Steelmanning the Case for Biden
In which I make his case, then meticulously knock it down.
Reports this week make it seem likely that Biden will withdraw from the race. But they also say he is angry about it, has not decided yet, and plans to keep campaigning for now.
I do think he should withdraw, and last week I tore into an especially weak argument for why he should run. But there are stronger arguments, made by smart and well-meaning people. Today I’d like to present those arguments fairly, and then refute them more politely.
This is a long post, but if you’re in a rush you can skim the boldfaced subheadings for the gist of his argument (in italics), and mine (larger headings). As I understand it, the strongest case for Biden goes as follows:
1. Polls show only a small and unclear dip in Biden’s support after the debate, and that dip could just as easily be attributed to the media frenzy as the debate itself.
A bevy of polls conducted the week after Biden’s disastrous debate showed an average reduction in his support of about two percentage points nationally, and even smaller in many swing states. The drop was typically within the margin of error and small enough to keep Biden and Trump arguably tied. Fluctuations of this size are inevitable in any campaign, and four months before the election, polls still have a long time to change.
Biden’s team has also argued that modern polling is unreliable anyway, so all we can know is that the race is still close. To some, cutting and running from a close contest three months out amounts to panicky bedwetting, especially given all the risk and chaos a last-minute switch entails.
Because the bad debate was followed almost immediately by two weeks of prominent media outlets amplifying calls for Biden to step down, it’s also possible that some or even most of the polling dip resulted less from the debate than from the media narrative surrounding it. If so, citing the polls as a reason Biden should step down is a somewhat circular argument, which Biden’s defenders likely find especially frustrating. An 11 July Washington Post article was titled with a rhetorical question: “Is a hazy 2-point shift enough to warrant dumping Biden?”
2. He’s not actually too old to govern, as reflected by his strong track record of achievements.
Everyone knows that Biden is old, and diminished in some ways from his political prime. But age affects some abilities more than others, and just because Biden walks slowly and sometimes stumbles over his words does not mean he’s significantly diminished in the core tasks of being president. A neuroscientist elaborated in The New York Times:
Public perception of a person’s cognitive state is often determined by superficial factors, such as physical presence, confidence and verbal fluency, but these aren’t necessarily relevant to one’s capacity to make consequential decisions about the fate of this country. Memory is surely relevant, but other characteristics, such as knowledge of the relevant facts and emotion regulation —both of which are relatively preserved and might even improve with age—are likely to be of equal or greater importance.
It’s fair to argue that so far, none of Biden’s slips have prevented him from making big decisions, brokering legislative compromises, or conducting his foreign policy. He has won genuine legislative victories in the face of significant headwinds, from CHIPS and the IRA to muscling through Ukraine aid. And perhaps Americans should vote—and Democrats should convince them to vote—more on a president’s track record than on his rhetorical abilities. On NPR, Bernie Sanders argued:
The truth is, he makes gaffs all the time. He always has. He's not a particularly great speaker. But what politics is supposed to be about, and what we should be voting up in an election is what is this candidate going to do for me and my family?...I think the record is pretty clear that Biden is standing for the working class, the middle class of this country, prepared to help the elderly and the kids, protect women's rights, deal with climate change. To my mind, that is the most important thing that we should be looking at.
Finally, Biden’s defenders can argue that if his aging worsens to the point where he is no longer able to govern effectively, stepping down then would result in the same President we’re hoping to replace him with on the ticket right now: Kamala Harris. So if Biden gives Democrats at least as strong a chance to win as she does, and he’s still up for the job for now, the fear that he won’t last the full four years is no reason to accelerate the handover.
3. Kamala Harris – the only realistic alternative to Biden – is a weaker candidate with glaring vulnerabilities of her own, which are not as baked in to her polling as Biden’s are.
Harris polled lower than Biden until very recently, and her approval rating remains low. Her 2020 presidential campaign fell flat on its face, and she’s failed to distinguish herself as Vice President, with several messaging miscues and few signature achievements. Her main issue profile was immigration, which is a liability this year. Her 2019 book was reportedly cliché and uninspired, and she struggles with open-ended questions or laying out a vision for the country. For sexist reasons or otherwise, she often comes off as insincere in ways voters find off-putting and Hillary-esque. Before Biden’s aging became so undeniable, conventional wisdom among DNC politicos was that Harris was not ready for primetime. Even if she were, a black woman from liberal California may struggle in the Midwest swing states that matter.
