I feel like he makes both of those clear in the first couple paragraphs. The grudge against Biden is due to not dropping out when it was first clear that he should and trying to hang on for far too long. The grudge against Snyder is for caring more about helping Democrats over truth-seeking. You're free to disagree with those reasons, and even discount what Nate says because of them, but personally I agree with him on both counts, though I think I am a bit more forgiving of Biden.
Really he quit at the perfect time. Democrats got to skip the usual interparty struggle and settle on the only plausible standard bearer. I could make the argument that Biden should have stepped down a year ago but there was no strong evidence he was behind then. There's no particular reason to think a contested primary would work in Democrats favor.
I'm hopeful it will turn out to be true (Biden quitting at the perfect time), but we won't know until November*; but even if turns out to be true, I don't think it was a strategic move on Biden's part. I think (and will think) he was just lucky. But hopefully, it may lead to some changes in the primary process.
*Arguably, we won't KNOW even in November. If Trump wins, it's certainly possible that even had Biden announced he wasn't running again back in 2022, Trump would still have won. And if Kamala wins, it's possible that the Democrats would still have won, even had the process played out differently. Having said that, I plan to take the election results as having answered the question.
I think what the post is really getting at is that though Biden eventually did the right thing, he risked a significant amount of the margins on the pathway to his decision.
If it goes well, all will probably be forgotten and Dems will rebuild the party's image around this new hopeful vision for the party. Biden and his decision will be lionized as one of the bravest choices a president has ever made. Kamala will be hailed as the president that truly brought America into the 21st century and reflects what America actually looks like in the 21st century.
If it doesn't go well though... then we have a different story. When we get the results, and it turns out that half a point in one swing state would've made the difference, then the decisions that led up to the Harris-Walz ticket will be dissected over and over until the 2026 cycle, and those decisions don't exactly look good for Biden. People will argue about how much of a difference an actual primary would've made in terms of name recognition. People will lament how long it took Biden to drop out after the debate when it was clear for weeks that pretty much everyone who's not a Republican or on the Biden campaign wanted him to. These things will only make a difference on the margins, but in a 50-50 race, those margins often add up to what makes the difference.
There are very good arguments to be made that Biden handled his campaign extremely poorly, and even though he eventually made the right decision, his journey there deserves a healthy amount of criticism.
Reporting from multiple sources are that behind the scenes Pelosi and other Party big-wigs were threatening Biden not only with an 'open convention' but also with leaking multiple additional insider eye-witness accounts of his dramatic cognitive decline.
So his dropping out should best be described as 'cowardly'. The 'brave' thing would have been to stay in and go down swinging.
It seemed clear to me that James wasn't describing the decision as brave. He was predicting that, in the event of a Harris win, it will go down in party lore as brave.
Harris vs. Trump is a coin toss right now, which is a heck of a lot better than Biden vs. Trump was shaping up; but it's still just a coin toss. There might be someone on the Democratic bench who would be doing much better than Harris if they'd been nominated. We missed the chance to find out.
"The grudge against Biden is due to not dropping out when it was first clear that he should" how about saving that, and any other anti-Democrats grudge for after we avoid the epic disaster of Trump's 2nd term? Oh yeah: there may not be as much of that sweet extra few bucks in clicks later on (btw, good job getting all those "who would be better candidate than Kamala, and why a 'coronation' would be bad process" articles under the wire in those short few days that was gonna be worth any attention). Call it my grudge against Nate, and practically every other journalist, analyst, writer out there: you have a big role in all this, don't act like it's someone else's responsibility to stop Trump. Be objective, do your actual job and write a thousand critical pieces of Trump and Republicans before writing anything against Biden, Harris or Democrats. Stop digging up stuff like this, you are obviously not doing it for the ideals of objectivity or truth, but because that's where the attention and clicks would be waiting for you. In other words Nate: you owe everyone, yourself included a series of hit pieces on Republicans now. I am tired of this "River" shit - it called selfishness. Oh, and that "I would have voted Libertarian" line you gave Ezra Klein was so pathetic - you didn't even have a name of the Libertarian candidate, never mind any potential issues with him or her. You should vote for Joe Biden's dog if he were to be the Democratic candidate against Trump, never mind Joe Biden. There is such a time when we all (those of us who are perfectly well aware of what's at stake in this election, and are not "men who just want to see the world burn") need to close the ranks and work together: you are either with the Village or with the incoming tsunami, there should be no River games now (and there will definitely be no River if Trump wins)
Ivan, I’m a political moderate who has voted for both Democrats and Republicans (Never Trump). The fact that Nate is willing to be objective and cover Democrats in a negative light is WHY I trust him. Not everything the party does is good, and many people like me won’t be gaslit into believing so. To your comment about Nate having a “role to stop Donald Trump’s 2nd term”, that is literally why me and other moderates don’t trust the mainstream media at all (see gaslit comment above). I don’t want Nate to convince me to vote for Harris by lying to me about the state of the Democratic Party; I want him and others to provide a realistic picture of how both parties are behaving so that I have accurate information to make a decision… thus putting the pressure on said Parties to behave properly vs. perpetuating their improper behavior while the media convinces me that it’s actually proper behavior.
Yeah, I mean, I generally appreciate Nate’s approach to forming his opinions, even if I don’t always agree with his conclusions. Honestly when I disagree with his takes it’s almost refreshing because for the most part my political disagreements these days fall into either of two categories:
a) “What this person is arguing literally makes me nauseous; how anyone can be so clearly cynical and bad-faith in the service of such an ugly ideology?”
or
b) “Jeez — I mean I don’t want MAGA to win either — but this person’s Pollyanna-esque way of acting like the set of politicians who just happen to be the only reasonable alternative are all ‘knights in shining armor’… makes feel like it just might.”
I’m mostly here for the polling and model stuff. But it’s almost refreshing to read some punditry where I’m like: “Well, I see your argument but I don’t know if I completely agree… let’s just agree to disagree on some of this.”
You say you are "Never Trump", but then you say you need someone to provide some additional info to you before you decide to do your small part to stop him? Well which of those two is true? And what more info do you need? You really need someone to tell you that Democrats have their share of bad things about them? And you also need someone to weigh all that for you against everything that Trump is and is going to do before deciding what are you going to do on Election Day? Lance, you are going to have to forgive me, but I don't buy any of that. This "wait, wait everyone - I still need more info!" shtick is tiresome and harmful. No, you don't need any more info. You just want more attention. But believe me: nobody takes the remaining "undecideds" of this election for "the hardest thinkers of our electorate" (or something like that) no matter how hard they try to make themselves look like it. Having said all that - I'll be glad to take her down for everything she does wrong every step of the way, but: starting with January 21 of next year. Not now. Maybe in 2028, if Republicans nominate a sane person. But not now.
The best way to beat trump is to have reliable data about the state of the race. So I'm with Lance. In this case the data were so obvious (75% wanted him out, 63% embarrassed by both), that it shouldn't require a quant to make the case.
What does that have anything to do with the race right now? Do I need to tell you how much I cursed Biden before he dropped out because he was about to hand the country/world/planet to Trump due to being so self centered as he was being? We can get back to that if we have nothing better to do after the election. My point is: now is not time for that.
Your response is more than a little irrational. I admire Biden for stepping down, but there is an argument that he only did so as a response to pressure. If that is true, does it affect our evaluation of his actions? In the same way, Lincoln was not for ending slavery at first, but we applaud him for getting there. The only grudge I sense is in your response to this article.
In a matter of days he went from "only if I get a message from God" to being all but out the door. Maybe Nancy Pelosi is the second coming that has been the subject of prophets through millienia. Who knew?
Spoken language tends to be more rhetorical. If someone is asked an uncomfortable question over and over, it is human to take it personally and respond with an answer like that.
I took the metaphor to mean someone lacking their cognitive faculties. Whether it was temporary or permanent, the "hero" of the story is the person who intercedes to help. For all the negative press on JRB, I've never heard 1 mention of any chemical issues.
And being President of the US is a much bigger deal than attending a wedding. The analogy flips where the choice is, that's all.
Cognitively impaired people (due to age or anything else) should be allowed to attend weddings, but no one should choose to do drugs at a wedding to the point that they are disruptive.
People with significant cognitive impairment (due to age or anything else) should be respected, but attempting to hold a high stakes executive position that would be compromised by that impairment (which I'm not certain is true now, but the risk is way too high in the next 4.5 years) is a much *worse* decision than getting drunk or high at a wedding and disrupting the wedding.
I think what makes it a bad analogy is, is Biden the equivalent of one of the groomsmen (not even the best man! a groomsman!) at the wedding? It seems like he's more like the groom, right? The groom who's being asked to graciously give up marrying his dream girl, and then root like hell for the guy who's marrying her instead? I think we would be pretty indulgent of such a groom even if he got a bit petulant when first asked to step aside.
