Against revisionist history on Biden 2024

You can like the president or his policies. But his campaign was a disaster. And he didn't just drop out — he lost.

It's your wedding day. Congrats! But one of your groomsmen, Joey, is presenting you with a problem. Joey has always been a drinker, but it's gotten worse since his divorce. And he showed up to the ceremony three sheets to the wind. He nearly tripped during the processional. His toast went way over the line. And then he knocked over his wine glass and spilled Pinot Noir all over your favorite Aunt's dress. Fortunately, another friend, Nancy, persuaded Joey to call it a night before he made even more of a mess.

How should we feel about Joey? Well, that's up to you, I suppose. But he's certainly no hero. Nancy, on the other hand…

Biden didn’t step aside. He was pushed aside by his party.

Officially, Timothy Snyder is “the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna”. Unofficially, he’s a founding member of a certain prototype that’s familiar on Twitter (and frankly also on Substack): the Resistance Lib Celebrity Historian, hereafter RLCH.

The RLCH is emblematic of what I call the Indigo Blob phenomenon: the tendency for legitimate non-partisan expertise on the one hand, and cheerleading for the Democratic Party under the auspices of expertise on the other hand, to be deeply entangled. This does not imply that all experts have become partisan hacks. I mean, look, I’m a member of the Indigo Blob too — despite having stumbled into it backward through poker and baseball forecasting — and I think most journalists and academics are basically truth-seeking. But there are a significant minority of experts who think their goal is to help the Democratic Party, who don’t recognize their own tendency toward confirmation bias, or simply enjoy the engagement that being a social media celebrity brings.

If you’re a consumer of political news, then unless you’re really meticulous, it can often be hard to tell which is which. But with something like this tweet from Snyder, it isn’t a close call. This is revisionist history and BS — in the Harry G. Frankfurt sense of “bullshit” as causal indifference toward to the truth.

The last sentence of this tweet, that Biden will be regarded kindly by history, is highly plausible, especially if RLCHes like Snyder are responsible for writing it. (For what it’s worth, I do think Biden accomplished a lot in his term.) But the rest of it is bullshit: the equivalent of reframing Joey’s behavior as noble because he merely almost ruined your wedding.

Let’s start with the clause “What @POTUS did”. Because the decision to step aside wasn’t Biden’s decision alone, and in some ways not really his decision at all. Joe Biden is a party man. Barack Obama’s campaign was responsible for elevating him to the vice presidency in 2008, without which he’d be known for a long career as Senator but a two-time failure as a presidential candidate. And the party establishment provided significant assistance to Biden in 2020, coming behind him in South Carolina (Jim Clyburn) and Super Tuesday (Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, etc.) rather than risking a prolonged primary and perhaps a less electable nominee or a contested convention. I’m someone who thought Biden’s chances were considerably underrated throughout 2020 — but he might not have won it without that help.

Was Biden’s decision “spectacularly strategic”, as Snyder claims? No. It was marking an ‘X’ in the upper-left square of the tic-tac-toe board because it was an utterly obvious play. Reporting on the end-days of Biden’s 2024 campaign makes clear that he only left once he was persuaded that he was going to lose, his reputation sure to be in tatters even among sympathetic historians like Snyder.

Biden was very likely to lose the general election to Donald Trump. And he might also have lost the nomination. Nancy Pelosi and others who wanted him out were not only using their leverage but also credibly threatening to apply even more leverage in the future — the equivalent of telling our pal Joey that if you don’t hail an Uber right now, we’re going to call security and have you escorted out.

Democratic convention rules even permit considerable flexibility to delegates to bypass the candidate they were originally pledged to vote for if they can’t do so in “good conscience”. Would the party have taken things that far? When I spoke to Ezra Klein about this — Ezra is approximately 100x times more connected than me among Democratic Party officials — he was skeptical, and thought Biden could have held onto the nomination if he absolutely insisted on it. But who knows. Democrats like Pelosi think this election has existential stakes, and I wouldn’t put it past the party — which has shown a penchant for strategic thinking this year that they’ve sometimes lacked in the past — to take the issue to the convention floor, or to poison-pill Biden’s candidacy to the point where it became completely untenable. It’s Pelosi who deserves the credit for playing hardball — not Biden for belatedly reading the writing on the wall.