Since the debate, polls have shown Harris performing slightly better than Biden. But Biden’s defenders argue this is an unfair comparison because Biden has faced four years of Republican attacks, including about his age. Were Harris to replace him, Republicans would shift their attacks to Harris, and her thin lead may evaporate under scrutiny. Charles Blow argues:
[Harris leads only] in the abstract, before the chaos of a candidate change and before the full-frontal assault that being the nominee would surely bring. And in an era of opposition to wokeness and the values of diversity, equity and inclusion, that frontal assault, directed at the first Black, Asian American and female vice president, would be savage.
To some, the lessons of 2016 and 2020 are that America is still too sexist for a woman president. A better way to beat Trump is to play it safe and boring. No Democrat will be as loved as Trump is hated, so the ideal candidate fades into the background and makes the election a referendum on the other side. Biden is a known quantity, trusted, difficult to paint as a radical, and has already beaten Trump once. He may trail now, but the more Trump opens his mouth, the more voters may remember how much they hate him. Some think that’s a safer bet than trusting a polarized country to not be prejudiced.
4. Replacing Biden this late in the summer would cause chaos, be an awful look, and result in slapdash campaign, all of which hurts Democrats by more than replacing Biden is worth.
Part of this disagreement stems from differing assessments of Biden and Harris’ respective chances to beat Trump, other things equal. Let’s call these probabilities B and H. But I think another, underappreciated part of the disagreement stems from differing assessments how important and feasible it is, regardless of candidate, for the Democrats’ campaign to appear unified, according-to-plan, and proud of the last four years.
Traditionally, incumbent parties want to run on a message that things are going well, conveying momentum and progress and positivity. If you think this is very important, switching candidates so late in the summer scares you. It signals that even Democrats aren’t happy with how things are going, and replaces an orderly process planned for months with a slapdash Plan B at the 10th hour.
This appearance of chaos would likely hurt Harris’ performance, such that she’d do less well than she would have had she won the nomination the conventional way. Call this variable C, for the chaos penalty. For switching to Harris to be worthwhile, H needs to be larger than B by an amount larger than C. The steeper you think the chaos penalty is, the less likely this is true.
Professional campaigners seem to think C is larger than I intuit, which I admit should probably update me in that direction. The people in Biden’s campaign, who’ve been carefully sculpting his message and planning a convention for months around these themes, are very sensitive to the downsides of this message falling apart. At best, we’d be forfeiting the traditional advantages of incumbency in exchange for a highly untested victory formula.
5. It’s not anyone’s choice but Biden’s, and he’s clearly made his choice, so continuing to criticize it is counterproductive.
Another factor is how likely you find it that Biden would bow to sufficient pressure from his party, the media, his inner circle, or anyone else. If you think he’s simply too proud or stubborn to do that, continued calls for him to step down incur much of the chaos penalty (by revealing Democratic disunity and dissatisfaction) without the possible benefits of switching candidates. If Biden’s candidacy is inevitable, it’s no use crying over spilled milk, and anti-Trump people should instead be helping him to make his case in a more eloquent way than he’s able to do himself.
I hope Biden’s defenders will feel satisfied with that summary of their case. If not, please tell me what I missed in the comments. I’ll now explain why I think this argument fails.
1. True or not, the narrative that Biden is too old is now unshakeable, which likely puts a ceiling on his support.
Americans were deeply worried about Biden’s age long before the debate. As early as last summer, between 73% and 77% of Americans believed he was too old to work in government or run for president. While those beliefs may already be baked into his polling, Democrats’ hopes of boosting that polling depended on countering the narrative. That’s why they agreed to an early debate in the first place: they needed to reassure voters about his age.