I think he doesn't give any actual consideration to the argument that Biden was heroic or admirable. He doesn't try at all to put himself in the shoes of that argument (to "steelman" it or apply an "intellectual Turing test" in rationalist terms). He just ridicules it and says that Snyder is, in bad faith, trying to favor the Democratic Party. He may be right on both counts, but he argues so poorly that we can't really tell.
It would have been heroic or admirable to step aside before the primary. In the end, he was gifted an almost perfect moment to do it. He stepped down when the party was ready to rally around Harris out of fear of Trump being unbeatable after the shooting. It was pure luck that waiting this long ended up being better than stepping out earlier.
The fact that you don’t get the problems are so obvious I don’t even have to think about Biden and Snyder on this. Bear in mind I voted Biden in the 2020/24 South Carolina primary and voted in 2020 election. Biden dropped far too long to stay in the campaign, and did everything he could stay in if possible. He only stayed dropped because he didn’t have any choice. Bear in mind I stayed with Biden until after the debate was one of the worse things I’ve ever been wrong about.
Snyder makes himself out to be a partisan idiot, so that is one big reason to have a grudge against him. He is an embarrassment to his profession/institution.
lol why don’t you respond to the person I original responded to. I’m not the one who came up with the trutherism. Then maybe you could explain why the comment I responded to was more than an embarrassment
Don't have the inclination to defend Nate as I'm sure he could do a far better job...however conditional probabilities ostensibly depend on factual accounting of events? We've been sticking to this whole Bayesian thing for a while, as I see it at least (AISIAL).
My problem with Nate's column is surprisingly simple and also unsurprising: Silver is analyzing humans as if they're numbers. Ironically, by demonstrating his limitations as a pundit, he's practicing exactly what he accuses Snyder of doing.
The effort to remove Biden, the question of whether he should have run in the first place , Biden's agency in the entire affair: These were all very nuanced events, that evolved over time along with the perspectives of the humans involved in them. But Nate is absolutist about it in a way that seems almost too stereotypical for a numbers guy.
"It’s Pelosi who deserves the credit for playing hardball — not Biden for belatedly reading the writing on the wall," he writes. Really? Biden doesn't deserve ANY credit? Not for reading that writing, for example? For wisely throwing his support to Harris? For so gracefully making his exit? For not allowing the ordeal to get in the way of actual governing? For continuing to hammer Trump -- now on behalf of Harris?
Then, there's Silver's failure to mention the fact that Biden is a human being -- specifically a driven person whose entire career, self image and LIFE has been built on getting up off the canvas and fighting after people thought he was down for the count. That's what got him to the presidency. That's what enabled him to do the very hard work to pass an amazing amount of consequential legislation. That made it easier for him to believe that he was the warrior who needed to stay in the arena to defeat Trump again. And that certainly made it harder for him to throw in the towel. Yet, he did.
Silver ignores all this humanity by sticking the neat label of "party man" on Biden, and then back-rationalizing that he therefore should have followed Nate's "party man" archtype.
I've always admired how hard Nate works to carefully incorporate many variables into his models. But he doesn't demonstrate such care with the Uncle Joey analogy. For one thing, it's plainly problematic: There are fundamental typological differences between drunken behavior and aging -- between an out-of-control evening and a slow decline that just doesn't carry the same kind of moral baggage in our society.
More directly, the analogy is incomplete: Nate would have been more accurate if he noted that Uncle Joey used the opportunity to stop drinking for good and hasn't had a drop since. Then, when the couple came back from their honeymoon, he got the entire wedding party back together, apologized, offered up a new and fulsome toast (over lemonade), and gave the couple a new car. Gotta love that Uncle Joey!
Silver further undermines his authority by doubling down on the Biden-speaking-after-11 conspiracy theory even after both Barack Obama and Tim Walz were pushed passed 11 on Monday and Tuesday. Malarkey! Did the Dems also conspire to push their most charismatic speaker and their lovable VP nominee past 11 because they were embarrassed by them? I don't think so.
Then Nate unloads a double-barreled shotgun at one of the world's most respected and consequential historians. He pretty much calls him a "hack." A bit of humility and respect might have allowed Nate to check his own "priors" on the Biden resignation.
A great historian isn't necessarily a good political pundit -- much as a data-based election forecaster isn't necessarily a good analyst of human behavior. But Snyder is a pretty bright guy (understatement) with a perspective built on the study of history. Based on the arguments above, I'd say that the good professor's take on things more accurate than Nate's.
Thanks for taking the time to respond at length; I didn't like the tone of Nate's speculations, either. And speaking of being human, maybe Nate needs to get more rest. Debuting a new book, traveling to promote it, and keeping up with us could be getting on his nerves.
Thanks, that first part answers my question and makes me understand why so many people here hate how Nate talks about Biden.
I’m largely in the Nate camp here where Biden’s humanity and perspectives aren’t that interesting to me. Yes he’s a human being but he’s an incredibly powerful person whose shortcomings devastate the lives of millions, if not billions, of people. I get that his pride makes it very hard for him to step down and he did it anyway, but there’s only so much credit I can give for not putting his own interest ahead of the world’s.
Other commenters have talked about it well, but consider some of the relevant arguments Nate doesn’t engage with (is it common for politicians in Biden’s position to drop out? that would be relevant to the question of how admirable Biden’s choice was), versus irrelevant arguments he spends a great deal of time on (on Biden’s speaking slot at the convention, for instance).
Well, Biden also *gracefully* stepped down an passed the torch instead of sabotaging his successor's candidacy. That sounds like a low bar, but it's one LBJ couldn't clear and that's probably in the back of a lot of Democrats' minds in the Chicago DNC
You don't need to go that far. We have a contemporaneous president who led a violent insurrection after losing and still refuses to pass on the torch after his party has tried multiple times to move on.
I've not seen much evidence of his party moving on. Primary voters picked DJT overwhelmingly. If you're talking about the party elites and donors, he's gotten plenty of support there too.
To the extent that the Republican Party functions, it has repeatedly tried to rid itself of Trump. The elites, failing to act as a whole, have been unable to drag the rank-and-file away from MAGA.
You have to understand that the Republican party is currently under a dictatorship. It can be hard to tell what people really think under a dictator, but it occasionally bubbles up if you pay close attention. DeSantis was winning before Trump was indicted.
DeSantis was never winning. He did okay, briefly, against a hypothetical Trump candidacy; but as soon as Trump declared and the hypothetical became actual, DeSantis was 10 points behind, and he only went down from there. It's the same phenomenon we saw with Harris. Hypothetical Harris was polling about the same as Biden; actual Harris is doing much better.
Republican voters really do support Trump. The institutional Republican Party would dearly love to cut him loose, but party institutions are weak and Republican institutions weakest of all. The last few election cycles have purged almost all of the politicians who were willing to stand up to him.
It has a lot to do with his indictments. I've had heated debates with a Trump supporter. After calming down he admits that he'd rather it had been Nikki Haley. His passion for him today is mainly driven by his view that Trump is being prosecuted by his political enemies -- he talks about the failed assassination a lot.
He is like an old mumbling uncle to them. People are ready to move on. But they still love him and will come out and defend him if he's under attack.
No, not too much to ask...in fact it was asked, and the Democratic Party delivered. We now have a candidate that is very good on the merits.
As to the wider issue...yes, I think it is true in retrospect that it would have been better morally for him to exit before the primary, simply not run again at all. But that was not at all obvious at the time, and furthermore it's not clear to me even now whether that would have been superior strategically as opposed to morally. A bruising primary with a 2020-style stampede to the left would not necessarily have led to a great outcome.
Stipulating that he got through the whole primary and won effectively all the delegates, I think it's pretty extremely sour grapes to not give him quite a lot of credit for accepting the party's push out. He really did not have to. The result would have been ugly, but he really could have simply refused, and I think his current detractors greatly underestimate how emotionally difficult that let-go would be. He did a very good thing at a critical moment, let's not whine about it.
I strongly suspect that a prolonged primary prying open the fault lines in the democratic coalition (Gaza, immigration, etc) would have damaged the nominee to the point where a stronger one on paper would have been weaker in practice than Harris. I feel like dems did the best possible thing for the worst reasons. No way to know, but that’s my guess.
"Did the best possible thing for the worst reasons" is the best way to sum up the independent left-center perspective on the Democrats' whole current situation.
What a weird ax to grind, Nate. You’re giving off the vibes of the fellow who stands up in the theatre and yells at the audience that the actors are fake and what they’re seeing is not real.
Not sure this article quite reaches the "weird" threshold, but it is awfully uncharitable to a man who relinquished his bid for the most powerful position on the globe, regardless of the circumstances. My one consolation is that Nate at least acknowledges Nancy Pelosi's abilities as a master strategist and party heavyweight.
