What Democrats should do next

Biden is probably in trouble. Here's how to replace him.

Over at the New York Times, I have a story arguing for a slightly radical idea as Democrats consider what to do next about Joe Biden: throwing it back to the voters.

To overcome the obvious problem — the Democratic primary is over — here’s an idea. It’s not ideal, but I want a Democrat who can give the party a fighting chance. Even if the replacement candidate’s chances are below 50 percent, what matters is that he or she probably can poll better than Mr. Biden.

The party could hold an open audition for the nomination process. Candidates who raised their hands would hold two or three debates against one another. They could give speeches and hold rallies. And Democrats could vote in straw polls sponsored by donors in a combination of virtual locations and physical ones that reflected the demographic breadth of the Democratic Party — say, in Atlanta, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and one or two more rural locations. Voters would also express their opinions in regular opinion polls.

The first step in this plan, to be clear, is Biden getting out of the way. But the piece argues that voters have been pretty smart so far. They correctly detected that Biden’s age was a huge concern, a sentiment shared by relatively few pundits until recently — although there were some exceptions, as newsletter readers will know.

And voters are making a crystal-clear distinction between Biden and other Democrats. In polls of states that are highly competitive in both the presidential race and the Senate, there literally hasn’t been a single poll showing the Democratic Senate candidate losing since March — whereas almost none of the exact same polls show Biden winning:

In 46 of the 47 polls, the Democratic Senate candidate polled better than Mr. Biden. He and the Senate candidate performed equally well in one poll. Which means that Mr. Biden didn’t outpoll the Senate candidate in any of the surveys. (I’m using the versions of the polls among likely voters, and the version with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. included if the pollster made one available.)

None of the 47 polls — not a single one of them — showed the Democratic candidate trailing in the Senate race, though two showed a tie. In contrast, Mr. Biden led in only seven of the surveys, was tied with Mr. Trump in two and trailed in the other 38.

True, until recently, this wasn’t consistently true in polls of the presidential race. But those polls described hypothetical rather than actual matchups, including some involving candidates with relatively low name recognition. And that’s starting to change, too: A CNN poll yesterday found Biden trading Trump by 6 points, but Vice President Harris trailing him by 2 — not a great position for her by any means, but something that would at least roughly restore the pre-debate status quo.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

Ordinarily, I’d just drop the link to the Times story in here and leave it at that. But we’re dealing with a very compressed schedule — the 4th of July is tomorrow, so we’re heading into a de facto four-day weekend.¹ I also owe you a forecast update by the end of the week. (We’ve been updating the model nearly every day, but there’s also supposed to be at least one narrative story a week about the model for paid subscribers.) And the situation is evolving incredibly quickly.

Which means I’m going to do something stupid: not tell you what I think should happen with Biden — that’s covered by the Times story — but offer a prediction of what I think will happen.

The reason this is stupid is because it’s mostly up to one man: Biden. If we’re being extremely literal, the decision technically isn’t Biden’s alone.² But for all practical purposes, it comes down to the choices of what is probably a very narrow circle of family and advisors — and ultimately to Biden himself. There isn’t any good way to build a formal model of Biden’s thought process.

But by reading this newsletter, I suppose I think you’re indulging me to articulate predictions that will quite possibly be wrong — but where I think I have one or two insights that might be worthwhile. Even if that means people will screencap this and throw it back in my face later — which they will.

And if I had to bet, I’d bet against Biden being the Democratic nominee on Nov. 5.

This might seem like a radical position, but it’s not to people who are actually putting money on the line. At Polymarket, the probability of what Maria and I called p(drop)³ — the chance that Biden will drop out at some point before the election — is 53 percent. In other words, very slightly more likely than not. In fact, Harris is now considered about as likely as Biden to be the next president according to prediction markets. And her implied win probability — her chances of winning the presidency conditional on winning the nomination — is actually higher than Biden’s, about 40 percent as compared to his 30 percent.

These traders are presumably gaming things out in some of the same ways that I am. In a tweet on Monday night, I explained my rationale for this:

Let me offer a slightly longer explanation of each of these points.

• First, the polls. In our model, Biden has fallen from a 35 percent chance against Trump before the debate to 28 percent now. But his penalty from the debate is probably not yet fully priced in. Trump has gained 1.2 points in our national polling average since the debate, but the model is trying to balance different heuristics — not getting too aggressive, although it is aware that a debate just happened. But if you look at polls that provide for a direct pre-and-post debate comparison, Biden appears to have fallen by more — 2 points, 2,5 points, or maybe even 3. Keep in mind that the fallout from the debate has also been bad for Biden, which could create an additional burden on his numbers beyond the debate itself.

• Second, although I might bet on Biden surviving the current state of disarray, he’s at best going to emerge extremely wobbly from it. One more major problem in an impromptu setting, like a botched press conference, and this is probably unsustainable. There are also considerations like whether news stories will come out documenting additional, unflattering details about Biden’s condition — or whether the White House has been less than truthful with the American public about them. The press is going to cover this story extremely aggressively between now and Nov. 5, having been duped by partisan hacks posing as media critics into not covering it sufficiently before.

• Third, I don’t think there are actually that many Democrats who have an incentive to keep this going, including Biden and the White House. If they continue on in the race and lose to Trump, they will be remembered by liberals as almost Shakespearean villains — the old man and his counsel who were too stubborn to heed the wisdom of the public. Meanwhile, elected office-holders are starting to bail on Biden. And if you read the smoke-signals carefully, so are some of the elder statesmen in the party, like James Clyburn and Barack Obama. No, they’re not saying this explicitly — but that Obama failed to refute a Washington Post story that suggested he has private doubts about Biden is what we poker players call a “tell”.

  

• Fourth, by the euphemism “actuarial risk”, I mean that there’s some chance Biden could suffer a severe medical episode between now and November that forces everyone’s hand. I don’t want to speculate on the probability of this; it’s low, but it’s certainly not zero.

• And finally, asking voters to make the guy they saw on Thursday president for another four years is fundamentally a really bad idea:

  

  Now, to be fair, the story I linked to there — suggesting Biden only has 6 “dependably engaged” hours a day — probably wasn’t a misguided attempt at spin. Instead, it means there’s some constituency within the White House that’s leaking to reporters. But that’s sort of the point. The White House has mostly been leak-free until recently. People know this is a bad idea, and they want out. Moreover, Biden might literally be incapable of doing what he needs to allay people’s doubts — like giving a bunch of impromptu interviews and press conferences where he hits his marks. It does look like he’s going to try on Friday in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, although Biden has been using teleprompters even at private fundraisers.

On top of all this, there is a lot of momentum building for Harris, as should be obvious if you’ve been checking Twitter lately (or checking the prediction markets). As I wrote in the NYT, that’s not my preferred solution — I very much think Harris deserves a chance, but I’d rather see open auditions for the nomination, which she’d compete in and might win anyway.

Nevertheless, that there’s this consolidation behind one alternative is very bearish for Biden, since Harris provides for a logical off-ramp for elected officials who are on the fence or reluctant to say anything publicly. And it’s pretty hard for the White House to argue against it’s own vice president, not that its stopped them from trying.

1. Plus, I’m headed back to Las Vegas for a week — or hopefully longer — for the World Series of Poker Main Event.

2. There is the 25th Amendment.

3. Inspired by p(doom) — the chance that humans will be destroyed by misaligned AI.