Biden’s debate performance put that possibility to bed. Trump’s team will play the video everywhere, and Americans will believe what their eyes and ears tell them. Trump bouncing up from a bullet, pumping his fist in the air and yelling “fight” only sharpens the contrast. Now, about 85% of voters think Biden’s too old. Nothing he can say moving forward will shake that belief.
The damage of the debate was not the dip it inflicted on Biden’s polling now, but the ceiling it placed on how high that polling can climb. In the court of public opinion, it proved the Republicans’ best argument right. That hangs a heavy weight around the Democrats’ necks, in an election when they’re already trying to swim upstream. Ezra Klein put it well:
President Biden faces a problem with no solution. No interview or speech will convince a doubtful public that he is still fit to serve. Perceptions of him had years to harden. In June 2020, 36 percent of voters said Biden was too old to serve. By 2024, that number had roughly doubled…
The debate didn’t change what voters believed about Biden. The debate made it impossible for the Democratic Party to continue ignoring what voters already believed about Biden.
Stepping down would remove this completely unnecessary downward pressure on the Democrats’ support – which is crucial because…
2. Democrats are clearly losing. Coming from behind will require clearer messaging and more vigorous campaigning than Biden can muster.
As of now, Biden is trailing Trump by 4% nationally. In four crucial swing states, Trump leads by at least 5%. At this point in the 2020 campaign, Biden led Trump by 9%—and still, he only won in a nailbiter.
These polls may be wrong, but we have no reason to believe they will be wrong in a direction that strengthens Biden’s argument, rather than strengthening ours. The pre-Election Day polls in 2020 overestimated Biden’s actual support by about 4%. They also underestimated Trump in 2016. Besides, polls have been getting better recently, and are the best tool we have to measure who’s winning.
In this context, we need to evaluate candidates based on who can most plausibly change the narrative and come from behind. This further weakens the case for Biden.
Being a good president requires a certain set of skills. Effectively campaigning for president requires a different set of skills. Reasonable people can debate whether Biden still has the first skillset, but it’s getting preposterous to argue he still has the second. With every public appearance he makes, it becomes clearer that his powers of rhetoric have collapsed. It is not an isolated incident, but a permanent condition.
The damage of the debate was not the dip it inflicted on Biden’s polling now, but the ceiling it placed on how high that polling can climb.
Even if Biden could convince voters that he’s not too old to be president, he’ll have a hard time convincing them of anything else if he can’t string three sentences together without getting lost. According to
, a Wednesday speech to the NAACP was not reassuring:A couple times, he seemed to get lost mid-utterance, start to say something else, and then try to pick up where he left off: discussing Trump, Biden said “His mismanagement of the pandemic was especially devastating to black communities — oh, I know, becau — and other countries, other communities of color.”
Sometimes you could sort of understand what he was saying, policy-wise, but if you took the words at face value they didn’t make sense: “My city Wilmington, Delaware, I-95 runs up through what used to be the black community, divided it, six lanes wide. We’re gonna make sure that the states want it, we’re gonna be able to pave over the top of that and still have the highway — connecting neighborhoods!” (If the punctuation seems weird, that’s because I’m trying to remain faithful to the rhythm with which he delivered these remarks.)
Because of his trouble speaking, here and there he seemed to invent new words. “And because of you,” he said at one point, “we’re not only prodeckting Obamacare, you allowed me to increase it, making healthcare more affordable, for putting — and by the way, more than it’s ever been, more than it’s ever been — millions of African Americans have now had healthcare because of what we’ve done.”
It’s already hard enough to convince undecided voters that the economy is doing well and inflation was not the Democrats’ fault. It’s already hard enough to make the case for Ukraine aid, or that Democrats have a handle on foreign policy with catastrophes in Gaza and Afghanistan. It’s already hard enough to get undecided voters excited about the CHIPS and Science Act, or other wonky accomplishments from years ago. It’s damn near impossible when you can’t speak coherently.
Given these factors, my rough estimate for B – the probability that Biden will beat Trump if he’s the nominee – is about 20%. Nate Silver’s model puts him at 28%, but Nate concedes this is inflated by “the broken leg problem” of Biden not being able to run as well as other candidates in his polling position.