You're thinking that pushing back against spin from partisan actors is akin to yelling in a movie theater that it's not real? Do you really think everyone realizes that it's partisan spin to the same extent that they realize movies aren't real?
Would you apply this principal universally, e.g. if someone pushes back against a conservative media source portraying Trump as a champion of the working class?
Thank you. I find Biden idolatry to be absurd. He behaved selfishly and so did the people around him. I get why Democrats see no upside in diminishing an already diminished figure. Biden will be a liability to Harris, not an asset. The less said about him the better. The Snyder tweet is self-abasing.
Yep, I've had a similar argument that dictators who quit willingly should have a nice peaceful life rather than be criminally tried: you want to reward good decisions and allow for graceful losses.
Sure you do, but that is a practical argument to make the to people around him. Not something that should be swaying the pronouncements of people actually interested in the truth.
If Snyder doesn't want to be known as such that is fine, though he should probably get out of academia then since that is presumably what it is still about? Or is it time to nix the whole thing?
Nate Silver built his reputation on numbers-based political analysis. Whenever he strays into punditry, he seems to lose his footing. I'm not sure what animus Silver has for Biden, but it isn't data that is causing him to write this post.
He's got some fanboy thing about Shapiro. He had some article moaning about all these pundits who get distracted by candidate 'Vibes" instead of fundamentals and then in the same article he calls Shapiro charismatic several times, and also a "generational political talent.". I don't know why. He's not the first guy to win AG a couple times and then governor.
I haven't followed Shapiro's career, but I understand that at age 20, he wrote an article stating that there's no chance for Israeli-Palestinian peace because the Palestinians don't want peace. This means that at least at 20, he was someone connected to reality, which is more than can be said about most Democratic politicians of his age.
His take was actually more numbers based. Shapiro vastly outperformed the expected outcome for a Dem gubernatorial candidate and still holds much higher favourability ratings than he should.
It's the same here. The numbers show that Biden should've dropped out a lot earlier than he did, and when you add all those things up in a 50-50 election, it could end up making the difference. Nate is seeing a world on November 6th where we wake up, Trump wins by an extremely narrow margin (a very likely outcome given current projections), and the autopsy begins. That autopsy will NOT look good for Biden who wasted at least six months fumbling his way towards the historic decision that everyone is celebrating.
That's why I don't listen to the podcast (I tried) or follow him on Twitter (where I unfollowed him long before I deleted my account due to the Musking). Even Nate has acknowledged in the past that he's not great at punditry, but it's a lesson he keeps having to re-learn.
In this instance, he has a point that Biden was essentially forced out, but he's not giving Biden nearly enough credit for bowing out gracefully once he made the decision and giving a full-throated endorsement to Kamala. He didn't have to do that, and his actions have definitely contributed to the party unity that Democrats are now experiencing.
There's no good reason to believe that Biden would have lost the Democratic nomination if he had stuck around. He willingly gave it up. Yeah, he had to be pushed to do so, but given how few people historically have voluntarily stepped down from a position of power with at least a shred of dignity, I think it is proper to give him some credit for doing so.
How would you even go about engineering this coup d'etat? Is Kamala Harris or Gretchen Whitmer going to send emissaries to woo the DNC delegates one by one about two weeks before they certify? This actually happened in early August, the real voting was done digitally.
I think you are underestimating how ugly it could have gotten and how much pressure they could have applied. No one thinks Biden is a monster , he would eventually cave, and he did.
I don't know who you mean by "they." If you mean the delegates, I have to just echo Ezra Klein's opinion that they would not have gone against him in any large numbers, nor would an alternative candidate have sprung up in time. If you mean party leadership, then I agree the pressure would have been such (indeed, was probably already such) that Biden would have to be a monster not to step down. However, there are actually a lot of monsters—or put it more precisely, a lot of egotists obsessed with their supposed irreplaceability—in politics! People in this thread have mentioned Feinstein and Bader-Ginsburg and Trump as three examples. So if Snyder's praise is too effusive, I still think it's closer to the mark than Nate's "he was just marking a Tic-Tac-Toe box" claim.
If it did get that ugly and Biden was outright forcibly removed, I would be shocked if the successor candidate was able to succeed in the general. The bad blood between Biden supporters and those supporting his removal would taint every discussion until November, and we would be mired in anger and controversy rather than excitement and joy. There was no way to move forward to our current (relatively successful) position without Biden deciding to make a graceful, albeit overdue, exit.
According to an article in the NYT, Pelosi played a big role and Biden has stopped speaking to her over it. People with dementia lose insight into their problems.
The article said they haven't spoken since he dropped out; that isn't the same as "he's stopped speaking to her over it." He's still President of the United States -- kind of a busy job, you know -- and it's been barely a month.
Anyway, considering how long Biden struggled to reach the Presidency, it's hardly a surprise that he'd be feeling pretty raw after being strong-armed into quitting the race. (Even if the strong-arming was a last resort undertaken when it was clear things were heading for disaster and there was no other way.)
IDK, I talked to a delegate at a fundraiser less than a week before he stepped down. It was at an event held by a congressperson. The delegate was very clear they were "required" to support Biden, but was wearing a Harris shirt. When I pointed out to the delegate and others that they were not actually strictly speaking required to do so, they did maintain their position, but there was a bit of smirk and jauntiness about them and their Harris support that made me think they knew something would happen.
They didn't seem like they gave two fucks about Biden or were at all willing to defend supporting him. But were just like "I will do what is required it is fine" with a big grin on their face.
This was the part were Nate lost me. I don't like revisionist history, and there is certainly some amount of that going on with Biden's choice, but in the end, it still required Biden to make the choice, and a lot of other politicians absolutely would not.
Lots of donors as well as low voters would abandoning Biden, more and more dems most recently led by Sherrod Brown, the top of congressional leadership led by Pelosi were leading directly or effectively stopping Biden… I guess you could say Biden could have stayed up for but what kind of race would have had for Biden if he’d stayed?
What would Biden’s campaign would have been like if he’d stayed in office given the fact that Biden couldn’t work enough to have a campaign like Harris has, was losing more and more Democrats stepping away from him, and both voters and campaign money dropping off?
AOC advertised on Instagram that she was going to go on at 6:00pm. She didn't take the stage until 6:40pm. I think it's occam's razor to say that the organizers messed up their timing or got delayed. Nate suggesting there was some sort of backroom collusion to keep Biden away from viewers just feels like an oddly farfetched belief from the "data guy."
(Frankly, as someone who watches his speeches on Youtube quite often, it feels like Democratic political speeches never happen when they are supposed to. Biden's speech after the NATO Summit was also pretty darn delayed from when it was scheduled to start. They seemingly tightened the schedule up last night and Obama still went on after 11pm.)
The funniest part of Nate’s argument is that the organizers could’ve used the “Oscars get the hell off the stage music” as a solution. When 1) I’m sure the DNC crowd would’ve loved hearing someone like Warnock or even the Union Leader get wrap-up music and 2) Everyone knows the Oscars are notoriously well known for always ending on time and never going long.
I've been following the party conventions for literally 80 years and I cannot recall any that stayed on schedule. And as someone who has organized large convention-like meetings of other sorts I have a very clear idea of why this occurs, and the all but insoluble difficulties involved in trying to change it.
Some delays are unexpected, but still, if you want to make sure someone is on before 10 pm, you can do that by scheduling them at 8, while if you schedule them after 9, you know there's a reasonable chance they don't get on until 10 or even later.
It's like with traffic, or air travel delays - you never know how long it's actually going to be until you arrive, but you have some sense of how likely it is, and you have a choice about how to schedule around that possibility. If you intentionally scheduled a 1 hour connection at O'Hare in February, then you probably aren't that concerned about a snowstorm trapping you, and if you intentionally scheduled events in downtown LA and Santa Monica within an hour of each other, then you must have thought it wasn't too much of a tragedy if you missed the second one.
I’d argue that not having Biden be the headliner is much more of an insult than having him go on too late.
James Taylor had his whole performance cut. Is there also some anti-James Taylor contingent within the Democratic Party that wanted to screw him out of his convention spot too?
"Agreed on Biden deserving a bit more credit. In, say, 10 scenarios where you have a politically non-viable nominee and are relying on that person to put party over self, probably 6+ out of the ten choose self. After all, from their perspective, quitting is a guarantee of not being elected, while a longshot campaign still preserves the possibility if only slightly. Biden could have taken the party down with him and he didn’t. I’m grateful."
Nate says, "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." I don't disagree that course would have shown *more* moral courage. But given that we could expect plenty of folks in similar situations to take their party or institution down with them, I still maintain that Biden deserves some amount of credit. If others are less willing to extend gratitude to Biden and lean more on the side of irritation or even anger, that's fine, but I do want to push back on the idea that Biden had no agency here. Does Pelosi deserve lots of credit? Sure! But Biden could have made the situation a lot worse and he didn't. Don't count on that outcome next time this sort of thing happens.