What would have shown the foresight and moral courage Snyder imagines is for Biden to have exited the race earlier — ideally with enough time for Democrats to have a real primary. Voters’ age-related concerns about Biden were about the most persistent and obvious signal that I’ve seen in the polling business since I began covering politics. The problems were evident long before the debate, like in Biden’s refusal to do a Super Bowl interview

Indeed, there was a revival of this sort of denialism this week, when Biden’s speaking slot at the convention on Monday was pushed to the 11:30 p.m. hour. Maybe you can say this was all just an unfortunate coincidence, but I think you should be deeply skeptical of these claims. It’s not like it was hard to predict that AOC and other speakers would extend beyond their scheduled speaking times; this happens at every convention. If you want to run a tight show, even when there are a lot of egos in the room, then you can play the Oscar get-the-hell-off-the-stage music or send a note to the speaker’s teleprompter.

Generally speaking, parties have an incentive to extend a little bit beyond the schedule because the networks won’t call your bluff and drop their coverage. But 11:30 is really late. Between 10:30 and 11:30, the number of Americans who are asleep increases nonlinearly from 47 percent to 72 percent, and the number watching TV is roughly cut in half. Democrats weren’t in any hurry to have voters hear from a president with a 39 percent approval rating.

And although you could say that at least things worked out well in the end — Kamala Harris’s campaign is off to a good start, certainly — an earlier withdrawal would probably have been the percentage play. It was far from obvious that Harris would be so prepared for the moment, and even now her chances are only about 50/50. A proper primary would have provided for more optionality. With the benefit of hindsight, I think we can say that Harris would have been the favorite. But maybe someone like Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro or Wes Moore would have emerged instead and given Democrats even better odds.

Democrats are also lucky that the Indigo Blob seems to have become largely disinterested in covering Biden’s age and fitness for office now that it’s no longer a horse-race story. Because Biden’s lack of consistent uptime — such as reportedly often being off his A-game in the evenings — is a huge concern if, say, there’s a report of an incoming North Korean ICBM at midnight, a circumstance that requires the president to act with the fate of the world on the line within 6 minutes. Democrats are fading the risk that things in the Middle East or in the financial system don’t spiral out of control and that Biden is up for the task if they do.

This is an important empirical question, too

Incumbent presidents usually win re-election, right? I’m sure I’ve said some version of this many times. It is one of the truisms of politics, one of the reasons that Democrats were initially reluctant to push Biden aside. But the actual answer isn’t so simple.

What’s true is this: incumbent presidents who win their party’s nomination usually win re-election. Specifically — let’s wind this all the way back to the dawn of the Republic — 23 of 33 who captured their party’s banner won the general election, too. That’s 70 percent, a pretty good hit rate.

But here’s another fact: most incumbent presidents who were eligible to seek re-election did not win another term. In fact, just 23 of 54 did, or 43 percent.

What accounts for the difference? Well, until the 22nd Amendment — which was passed in 1951 but grandfathered in for the then-incumbent, Harry S. Truman — there was no constitutional limit on the number of terms a president might serve. George Washington established a two-term precedent and most of the other early presdients followed it with few questions asked. But by the early 20th century, many presidents didn’t. Woodrow Wilson wanted a third term until he had a stroke, and remained convinced even afterward that he could still have won one somehow. Then FDR violated the two-term precedent, of course. Truman strongly considered a third term despite having an approval rating similar to Biden’s in the high 30s. LBJ was also eligible for a third term in 1968 because he’d only been elected once, having succeeded John F. Kennedy to the office. His case is more ambiguous — LBJ was non-committal — but it was the New Hampshire primary, where LBJ (as a write-in) got less than 50 percent of the vote, that really drove the point home.

Before the advent of the modern presidential primary system, which evolved rapidly between 1968 and 1980, stubborn old men that didn’t know their own limitations would simply be pushed aside by their parties. There are only a few vestiges of these “smoke-filled room” days left, like the presence of superdelegates and the conscious cause.

Still, there is considerable selection bias in who seeks and wins their party nomination and who doesn’t. The probable losers are usually weeded out, either by themselves or by their party, which biases the incumbent success rate upward. If you look at incumbents who actively sought another term — yes, there are some borderline cases, and I don’t count presidents like Chester A. Arthur in the denominator who were wiser than Wilson about acknowledging their health problems — the batting average is 55 percent. Basically a coin flip.

That has implications for our empirical understanding of the presidency. Models like Allan Lichtman’s 13 Keys to the White House which do not account for this selection bias are flawed. Notwithstanding his system’s other subjectivities, Lichtman insisted that Biden was a winner and should stay in the race, which should count as a failed prediction given the reason that Biden quit.

So Biden should be thought of in the same category as Wilson and Truman — as incumbents who sought another term and lost it, because their parties intervened to prevent an electoral disaster. If Harris wins the presidency, historians like Snyder will probably elide that part and Biden will be remembered fondly by the Indigo Blob. But if Harris loses — and this is still basically a 50/50 race — all bets are off.