3. Kamala Harris is a stronger candidate than Biden, in part because the political winds have shifted since 2020.
No law of the universe says Biden’s replacement would have to be Kamala Harris. But it is the likeliest outcome, and any possibility of improving upon Harris would only strengthen the case for Biden stepping down. To be conservative, let’s assume Harris is the only alternative. This is the longest and most important part of my case, so I’ll break it into subcomponents.
3A – Harris has no age penalty, which helps make the election about Trump.
She’s 59. Trump is 78. Right away, the age argument becomes ours instead. Frustration with gerontocracy—or as normal people call it, “Get these old geezers out of there, we need some fresh faces”—is pretty widespread.
As in 2020, Democrats’ best chance of winning is to make the election a referendum on Trump. The best candidate is the one with the fewest distractions from Trump: the closest thing to a generic Democrat. In 2020, that candidate was Biden. But this year, Biden’s age is the biggest distraction in politics. Kamala may not be who we’d grow in a lab as the generic Democrat, but she’s closer to “safe and boring” than Biden is. She will capture the full anti-Trump vote, without losing those who cannot in good conscience vote for someone they deem mentally incompetent for the job.
argues:the right lesson to take from the relatively narrow Biden-Trump margin, though, is not that Biden is fine, but rather that Trump is very beatable. Defeating him does not require a miracle worker or a generational political superstar — Biden himself was neither — but it does require a candidate without crippling weaknesses.
3B – Harris has a smaller “status quo penalty,” and is less burdened by the turnout-suppressing aspects of Biden’s presidency, such as his handling of the war in Gaza or the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Incumbency is not the advantage it used to be. A record 73% of our country thinks we’re on the wrong track. People are anxious, angry, and on edge, so it’s hard to convince them things are going well. In the last two presidential elections, the incumbent party has lost.
Harris is still the incumbent party, of course, but she can promise change more plausibly than Biden. She has the enviable position of being associated enough with the administration to share credit for its accomplishments but distanced enough from its decision-makers to take much blame for its liabilities. She has both experience and relative youth.
from argues:Her rationale is that she is the candidate to turn the page on all of it. If you are sick and tired of the last decade of politics, Harris is the candidate to wipe the slate and begin anew.
This is especially important for rallying turnout among progressives, some of whom have sworn never to vote for “Genocide Joe.” A survey of likely voters in battleground states showed 13% of voters who backed Biden in 2020 but won’t support his reelection cited his management of the war in Gaza as their primary reason. Though Harris has defended her boss’s policies out of necessity, she also reportedly pushed the administration for greater empathy towards suffering Palestinians, and was the first senior administration official to call for an “immediate ceasefire” in the conflict. Some progressives withholding their votes from Biden will be willing to give her a chance.
3C – Voters have swung back to a tough-on-crime mood, especially in a general election. Combined with Trump’s legal troubles, this turns Harris’s biggest obstacle in the 2020 primaries into a major advantage.
Party primaries punish centrist positions and reward radical positions. General elections do the opposite. So while Harris’ background as a hard-nosed prosecutor hurt her with voters during the 2020 primary, it would likely help her in the 2024 general election. This is especially true considering the political climate of those years. Though Harris dropped out in 2020 before George Floyd’s murder, Democrats’ (rightfully) irate response to police violence that year is indicative of the atmosphere she was trying to run in. This year, with crime rates a key voter concern, she could unabashedly brag about putting criminals behind bars.
Harris’ strongest moments in the Senate came when her prosecutor background was allowed to shine, like when she grilled Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, and Brett Kavanaugh. A head-to-head debate with a felon, if Trump dared to have one, could be electric television.
3D – Harris is better on abortion than Biden.
Being a woman with a 100% rating by the Planned Parenthood Action Fund will help Harris attack the man whose judicial appointments ended Roe v. Wade, a key issue in this election. By contrast, Biden is a devout Catholic who formerly opposed Roe, supported the Hatch Amendment, said abortion is “not a choice and a right,” and often sounds tepid in his abortion rights advocacy even today.
3E - Harris still has her powers of speech, which will help her run the campaign Biden can’t.