I think the Snyder praise quoted in that tweet is overly fulsome, but some amount of praise is warranted.
It's like if Joey got too drunk pre-partying, but then took the hint once it was suggested three times, and ducked out before the important part of the ceremony. We don't want people to be in the situation where they need to step out like that, but we still ought to recognize that the ones that see the situation and take relevant action are still better than the others.
Also, everyone seems to say Biden’s decline has occurred relatively recently. When exactly should he have decided that he couldn’t win again to set up a primary - in 2022? Biden did the right thing at roughly the right time and it’s foolish to suggest that there was some other magical time that would have been better.
Yes Biden was obviously selfish in his reluctance to step down, but the “indigo blob” members who do view their role as helping democrats to get elected have every incentive to write posts like that.
First, they essentially promised Biden that he would be viewed positively in order to incentivize him to step aside, and may now feel they need to follow through.
Second, the party has demonstrated remarkable unity after Biden’s departure from the race; why would they risk that by speaking negatively and candidly about Biden?!
I agree with all of the above, but that doesn't mean you can't also go too far praising a person for an important but only adequately executed decision. He did the right thing eventually. He deserves credit for that. But degree is everything; he doesn't need or deserve *that much* credit.
Love you as a numbers guy but your anti-Biden bias is in full bloom. Your analogy in the first paragraph could not be more insulting to the man: apparently intentionally so as you chose it. Your model had Biden at a 28% chance when he dropped, which you characterize as very likely to lose. Your 538 model had Trump at 28% on the eve of the 2016 election: something you characterized after the election as Trump having a significant chance of winning. You repeat (two days in a row) your conspiracy theory that the Dems pushed Biden’s Wednesday speech out of East Coast prime time intentionally in order to bury it, even after former President Obama’s speech likewise was pushed out of prime time last night (you fail to bring that up and I imagine have no theory as to why they would intentionally do that). You make many assertions about the motivations of the players in the journey from Biden the nominee to Biden dropping out based on your gut. I truly hope that you are not letting your growing enjoyment of gut punditry affect your empirical data work. If you do, you will lose your following, or at least this one.
The claim about the 28%, although seemingly clever, is very unfair. Nate Silver repeatedly emphasized that the percentages are based solely on a polling model, as the model wasn't designed to account for a situation where a presidential candidate is unable to complete a coherent sentence. In reality, Biden's chances were clearly lower than that.
Yes, Nate made that point but I’m not sure I agree with it. The polling model absolutely had taken Biden’s speaking abilities (or lack thereof) into account: look at the drop down to 28% after the debate. But it had levelled out at 28% and would likely have stayed there given our partisan divide: as Nate himself would admit, Biden’s fragility was baked in after that debate.
But there would have been constant reminders of that fragility between the debate and the election that would have continued to crater his numbers. I'm guessing that Nate wouldn't actually have bet money on Biden even if you had given him 20-1 odds (I can tell you I wouldn't).
The partisan divide in this country meant that Biden would never have gotten less than 40-45% of the vote, regardless of how bad a candidate he was. Certainly, I would have voted for a corpse over Trump. But Biden had no chance to win. That was immediately apparent after the debate to everyone but Biden, his family, and Democrats so blinded by partisanship that they were literally incapable of seeing Biden as he was, the people who had really convinced themselves that the emperor was wearing clothes.
Seldom am I impressed by Nate the pundit, certainly not this time. "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." This is a total fantasy which completely ignores how DNC delegates are chosen and how they operate. They are chosen from lists of loyalists provided by the campaigns, and since Biden was running unopposed all the delegates were selected by his campaign, except for a few oddball cases like "undeclared" voters in Michigan. This meant there was no credible way Biden could lose unless he stepped down voluntarily. It's also the key reason Kamala Harris could consolidate the support of the whole party almost instantly. Once Biden instructed his delegates to support her, she had everything she needed for victory.
The delegates and party totally had the power to push him out. Simply because he needed everyone on board. Andy dissension in his precarious electoral position was going to be fatal. It wouldn't take too many calls from big donors/Obama/Pelosi whoever, to tip it over. I am sure it was just steadily escalating pressure.
The idea that Biden plus his delegates were within their power to somehow hold out against the will of all the party grandees is silly. Sure that might be strictly speaking possible, but it is not realistically what would happen. And while Biden did pick the delegates, a huge number of them are going to be general party loyalists, not necessarily Biden loyalists.
The notion that Biden threw everything out to stay as long as he could and seeing the enormous effort to the rest of the party launched by Pelosi to get Biden to drop off. Large numbers of fundraisers were refusing to help Biden, more and more congressional Dems were stopping away from Biden, and Biden was seriously dropping . I guess you could say Biden could have technically stayed to run, but if it would have been a seriously damaged his fundraising and have almost seriously seen him seriously defeated in November and turned Democrats against him after Trump lost.
Yeah the idea he wasn't forced out when the calls for him to step down were getting so open is silly.
If I threaten to pull a gun on you if you don't do X, you refuse, and then I unholster the gun, and you refuse, and then point it at you, and then you do what I say.
Being like "well there was no warning shot so they weren't really pressured" is pretty silly.
Politics makes people tribal and stupid, like Mr. Snyder. And the gaggle of commenters here mad Nate doesn't love President piss pants who appeared for months happy to throw away the election.
I’d add to stupid tribal people a lot of people can never admit they are wrong about anything ever. A big part of the reason so many people hate Nate Silver is they can’t blame him for being about 2016. Harris has made it obvious how much we didn’t really have a president for months if not longer.
The people in the comment section are a self-selected group of people who are paying for Silver Bulletin. On the whole, that's not a group of people who are likely to hate Nate Silver.
Regardless of Biden reading the tea leaves or Pelosi pushing him, I think you're being disingenuous when you don't give Biden the proper credit for stepping aside. It was, in fact, a patriotic and selfless act. Don't believe me? Picture what would be happening on the Republican side if a similar effort of the party faithful and/or their Pelosi equivalent was trying to push Trump off the ticket. Do you think for a moment -- even if polls and support showed him losing -- Trump would walk away from the nomination? Of course not. In fact, despite losing an election, he tried to steal it to retain power. So give credit for character where credit is due. I realize comparing anyone's character to Trump is a bit of a straw dog game, but that's where we are right now. If Biden had been even a minor bit Trump-like, he would have put himself and his own selfish interests above party and country. Biden did the opposite. Acknowledge that.
"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"
Minor comment: The time-use argument overstates the case, since (AFAICT) it reports time in the respondent's local time zone, but 11:30pm is only for Eastern time; it was 1030pm in Chicago and only 830pm where I am.
Seems pretty damn obvious. 4 out of the 7 swing states are on Eastern Time. However you don't really need a conspiracy to explain an event running late.
Besides, whose time would have been cut so Old Joe could have been on earlier? Not the absolutely riveting and cheer-worthy parlay of four Lieutenant Governors we (or some of us) were treated to; or, that spell-binding hulk of a billionaire governor, (whoever he was), the crowd couldn’t get enough of. I was semi-surprised they didn’t rope in a few break-dancers to keep us all on the edge our seats, waiting (and waiting) for Old Joe to make his appearance; and, like a glass of warm milk, put us to sleep.
It's not clear what your grudge is against Biden, or Snyder, but this post will make me think twice about anything you post that's not pure numbers.
I feel like he makes both of those clear in the first couple paragraphs. The grudge against Biden is due to not dropping out when it was first clear that he should and trying to hang on for far too long. The grudge against Snyder is for caring more about helping Democrats over truth-seeking. You're free to disagree with those reasons, and even discount what Nate says because of them, but personally I agree with him on both counts, though I think I am a bit more forgiving of Biden.
Really he quit at the perfect time. Democrats got to skip the usual interparty struggle and settle on the only plausible standard bearer. I could make the argument that Biden should have stepped down a year ago but there was no strong evidence he was behind then. There's no particular reason to think a contested primary would work in Democrats favor.
I'm hopeful it will turn out to be true (Biden quitting at the perfect time), but we won't know until November*; but even if turns out to be true, I don't think it was a strategic move on Biden's part. I think (and will think) he was just lucky. But hopefully, it may lead to some changes in the primary process.
*Arguably, we won't KNOW even in November. If Trump wins, it's certainly possible that even had Biden announced he wasn't running again back in 2022, Trump would still have won. And if Kamala wins, it's possible that the Democrats would still have won, even had the process played out differently. Having said that, I plan to take the election results as having answered the question.
If KH wins, we'll see if they skipped or deferred the intraparty struggle.
I think what the post is really getting at is that though Biden eventually did the right thing, he risked a significant amount of the margins on the pathway to his decision.
If it goes well, all will probably be forgotten and Dems will rebuild the party's image around this new hopeful vision for the party. Biden and his decision will be lionized as one of the bravest choices a president has ever made. Kamala will be hailed as the president that truly brought America into the 21st century and reflects what America actually looks like in the 21st century.
