The silver lining to Biden’s debate disaster

There is no way to sugarcoat President Joe Biden’s debate performance on Thursday night: It was a disaster. He muttered, babbled, and failed to pounce on Donald Trump’s lies and threats to democracy. By Friday morning, the country’s liberal commentators were telling Biden to step down — and, behind closed doors, many Democrats were saying the same thing.

Amid this gloom, I found a ray of hope from an unusual source: Astead Herndon, the New York Times reporter who has been banging on about the political risks of Biden’s age for months (and taking a lot of Democratic fire for doing so). After being proven spectacularly right on Thursday night, Herndon didn’t take a victory lap — he looked to the future.

“I don’t think the election is over. I think it’s just starting,” he wrote on Twitter/X. “We’re finally out of the [delusion] phase. Country and parties both.”

Herndon’s comment stood out not just because it cut against the chorus of gnashing teeth, but because it pointed to why everything might not be doomed. If we truly were in a mass delusion about Biden’s ability to campaign, and now that’s ending, it opens up new possibilities for the 2024 election.

And not just that. If the Democratic Party does prove capable of convincing Biden to step aside for a more inspiring candidate, it might even help address a deep concern about the future of the country itself.

Biden as a symptom of national decline

For months — maybe even years — American politics has been mired in malaise. 

There are lots of reasons: Lingering anger about inflation. The legacy of the pandemic. Deep and seemingly intractable polarization.

But I think a large part of it was the uninspiring prospect of a Trump and Biden rematch. 

Poll after poll showed that Americans were dissatisfied with the prospect of a 2020 rematch. Most of the country didn’t want this choice and still doesn’t. It’s conventional wisdom that “double haters” — voters who dislike both Biden and Trump — are the most decisive swing voters in the 2024 election. 

We all know the reasons this dire matchup was going to happen. While Trump is unpopular with the public and the GOP elite, he has an unshakable grip on the Republican base. And though Biden is even less popular, no serious Democrat was going to risk torpedoing the party’s general election chances against Trump by launching a bitter primary challenge they’d almost certainly lose.

But the fact that things are this way is exactly the problem. When political parties offer people choices they hate, for whatever reason, people become (even more) disillusioned with their functioning. The “hollow parties,” as two political scientists recently described them, feel like just another symptom of America’s broader political brokenness.

Biden’s departure as a (possible) symbol of national renewal

The most plausible scenario is that Biden simply weathers the current PR storm and stays atop the ticket. If that happens without him doing something to prove the debate catastrophe was a one-off, it’ll simply reaffirm that the institutions designed to safeguard American democracy are as broken as everything else.

“We have institutions to handle this. Biden could just step down. But we could also have an open convention. The party could nominate someone else. But the institutions are as moribund as the candidate: they have not seen use in many years,” writer John Ganz observed on Friday morning. 

But at the same time, something feels different about the current wave of pressure on Biden to quit the race. 

In February, after special counsel Robert Hur released a report suggesting that Biden had a poor memory, most liberals and Democrats insisted the president was being smeared. After the debate, the liberal opinion-making world is in lockstep: Joe Must Go. And the quotes anonymous Democrats are giving to connected reporters are unprecedented.

“I think the president has one week to prove he is not dead,”’ a swing-state Congress member told Slow Boring’s Matt Yglesias.

You can imagine a scenario where this level of panic, combined with someone from Biden’s inner circle telling him the truth, might reach the president and convince him that his time is up. All of a sudden, the idea of Biden’s departure has left the realm of fantasy and entered the blurry world of uncertain probability.

In such a scenario, the Democratic party could avoid the chaos of a nasty primary or contested convention; Biden could, in consultation with other party leaders, pick a successor and endorse them. The party would have months to rally behind whoever it was: Vice President Kamala Harris, a Cabinet member like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, or a popular and successful governor like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer. For a party whose Washington leadership is dominated by boomers, its young bench is surprisingly deep.

This would do more than improve the Democratic party’s chances against Trump: It would show Americans that their institutions actually can do surprising, and maybe even impressive, things. It would provide concrete evidence that we aren’t stuck in a downward spiral of political sclerosis, that the unexpected can happen, and that sometimes it might actually be good.

I certainly don’t want to suggest that replacing Biden will fix everything, either for Democrats narrowly or for the country more broadly. In our polarized system, the election will remain close no matter what; the country’s problems run far deeper than the two old men running for president.

But it’s important not to let realism lapse into nihilism. Just because few things have changed American politics of late doesn’t mean nothing can. And we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the person in the top job: The mere fact of Barack Obama’s identity altered American politics at such a profound level that we still haven’t fully grappled with the consequences.

It’s rare to see a clear pathway toward rebooting American politics. But Biden’s disastrous debate performance has created an opening for one. It’s up to him to take it.