When Harris came on CNN for mop-up duty the night of the debate, the difference between her ability to deliver a message and Biden’s was incredibly stark. She was sharp, direct, and handled tough questions with aplomb. She remembered all her lines and never got lost in the middle of a sentence. Yes, she has misspoken in the past and it’s possible her message lands flat—but at least she’ll have a message. Yglesias argues Harris:
“would be capable, not only of dramatically outworking Biden, but dramatically outworking Trump. Harris could be doing large numbers of brief, reasonably friendly media appearances where she does what any normal politician could do: deliver crisp, clear versions of Democratic Party talking points about how Trump is a criminal who wants to blow out the deficit with regressive tax cuts and she is a prosecutor who wants to protect abortion rights and make the rich pay their fare [sic] share of taxes.”
Trump has vulnerabilities that didn't exist in 2016, and he looks horrible in contrast to anyone competent. Right now, he's winning anyway. The only prayer of closing that gap is with a candidate energized and eloquent enough to exploit those vulnerabilities.
3F – Harris polls better than Biden. And while her numbers are softer, that’s true in both directions. Democrats are losing, so they need to take the risk.
Harris polls slightly better than Biden in a head-to-head matchup with Trump, including in swing states. Her advantages are especially pronounced among young, Black, and Latino voters, who disproportionately comprise the “double haters” on which this election will probably hinge.
As the steelman said, Biden’s polling accounts for all his perceived strengths and weaknesses when he’s in the spotlight, and Harris’ does not. But this does not necessarily mean her polling is inflated; it just means there’s a wider range of outcomes for how she’ll perform. It introduces risk, but also upside.
Americans listening to Harris for the first time may find they like her. She did very well in her debate with Mike Pence in 2020 and is more moderate than voters may expect. Campaigning on her beliefs may improve her popularity by more than Republican attack ads hurt it, or at least mitigate the damage.
4. By this point, party disunity and the “chaos penalty” are sunk costs. But a shakeup would inject badly needed energy and direction at a moment of panic and paralysis.
Concern about chaos was valid in the first week of July. By this point, it’s already too late. The past month has featured the debate debacle, the assassination attempt, a steady drumbeat of liberal media figures calling on Biden to withdraw, and an accelerating wave of Democratic congressmen echoing those calls. There is no way to put that cat back in the bag, and only one way to silence those calls every day from now until the convention. So unity is no longer achievable with Biden atop the ticket.
The best candidate is the one with the fewest distractions from Trump. But this year, Biden’s age is the biggest distraction in politics.
If Biden somehow clings to the nomination, the Democrats’ mood will only deteriorate. The party will slink into autumn downcast, bitter, and bracing for a blowout defeat. Each new gaffe from Biden will expose the party to fresh rounds of mockery.
By contrast, stepping down would invigorate Democrats, converting anger at Biden’s pride into respect for his willingness to put party and country first—something Trump would never do. It would also gift Harris a frenzy of free publicity that could excite non-Democrats and undecided voters, many of whom were yearning for a shakeup. The convention would be better viewed, by more curious eyes.
Again, smart people can disagree about how much of the chaos is a sunk cost, and how large and long-lasting the Harris honeymoon would be. But we can incorporate both factors into our final model, which now looks like this:
Biden should withdraw if H – C + E > B – CS, where:
H = probability Harris would beat Trump had she been nominated normally. My estimate for this is 40%.
C = reduction in her chance to beat Trump produced by the chaos of party infighting and her unconventional, late-starting, slapdash campaign. My estimate for this is 10%.
E = boost to her chance of winning provided by the exciting media frenzy of the swap, and sudden alternative for double-haters. My estimate is 2%.
B = probability Biden would beat Trump had he avoided his debate debacle and the chaos of the past month. Given his revealed inability to effectively campaign (even if he hadn’t held a June debate) my estimate is 30%.
CS = (sunk cost chaos); that portion of Harris’ chaos penalty which applies to Biden anyway, given the circus surrounding his age and constant calls to step down. My estimate is all of it, so 10%.