If it doesn't go well though... then we have a different story. When we get the results, and it turns out that half a point in one swing state would've made the difference, then the decisions that led up to the Harris-Walz ticket will be dissected over and over until the 2026 cycle, and those decisions don't exactly look good for Biden. People will argue about how much of a difference an actual primary would've made in terms of name recognition. People will lament how long it took Biden to drop out after the debate when it was clear for weeks that pretty much everyone who's not a Republican or on the Biden campaign wanted him to. These things will only make a difference on the margins, but in a 50-50 race, those margins often add up to what makes the difference.
There are very good arguments to be made that Biden handled his campaign extremely poorly, and even though he eventually made the right decision, his journey there deserves a healthy amount of criticism.
You call Biden's decision to drop out as "brave".
Really?
Reporting from multiple sources are that behind the scenes Pelosi and other Party big-wigs were threatening Biden not only with an 'open convention' but also with leaking multiple additional insider eye-witness accounts of his dramatic cognitive decline.
So his dropping out should best be described as 'cowardly'. The 'brave' thing would have been to stay in and go down swinging.
It seemed clear to me that James wasn't describing the decision as brave. He was predicting that, in the event of a Harris win, it will go down in party lore as brave.
Strongly agree with your take on how Dems will react depending on who wins.
If Kamala Harris wins... She will be president.
Harris vs. Trump is a coin toss right now, which is a heck of a lot better than Biden vs. Trump was shaping up; but it's still just a coin toss. There might be someone on the Democratic bench who would be doing much better than Harris if they'd been nominated. We missed the chance to find out.
Will you still say that he quit at the perfect time if Harris loses the election?
"The grudge against Biden is due to not dropping out when it was first clear that he should" how about saving that, and any other anti-Democrats grudge for after we avoid the epic disaster of Trump's 2nd term? Oh yeah: there may not be as much of that sweet extra few bucks in clicks later on (btw, good job getting all those "who would be better candidate than Kamala, and why a 'coronation' would be bad process" articles under the wire in those short few days that was gonna be worth any attention). Call it my grudge against Nate, and practically every other journalist, analyst, writer out there: you have a big role in all this, don't act like it's someone else's responsibility to stop Trump. Be objective, do your actual job and write a thousand critical pieces of Trump and Republicans before writing anything against Biden, Harris or Democrats. Stop digging up stuff like this, you are obviously not doing it for the ideals of objectivity or truth, but because that's where the attention and clicks would be waiting for you. In other words Nate: you owe everyone, yourself included a series of hit pieces on Republicans now. I am tired of this "River" shit - it called selfishness. Oh, and that "I would have voted Libertarian" line you gave Ezra Klein was so pathetic - you didn't even have a name of the Libertarian candidate, never mind any potential issues with him or her. You should vote for Joe Biden's dog if he were to be the Democratic candidate against Trump, never mind Joe Biden. There is such a time when we all (those of us who are perfectly well aware of what's at stake in this election, and are not "men who just want to see the world burn") need to close the ranks and work together: you are either with the Village or with the incoming tsunami, there should be no River games now (and there will definitely be no River if Trump wins)
Ivan, I’m a political moderate who has voted for both Democrats and Republicans (Never Trump). The fact that Nate is willing to be objective and cover Democrats in a negative light is WHY I trust him. Not everything the party does is good, and many people like me won’t be gaslit into believing so. To your comment about Nate having a “role to stop Donald Trump’s 2nd term”, that is literally why me and other moderates don’t trust the mainstream media at all (see gaslit comment above). I don’t want Nate to convince me to vote for Harris by lying to me about the state of the Democratic Party; I want him and others to provide a realistic picture of how both parties are behaving so that I have accurate information to make a decision… thus putting the pressure on said Parties to behave properly vs. perpetuating their improper behavior while the media convinces me that it’s actually proper behavior.
Yeah, I mean, I generally appreciate Nate’s approach to forming his opinions, even if I don’t always agree with his conclusions. Honestly when I disagree with his takes it’s almost refreshing because for the most part my political disagreements these days fall into either of two categories:
a) “What this person is arguing literally makes me nauseous; how anyone can be so clearly cynical and bad-faith in the service of such an ugly ideology?”
or
b) “Jeez — I mean I don’t want MAGA to win either — but this person’s Pollyanna-esque way of acting like the set of politicians who just happen to be the only reasonable alternative are all ‘knights in shining armor’… makes feel like it just might.”
I’m mostly here for the polling and model stuff. But it’s almost refreshing to read some punditry where I’m like: “Well, I see your argument but I don’t know if I completely agree… let’s just agree to disagree on some of this.”
You say you are "Never Trump", but then you say you need someone to provide some additional info to you before you decide to do your small part to stop him? Well which of those two is true? And what more info do you need? You really need someone to tell you that Democrats have their share of bad things about them? And you also need someone to weigh all that for you against everything that Trump is and is going to do before deciding what are you going to do on Election Day? Lance, you are going to have to forgive me, but I don't buy any of that. This "wait, wait everyone - I still need more info!" shtick is tiresome and harmful. No, you don't need any more info. You just want more attention. But believe me: nobody takes the remaining "undecideds" of this election for "the hardest thinkers of our electorate" (or something like that) no matter how hard they try to make themselves look like it. Having said all that - I'll be glad to take her down for everything she does wrong every step of the way, but: starting with January 21 of next year. Not now. Maybe in 2028, if Republicans nominate a sane person. But not now.
The best way to beat trump is to have reliable data about the state of the race. So I'm with Lance. In this case the data were so obvious (75% wanted him out, 63% embarrassed by both), that it shouldn't require a quant to make the case.
What does that have anything to do with the race right now? Do I need to tell you how much I cursed Biden before he dropped out because he was about to hand the country/world/planet to Trump due to being so self centered as he was being? We can get back to that if we have nothing better to do after the election. My point is: now is not time for that.
Your response is more than a little irrational. I admire Biden for stepping down, but there is an argument that he only did so as a response to pressure. If that is true, does it affect our evaluation of his actions? In the same way, Lincoln was not for ending slavery at first, but we applaud him for getting there. The only grudge I sense is in your response to this article.
In a matter of days he went from "only if I get a message from God" to being all but out the door. Maybe Nancy Pelosi is the second coming that has been the subject of prophets through millienia. Who knew?
Spoken language tends to be more rhetorical. If someone is asked an uncomfortable question over and over, it is human to take it personally and respond with an answer like that.
what about this seemed like he had a “grudge” against biden or snyder?
The extended metaphor in which he compares Biden to a puking drunkard is a little over the top. Biden's issue isn't drugs I think.
I took the metaphor to mean someone lacking their cognitive faculties. Whether it was temporary or permanent, the "hero" of the story is the person who intercedes to help. For all the negative press on JRB, I've never heard 1 mention of any chemical issues.
And being President of the US is a much bigger deal than attending a wedding. The analogy flips where the choice is, that's all.
Cognitively impaired people (due to age or anything else) should be allowed to attend weddings, but no one should choose to do drugs at a wedding to the point that they are disruptive.
People with significant cognitive impairment (due to age or anything else) should be respected, but attempting to hold a high stakes executive position that would be compromised by that impairment (which I'm not certain is true now, but the risk is way too high in the next 4.5 years) is a much *worse* decision than getting drunk or high at a wedding and disrupting the wedding.
I think what makes it a bad analogy is, is Biden the equivalent of one of the groomsmen (not even the best man! a groomsman!) at the wedding? It seems like he's more like the groom, right? The groom who's being asked to graciously give up marrying his dream girl, and then root like hell for the guy who's marrying her instead? I think we would be pretty indulgent of such a groom even if he got a bit petulant when first asked to step aside.
You are taking the metaphor too literally, which defeats the purpose of metaphors. They are not statements of fact to be parsed this closely.
I think he doesn't give any actual consideration to the argument that Biden was heroic or admirable. He doesn't try at all to put himself in the shoes of that argument (to "steelman" it or apply an "intellectual Turing test" in rationalist terms). He just ridicules it and says that Snyder is, in bad faith, trying to favor the Democratic Party. He may be right on both counts, but he argues so poorly that we can't really tell.
It would have been heroic or admirable to step aside before the primary. In the end, he was gifted an almost perfect moment to do it. He stepped down when the party was ready to rally around Harris out of fear of Trump being unbeatable after the shooting. It was pure luck that waiting this long ended up being better than stepping out earlier.
The fact that you don’t get the problems are so obvious I don’t even have to think about Biden and Snyder on this. Bear in mind I voted Biden in the 2020/24 South Carolina primary and voted in 2020 election. Biden dropped far too long to stay in the campaign, and did everything he could stay in if possible. He only stayed dropped because he didn’t have any choice. Bear in mind I stayed with Biden until after the debate was one of the worse things I’ve ever been wrong about.
