidence to politically sensitive questions from reporters that he needs firm responses to. He cannot speak sentences that are consistently intelligible or audible. He cannot paint a vivid and attractive picture of what America should look like in the future. In other words, he cannot make the case for his own candidacy.
If he cannot do these things, then he cannot fulfill one of the most basic requirements of any politician: to communicate ideas and persuade people to join them in an endeavor to make them a reality. Such a task will always be required of a politician, whether in private meetings with power brokers or at public rallies ahead of elections. It requires willful denialism — of the polls, of common sense — to suggest that Biden's communicative problems do not help explain why he is trailing in the polls against one of the weakest presidential candidates in modern political history, and why it's hard for him to close the gap. The leaders of any responsible party would attempt to intervene and find someone who can do the job, and it is refreshing to see reports that, for all their flaws, Democratic leaders are doing just that.
If the campaign to persuade Biden to step aside fails and he remains the Democratic nominee, the choice between him and Trump will be a no-brainer for the majority of Democratic voters. Biden’s values and judgment — even if executed poorly — are far better alternatives to Trump’s ethno-nationalist authoritarian fantasy. But most voters are not partisan Democrats. And less-engaged Democrats, independents, true swing voters, disenchanted Republicans and potential third-party voters are all persuadable demographics who will play a critical role in who wins the election. The Democrats need someone capable of persuasion — not just through rhetorical competence but also a meaningful and ambitious policy vision. First they must persuade Biden that, as much as he may wish that he could, he is no longer capable of doing what waging a presidential campaign and leading the country demand.