This works out to 32% for Harris vs. 20% for Biden. Betting markets now show Harris with twice as large a chance as Biden, and all Democrats put together with a 36% chance to win, which acts as a nice sanity check on my unscientific guesses. Smart people can plug different values in for those variables, and maybe add some I’ve missed, and get a different result. But if I’m anywhere close, the stakes are too high not to make the swap.1
5. Biden really is too old to serve another four years.
Every argument to this point has focused on the politics – on the optics of the thing. That’s what matters most because of how dangerous Trump is; because Presidents are surrounded by expert advisors they can lean on; because executive decision-making is dispersed throughout the administration; and because if Biden wins, he can always resign the presidency at some later time, which guards against the worst risks of continued decline.
But the merits of the question matter too. To many Americans who are not politics-obsessed weirdos, the merits matter most. And on the merits, you need some deeply tinted glasses to pretend Joe Biden is dependably capable of the highest-stakes job on the planet for the next four years.
Even before the debate, reports surfaced that Biden shows signs of slipping behind closed doors. His decline has reportedly accelerated in the past six months, which helps explain why the party initially rallied behind his reelection bid: at the time, he wasn’t as bad as he is now. But now, doctors are concerned about his health. He has obvious lapses and memory issues, that fluctuate by the day and hour. Axios cites sources inside the White House who say that “from 10 am to 4 pm, Biden is dependably engaged,” but much less so outside that time or while traveling abroad. That’s what we saw at the debate. That’s what George Clooney saw at the fundraiser.
If China sneak attacks Taiwan, can we trust they’ll be courteous enough to do it during the hours of 10 am and 4 pm ET? Do we want our president working 30-hour weeks? Do you see how absurd it is that we’re even having this conversation? Biden’s defenders are grading on a curve, blinded by partisan defensiveness and hatred for an even more incompetent opponent. The rest of the country is not so blinkered.
Yes, any Democratic administration would be preferable to Trump, including Biden at 50% capacity. But a man at 50% capacity is still a terrible, embarrassing joke of a person to be making such high-stakes decisions. It’s dangerous. It’s irresponsible. And if you think the politics of it are a tossup, or impossible to predict, you might as well go with the responsible option.
Conclusion:
As Ezra Klein said after the debate, “Democrats like to say that democracy is on the ballot. But it isn’t. Biden is on the ballot. There are plenty of voters who might want to vote for democracy but do not want to vote for Biden.”
It is true that some other voters may support Biden, but would not support Kamala Harris, largely due to racism and sexism. But there is excellent reason to suspect the first set of voters is larger than the second. As Yglesias summarizes, “Harris is more popular than Biden, her polling against Trump is stronger than Biden’s, she is a more effective messenger for the administration than Biden, and she has dramatically more upside than Biden.”
Besides, it should matter at least a little that the concerns of the first set of voters are perfectly valid, while the concerns of the second set are not. If you think we’re likely to lose either way, wouldn’t you rather it be because Americans rejected our message than because they never heard it? Wouldn’t you rather Americans prove they’re too prejudiced for a black woman than for nail-biting politicos to just assume it? Wouldn’t you rather put up a fight than go out with a hoarse, confused, slack-jawed whimper?
I don’t know if Biden is so diminished that he needs to resign the presidency right away. But he is diminished enough that it’s insulting for him to ask for four more years. That’s why two-thirds of Democrats think he should drop out, and why it feels increasingly likely as of this writing. Party unity is only achievable behind a new candidate. The sooner, the better.
As I mention in argument 5 of the steelman, whether he should step down is technically a different question than whether prominent people should call on him to step down. We could add two more variables for “stubbornness” (% chance he’d ignore or accede to massive pressure) and “criticism penalty” (reduction in his chance to win inflicted by such massive pressure between now and the convention, should he not yield).
At this point, I think there’s at least a 50% chance he’ll step aside, that most of the criticism penalty is also a sunk cost, and that residual criticism from now until the convention would only reduce his chances by maybe another 3%. But if he were 70% likely to ignore the pressure, the criticism penalty were 5%, and my other guesses were right, he’d still break even at a 20% chance to win in expectation either way. So you might as well say the truth (unless you’re a politician facing a collective action problem).