Snyder makes himself out to be a partisan idiot, so that is one big reason to have a grudge against him. He is an embarrassment to his profession/institution.
One month of subscription to this newsletter is all I can take. The 11 PM speech trutherism broke me.
lol you are the one who sounds like engaging in trutherism. You’re a total embarrassment
lol why don’t you respond to the person I original responded to. I’m not the one who came up with the trutherism. Then maybe you could explain why the comment I responded to was more than an embarrassment
https://www.natesilver.net/p/against-revisionist-history-on-biden/comment/66323254?r=auz4n&utm_medium=ios
Maybe try to use a logical argument instead of resorting to ad hominem next time.
Nate is a strictly horse-race journalist. These strike me as horse-race strategy/journalism criticisms, not idealogical ones.
Don't have the inclination to defend Nate as I'm sure he could do a far better job...however conditional probabilities ostensibly depend on factual accounting of events? We've been sticking to this whole Bayesian thing for a while, as I see it at least (AISIAL).
I suspect "Joe Fitzgerald" isn't that interested in probabilities or facts, just partisan point scoring.
Can you explain your disagreement? I was nodding along the whole post and am confused what about it was so objectionable.
My problem with Nate's column is surprisingly simple and also unsurprising: Silver is analyzing humans as if they're numbers. Ironically, by demonstrating his limitations as a pundit, he's practicing exactly what he accuses Snyder of doing.
The effort to remove Biden, the question of whether he should have run in the first place , Biden's agency in the entire affair: These were all very nuanced events, that evolved over time along with the perspectives of the humans involved in them. But Nate is absolutist about it in a way that seems almost too stereotypical for a numbers guy.
"It’s Pelosi who deserves the credit for playing hardball — not Biden for belatedly reading the writing on the wall," he writes. Really? Biden doesn't deserve ANY credit? Not for reading that writing, for example? For wisely throwing his support to Harris? For so gracefully making his exit? For not allowing the ordeal to get in the way of actual governing? For continuing to hammer Trump -- now on behalf of Harris?
Then, there's Silver's failure to mention the fact that Biden is a human being -- specifically a driven person whose entire career, self image and LIFE has been built on getting up off the canvas and fighting after people thought he was down for the count. That's what got him to the presidency. That's what enabled him to do the very hard work to pass an amazing amount of consequential legislation. That made it easier for him to believe that he was the warrior who needed to stay in the arena to defeat Trump again. And that certainly made it harder for him to throw in the towel. Yet, he did.
Silver ignores all this humanity by sticking the neat label of "party man" on Biden, and then back-rationalizing that he therefore should have followed Nate's "party man" archtype.
I've always admired how hard Nate works to carefully incorporate many variables into his models. But he doesn't demonstrate such care with the Uncle Joey analogy. For one thing, it's plainly problematic: There are fundamental typological differences between drunken behavior and aging -- between an out-of-control evening and a slow decline that just doesn't carry the same kind of moral baggage in our society.
More directly, the analogy is incomplete: Nate would have been more accurate if he noted that Uncle Joey used the opportunity to stop drinking for good and hasn't had a drop since. Then, when the couple came back from their honeymoon, he got the entire wedding party back together, apologized, offered up a new and fulsome toast (over lemonade), and gave the couple a new car. Gotta love that Uncle Joey!
Silver further undermines his authority by doubling down on the Biden-speaking-after-11 conspiracy theory even after both Barack Obama and Tim Walz were pushed passed 11 on Monday and Tuesday. Malarkey! Did the Dems also conspire to push their most charismatic speaker and their lovable VP nominee past 11 because they were embarrassed by them? I don't think so.
Then Nate unloads a double-barreled shotgun at one of the world's most respected and consequential historians. He pretty much calls him a "hack." A bit of humility and respect might have allowed Nate to check his own "priors" on the Biden resignation.
A great historian isn't necessarily a good political pundit -- much as a data-based election forecaster isn't necessarily a good analyst of human behavior. But Snyder is a pretty bright guy (understatement) with a perspective built on the study of history. Based on the arguments above, I'd say that the good professor's take on things more accurate than Nate's.
Thanks for taking the time to respond at length; I didn't like the tone of Nate's speculations, either. And speaking of being human, maybe Nate needs to get more rest. Debuting a new book, traveling to promote it, and keeping up with us could be getting on his nerves.
Thanks, that first part answers my question and makes me understand why so many people here hate how Nate talks about Biden.
I’m largely in the Nate camp here where Biden’s humanity and perspectives aren’t that interesting to me. Yes he’s a human being but he’s an incredibly powerful person whose shortcomings devastate the lives of millions, if not billions, of people. I get that his pride makes it very hard for him to step down and he did it anyway, but there’s only so much credit I can give for not putting his own interest ahead of the world’s.
Just a difference in outlook I suppose.
Other commenters have talked about it well, but consider some of the relevant arguments Nate doesn’t engage with (is it common for politicians in Biden’s position to drop out? that would be relevant to the question of how admirable Biden’s choice was), versus irrelevant arguments he spends a great deal of time on (on Biden’s speaking slot at the convention, for instance).
You could argue that there has never been a politican "in Biden's position" because no 81 year old President has sought re-election to the Presidency.
Well, Biden also *gracefully* stepped down an passed the torch instead of sabotaging his successor's candidacy. That sounds like a low bar, but it's one LBJ couldn't clear and that's probably in the back of a lot of Democrats' minds in the Chicago DNC
You don't need to go that far. We have a contemporaneous president who led a violent insurrection after losing and still refuses to pass on the torch after his party has tried multiple times to move on.
I've not seen much evidence of his party moving on. Primary voters picked DJT overwhelmingly. If you're talking about the party elites and donors, he's gotten plenty of support there too.
To the extent that the Republican Party functions, it has repeatedly tried to rid itself of Trump. The elites, failing to act as a whole, have been unable to drag the rank-and-file away from MAGA.
You have to understand that the Republican party is currently under a dictatorship. It can be hard to tell what people really think under a dictator, but it occasionally bubbles up if you pay close attention. DeSantis was winning before Trump was indicted.
DeSantis was never winning. He did okay, briefly, against a hypothetical Trump candidacy; but as soon as Trump declared and the hypothetical became actual, DeSantis was 10 points behind, and he only went down from there. It's the same phenomenon we saw with Harris. Hypothetical Harris was polling about the same as Biden; actual Harris is doing much better.
Republican voters really do support Trump. The institutional Republican Party would dearly love to cut him loose, but party institutions are weak and Republican institutions weakest of all. The last few election cycles have purged almost all of the politicians who were willing to stand up to him.
It has a lot to do with his indictments. I've had heated debates with a Trump supporter. After calming down he admits that he'd rather it had been Nikki Haley. His passion for him today is mainly driven by his view that Trump is being prosecuted by his political enemies -- he talks about the failed assassination a lot.
He is like an old mumbling uncle to them. People are ready to move on. But they still love him and will come out and defend him if he's under attack.
DeSantis lost the primary when he couldn't beat Disney.
yeah I tend to agree with you. Rs in the Senate could have easily put him out to pasture by convicting on either impeachment
Primary voters picked Biden overwhelmingly too. So what?
Is it that much to ask to have a candidate with better credentials than merely "very probably better than an unhinged convicted felon"?
No, not too much to ask...in fact it was asked, and the Democratic Party delivered. We now have a candidate that is very good on the merits.
As to the wider issue...yes, I think it is true in retrospect that it would have been better morally for him to exit before the primary, simply not run again at all. But that was not at all obvious at the time, and furthermore it's not clear to me even now whether that would have been superior strategically as opposed to morally. A bruising primary with a 2020-style stampede to the left would not necessarily have led to a great outcome.
Stipulating that he got through the whole primary and won effectively all the delegates, I think it's pretty extremely sour grapes to not give him quite a lot of credit for accepting the party's push out. He really did not have to. The result would have been ugly, but he really could have simply refused, and I think his current detractors greatly underestimate how emotionally difficult that let-go would be. He did a very good thing at a critical moment, let's not whine about it.
LBJ quit at the end of March, after a close call in the NH primary. How did he sabotage Humphrey??
not to mention the whole, giving humphrey a huge boost in the last weeks of the race. (bombing halt)
I strongly suspect that a prolonged primary prying open the fault lines in the democratic coalition (Gaza, immigration, etc) would have damaged the nominee to the point where a stronger one on paper would have been weaker in practice than Harris. I feel like dems did the best possible thing for the worst reasons. No way to know, but that’s my guess.
"Did the best possible thing for the worst reasons" is the best way to sum up the independent left-center perspective on the Democrats' whole current situation.
What a weird ax to grind, Nate. You’re giving off the vibes of the fellow who stands up in the theatre and yells at the audience that the actors are fake and what they’re seeing is not real.
Not sure this article quite reaches the "weird" threshold, but it is awfully uncharitable to a man who relinquished his bid for the most powerful position on the globe, regardless of the circumstances. My one consolation is that Nate at least acknowledges Nancy Pelosi's abilities as a master strategist and party heavyweight.
You're thinking that pushing back against spin from partisan actors is akin to yelling in a movie theater that it's not real? Do you really think everyone realizes that it's partisan spin to the same extent that they realize movies aren't real?
Would you apply this principal universally, e.g. if someone pushes back against a conservative media source portraying Trump as a champion of the working class?
The fellow in the theatre is saying things that are literally true, but he doesn’t understand the context.
Thank you. I find Biden idolatry to be absurd. He behaved selfishly and so did the people around him. I get why Democrats see no upside in diminishing an already diminished figure. Biden will be a liability to Harris, not an asset. The less said about him the better. The Snyder tweet is self-abasing.
After we take away grandpa's keys (Silver 2024), then we need to continually reinforce his good decision to let us have them.
Yep, I've had a similar argument that dictators who quit willingly should have a nice peaceful life rather than be criminally tried: you want to reward good decisions and allow for graceful losses.
Sure you do, but that is a practical argument to make the to people around him. Not something that should be swaying the pronouncements of people actually interested in the truth.
If Snyder doesn't want to be known as such that is fine, though he should probably get out of academia then since that is presumably what it is still about? Or is it time to nix the whole thing?
Apparently Leonid Brezhnev had dementia in the last few years of his life. I guess others were making the decisions (he was younger than Biden)
Look, all I need to say is Grandpa is an America hero for a few months. That's a pretty good price IMO.
Nate Silver built his reputation on numbers-based political analysis. Whenever he strays into punditry, he seems to lose his footing. I'm not sure what animus Silver has for Biden, but it isn't data that is causing him to write this post.
It's a lot like his articles about Shapiro.
He's got some fanboy thing about Shapiro. He had some article moaning about all these pundits who get distracted by candidate 'Vibes" instead of fundamentals and then in the same article he calls Shapiro charismatic several times, and also a "generational political talent.". I don't know why. He's not the first guy to win AG a couple times and then governor.
I haven't followed Shapiro's career, but I understand that at age 20, he wrote an article stating that there's no chance for Israeli-Palestinian peace because the Palestinians don't want peace. This means that at least at 20, he was someone connected to reality, which is more than can be said about most Democratic politicians of his age.
His take was actually more numbers based. Shapiro vastly outperformed the expected outcome for a Dem gubernatorial candidate and still holds much higher favourability ratings than he should.
It's the same here. The numbers show that Biden should've dropped out a lot earlier than he did, and when you add all those things up in a 50-50 election, it could end up making the difference. Nate is seeing a world on November 6th where we wake up, Trump wins by an extremely narrow margin (a very likely outcome given current projections), and the autopsy begins. That autopsy will NOT look good for Biden who wasted at least six months fumbling his way towards the historic decision that everyone is celebrating.
That's why I don't listen to the podcast (I tried) or follow him on Twitter (where I unfollowed him long before I deleted my account due to the Musking). Even Nate has acknowledged in the past that he's not great at punditry, but it's a lesson he keeps having to re-learn.
In this instance, he has a point that Biden was essentially forced out, but he's not giving Biden nearly enough credit for bowing out gracefully once he made the decision and giving a full-throated endorsement to Kamala. He didn't have to do that, and his actions have definitely contributed to the party unity that Democrats are now experiencing.
Numbers Nate is A+. Pundit Nate ….eesh,
There's no good reason to believe that Biden would have lost the Democratic nomination if he had stuck around. He willingly gave it up. Yeah, he had to be pushed to do so, but given how few people historically have voluntarily stepped down from a position of power with at least a shred of dignity, I think it is proper to give him some credit for doing so.
How would you even go about engineering this coup d'etat? Is Kamala Harris or Gretchen Whitmer going to send emissaries to woo the DNC delegates one by one about two weeks before they certify? This actually happened in early August, the real voting was done digitally.
You would do exactly what they did? Tell him the party elites and big donors won't support him.
That's fine but the delegates would still have voted for him, since there's a collective action problem that prevents anything else from happening.
I think you are underestimating how ugly it could have gotten and how much pressure they could have applied. No one thinks Biden is a monster , he would eventually cave, and he did.
I don't know who you mean by "they." If you mean the delegates, I have to just echo Ezra Klein's opinion that they would not have gone against him in any large numbers, nor would an alternative candidate have sprung up in time. If you mean party leadership, then I agree the pressure would have been such (indeed, was probably already such) that Biden would have to be a monster not to step down. However, there are actually a lot of monsters—or put it more precisely, a lot of egotists obsessed with their supposed irreplaceability—in politics! People in this thread have mentioned Feinstein and Bader-Ginsburg and Trump as three examples. So if Snyder's praise is too effusive, I still think it's closer to the mark than Nate's "he was just marking a Tic-Tac-Toe box" claim.
If it did get that ugly and Biden was outright forcibly removed, I would be shocked if the successor candidate was able to succeed in the general. The bad blood between Biden supporters and those supporting his removal would taint every discussion until November, and we would be mired in anger and controversy rather than excitement and joy. There was no way to move forward to our current (relatively successful) position without Biden deciding to make a graceful, albeit overdue, exit.
According to an article in the NYT, Pelosi played a big role and Biden has stopped speaking to her over it. People with dementia lose insight into their problems.
The article said they haven't spoken since he dropped out; that isn't the same as "he's stopped speaking to her over it." He's still President of the United States -- kind of a busy job, you know -- and it's been barely a month.
Anyway, considering how long Biden struggled to reach the Presidency, it's hardly a surprise that he'd be feeling pretty raw after being strong-armed into quitting the race. (Even if the strong-arming was a last resort undertaken when it was clear things were heading for disaster and there was no other way.)
IDK, I talked to a delegate at a fundraiser less than a week before he stepped down. It was at an event held by a congressperson. The delegate was very clear they were "required" to support Biden, but was wearing a Harris shirt. When I pointed out to the delegate and others that they were not actually strictly speaking required to do so, they did maintain their position, but there was a bit of smirk and jauntiness about them and their Harris support that made me think they knew something would happen.
They didn't seem like they gave two fucks about Biden or were at all willing to defend supporting him. But were just like "I will do what is required it is fine" with a big grin on their face.
This was the part were Nate lost me. I don't like revisionist history, and there is certainly some amount of that going on with Biden's choice, but in the end, it still required Biden to make the choice, and a lot of other politicians absolutely would not.
Lots of donors as well as low voters would abandoning Biden, more and more dems most recently led by Sherrod Brown, the top of congressional leadership led by Pelosi were leading directly or effectively stopping Biden… I guess you could say Biden could have stayed up for but what kind of race would have had for Biden if he’d stayed?
About the same as it was as he left. It was a bifurcated choice.
What would Biden’s campaign would have been like if he’d stayed in office given the fact that Biden couldn’t work enough to have a campaign like Harris has, was losing more and more Democrats stepping away from him, and both voters and campaign money dropping off?
AOC advertised on Instagram that she was going to go on at 6:00pm. She didn't take the stage until 6:40pm. I think it's occam's razor to say that the organizers messed up their timing or got delayed. Nate suggesting there was some sort of backroom collusion to keep Biden away from viewers just feels like an oddly farfetched belief from the "data guy."
(Frankly, as someone who watches his speeches on Youtube quite often, it feels like Democratic political speeches never happen when they are supposed to. Biden's speech after the NATO Summit was also pretty darn delayed from when it was scheduled to start. They seemingly tightened the schedule up last night and Obama still went on after 11pm.)
Obama also spoke the day after at like 10:50, it's clearly not a conspiracy
The funniest part of Nate’s argument is that the organizers could’ve used the “Oscars get the hell off the stage music” as a solution. When 1) I’m sure the DNC crowd would’ve loved hearing someone like Warnock or even the Union Leader get wrap-up music and 2) Everyone knows the Oscars are notoriously well known for always ending on time and never going long.
I've been following the party conventions for literally 80 years and I cannot recall any that stayed on schedule. And as someone who has organized large convention-like meetings of other sorts I have a very clear idea of why this occurs, and the all but insoluble difficulties involved in trying to change it.
Some delays are unexpected, but still, if you want to make sure someone is on before 10 pm, you can do that by scheduling them at 8, while if you schedule them after 9, you know there's a reasonable chance they don't get on until 10 or even later.
It's like with traffic, or air travel delays - you never know how long it's actually going to be until you arrive, but you have some sense of how likely it is, and you have a choice about how to schedule around that possibility. If you intentionally scheduled a 1 hour connection at O'Hare in February, then you probably aren't that concerned about a snowstorm trapping you, and if you intentionally scheduled events in downtown LA and Santa Monica within an hour of each other, then you must have thought it wasn't too much of a tragedy if you missed the second one.
I’d argue that not having Biden be the headliner is much more of an insult than having him go on too late.
James Taylor had his whole performance cut. Is there also some anti-James Taylor contingent within the Democratic Party that wanted to screw him out of his convention spot too?
They cancelled their famous rock musician entertainment just so Biden wouldn't be any later. What was that for?
All of the headliners have run late. Tim Walz' knockout speech last night didn't air until atfer 11PM.
Gonna repost my comment from about a month ago:
"Agreed on Biden deserving a bit more credit. In, say, 10 scenarios where you have a politically non-viable nominee and are relying on that person to put party over self, probably 6+ out of the ten choose self. After all, from their perspective, quitting is a guarantee of not being elected, while a longshot campaign still preserves the possibility if only slightly. Biden could have taken the party down with him and he didn’t. I’m grateful."
Nate says, "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." I don't disagree that course would have shown *more* moral courage. But given that we could expect plenty of folks in similar situations to take their party or institution down with them, I still maintain that Biden deserves some amount of credit. If others are less willing to extend gratitude to Biden and lean more on the side of irritation or even anger, that's fine, but I do want to push back on the idea that Biden had no agency here. Does Pelosi deserve lots of credit? Sure! But Biden could have made the situation a lot worse and he didn't. Don't count on that outcome next time this sort of thing happens.
I think the Snyder praise quoted in that tweet is overly fulsome, but some amount of praise is warranted.
It's like if Joey got too drunk pre-partying, but then took the hint once it was suggested three times, and ducked out before the important part of the ceremony. We don't want people to be in the situation where they need to step out like that, but we still ought to recognize that the ones that see the situation and take relevant action are still better than the others.
Also, everyone seems to say Biden’s decline has occurred relatively recently. When exactly should he have decided that he couldn’t win again to set up a primary - in 2022? Biden did the right thing at roughly the right time and it’s foolish to suggest that there was some other magical time that would have been better.
Yes Biden was obviously selfish in his reluctance to step down, but the “indigo blob” members who do view their role as helping democrats to get elected have every incentive to write posts like that.
First, they essentially promised Biden that he would be viewed positively in order to incentivize him to step aside, and may now feel they need to follow through.
Second, the party has demonstrated remarkable unity after Biden’s departure from the race; why would they risk that by speaking negatively and candidly about Biden?!
I agree with all of the above, but that doesn't mean you can't also go too far praising a person for an important but only adequately executed decision. He did the right thing eventually. He deserves credit for that. But degree is everything; he doesn't need or deserve *that much* credit.
Love you as a numbers guy but your anti-Biden bias is in full bloom. Your analogy in the first paragraph could not be more insulting to the man: apparently intentionally so as you chose it. Your model had Biden at a 28% chance when he dropped, which you characterize as very likely to lose. Your 538 model had Trump at 28% on the eve of the 2016 election: something you characterized after the election as Trump having a significant chance of winning. You repeat (two days in a row) your conspiracy theory that the Dems pushed Biden’s Wednesday speech out of East Coast prime time intentionally in order to bury it, even after former President Obama’s speech likewise was pushed out of prime time last night (you fail to bring that up and I imagine have no theory as to why they would intentionally do that). You make many assertions about the motivations of the players in the journey from Biden the nominee to Biden dropping out based on your gut. I truly hope that you are not letting your growing enjoyment of gut punditry affect your empirical data work. If you do, you will lose your following, or at least this one.
The claim about the 28%, although seemingly clever, is very unfair. Nate Silver repeatedly emphasized that the percentages are based solely on a polling model, as the model wasn't designed to account for a situation where a presidential candidate is unable to complete a coherent sentence. In reality, Biden's chances were clearly lower than that.
Yes, Nate made that point but I’m not sure I agree with it. The polling model absolutely had taken Biden’s speaking abilities (or lack thereof) into account: look at the drop down to 28% after the debate. But it had levelled out at 28% and would likely have stayed there given our partisan divide: as Nate himself would admit, Biden’s fragility was baked in after that debate.
But there would have been constant reminders of that fragility between the debate and the election that would have continued to crater his numbers. I'm guessing that Nate wouldn't actually have bet money on Biden even if you had given him 20-1 odds (I can tell you I wouldn't).
The partisan divide in this country meant that Biden would never have gotten less than 40-45% of the vote, regardless of how bad a candidate he was. Certainly, I would have voted for a corpse over Trump. But Biden had no chance to win. That was immediately apparent after the debate to everyone but Biden, his family, and Democrats so blinded by partisanship that they were literally incapable of seeing Biden as he was, the people who had really convinced themselves that the emperor was wearing clothes.
Seldom am I impressed by Nate the pundit, certainly not this time. "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." This is a total fantasy which completely ignores how DNC delegates are chosen and how they operate. They are chosen from lists of loyalists provided by the campaigns, and since Biden was running unopposed all the delegates were selected by his campaign, except for a few oddball cases like "undeclared" voters in Michigan. This meant there was no credible way Biden could lose unless he stepped down voluntarily. It's also the key reason Kamala Harris could consolidate the support of the whole party almost instantly. Once Biden instructed his delegates to support her, she had everything she needed for victory.
The delegates and party totally had the power to push him out. Simply because he needed everyone on board. Andy dissension in his precarious electoral position was going to be fatal. It wouldn't take too many calls from big donors/Obama/Pelosi whoever, to tip it over. I am sure it was just steadily escalating pressure.
The idea that Biden plus his delegates were within their power to somehow hold out against the will of all the party grandees is silly. Sure that might be strictly speaking possible, but it is not realistically what would happen. And while Biden did pick the delegates, a huge number of them are going to be general party loyalists, not necessarily Biden loyalists.
The notion that Biden threw everything out to stay as long as he could and seeing the enormous effort to the rest of the party launched by Pelosi to get Biden to drop off. Large numbers of fundraisers were refusing to help Biden, more and more congressional Dems were stopping away from Biden, and Biden was seriously dropping . I guess you could say Biden could have technically stayed to run, but if it would have been a seriously damaged his fundraising and have almost seriously seen him seriously defeated in November and turned Democrats against him after Trump lost.
Yeah the idea he wasn't forced out when the calls for him to step down were getting so open is silly.
If I threaten to pull a gun on you if you don't do X, you refuse, and then I unholster the gun, and you refuse, and then point it at you, and then you do what I say.
Being like "well there was no warning shot so they weren't really pressured" is pretty silly.
I’m glad some people are reasonable about this but I’m surprised how many people even now don’t get it.
Politics makes people tribal and stupid, like Mr. Snyder. And the gaggle of commenters here mad Nate doesn't love President piss pants who appeared for months happy to throw away the election.
I’d add to stupid tribal people a lot of people can never admit they are wrong about anything ever. A big part of the reason so many people hate Nate Silver is they can’t blame him for being about 2016. Harris has made it obvious how much we didn’t really have a president for months if not longer.
The people in the comment section are a self-selected group of people who are paying for Silver Bulletin. On the whole, that's not a group of people who are likely to hate Nate Silver.
Regardless of Biden reading the tea leaves or Pelosi pushing him, I think you're being disingenuous when you don't give Biden the proper credit for stepping aside. It was, in fact, a patriotic and selfless act. Don't believe me? Picture what would be happening on the Republican side if a similar effort of the party faithful and/or their Pelosi equivalent was trying to push Trump off the ticket. Do you think for a moment -- even if polls and support showed him losing -- Trump would walk away from the nomination? Of course not. In fact, despite losing an election, he tried to steal it to retain power. So give credit for character where credit is due. I realize comparing anyone's character to Trump is a bit of a straw dog game, but that's where we are right now. If Biden had been even a minor bit Trump-like, he would have put himself and his own selfish interests above party and country. Biden did the opposite. Acknowledge that.
A pundit Nate is not.
He is, but it doesn't look good on him. Sorry Nate. Not a good look! Stick to numbers please.
"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"
Minor comment: The time-use argument overstates the case, since (AFAICT) it reports time in the respondent's local time zone, but 11:30pm is only for Eastern time; it was 1030pm in Chicago and only 830pm where I am.
Seems pretty damn obvious. 4 out of the 7 swing states are on Eastern Time. However you don't really need a conspiracy to explain an event running late.
Besides, whose time would have been cut so Old Joe could have been on earlier? Not the absolutely riveting and cheer-worthy parlay of four Lieutenant Governors we (or some of us) were treated to; or, that spell-binding hulk of a billionaire governor, (whoever he was), the crowd couldn’t get enough of. I was semi-surprised they didn’t rope in a few break-dancers to keep us all on the edge our seats, waiting (and waiting) for Old Joe to make his appearance; and, like a glass of warm milk, put us to sleep.
that snyder tweet is so unbelievably sanctimonious