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femalewhen i arrived A text message from longtime Democratic strategist James Carville near the end of last night's presidential debate echoed his despair through my phone.
Carville wrote to me: “I tried, I tried.”
A few minutes later, when the debate was over, we spoke by phone. Carville had been one of the most vocal and persistent Democrats in arguing that President Joe Biden was too old to run again. Carville, who managed Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and is still an influential political analyst at 79, has recently softened that criticism, though it is more resignation than conviction. His concerns about Biden’s ability to beat Donald Trump have never diminished in our previous conversations, but he seemed to accept as inevitable that the party will not reject a president who wants to run for reelection.
But last night, Cavill, like other Democrats I spoke to, sounded almost shocked as he searched for words to describe Biden’s distracting, confusing and inconsistent debate performance.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Cavill told me. “Who wouldn't have expected this? I was just taken aback.”
What do you think will happen next? I asked. Carville responded, “I have come to realize the limits of my power.” He thought it “was a terrible idea” for Biden to run again. I said it publicly. I failed… I understand that. So how can you not see this happening?”
I had one last question. what do you think ~ must What happens next—will Biden have to step down? “I don’t know,” he said gravely. “Democrats are in a moment where they’re coming back to Jesus. That’s where we are.”
Carville was not the only Democrat reconsidering a scenario that had become a political fantasy. The question is whether they can persuade or push Biden not to run again. Another prominent Democratic strategist, who is considered one of Biden's strongest defenders in the Democratic Party and did not want to be named in this report, told me last night of his view that “there is a very good chance he will not be the nominee.” Still, the strategist added, “I don’t know how that happens.”
If Biden insists on staying in the race, there is still a good chance that Democrats will nominate him at the convention in August. Unseating a sitting president is a huge undertaking. But it is likely that more Democrats will break the party’s nomination rules in the coming days. And those rules provide a simple roadmap for replacing Biden at the convention if he voluntarily steps down, and a path for challenging him if he doesn’t.
Trump wasn't the big man in the debate. Although less combative than his first debate with Biden in 2020 and much more heated than Biden's last night, Trump continued to display all of the negative traits that are familiar to him. He asserted his constitutional right to an abortion and repeated discredited claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Trump’s performance did not convince Democrats that he could not be defeated in November. But Trump’s obvious vulnerabilities will probably amplify their concerns about Biden, because it showed that Democrats could still stop him if they had a candidate who did not suffer from his many painfully obvious vulnerabilities.
FOr the Democratic Party The president’s performance last night, which Biden feared he wouldn’t win, may have been so bad that it was good, in the sense that it brought back into the discussion the idea of a replacement candidate, something the White House had almost completely ruled out. “I think someone is going to declare and challenge him,” a Biden strategist predicted flatly last night.
Some senior party strategists said they viewed the widespread panic over Biden’s performance last night as a hysterical overreaction. “It was a missed opportunity, but the idea that it would change the game is completely wrong,” said Geoff Garin, a veteran Democratic pollster.
Jennifer Fernandez Ancona, co-founder of Way to Win, a liberal group focused on electing candidates of color, didn’t praise Biden’s performance, but she didn’t see it as an insurmountable obstacle to beating Trump. “This election has always been about more than these two candidates and their accomplishments,” she said. “The choice and contrast between the two different futures they represent is clear, and it’s only going to get starker as we get closer to Election Day.”
But those voices were an exception to the collective cry of despair that erupted from prominent Democrats last night. “Absolute disaster,” was the summary of a top strategist for an elected Democratic candidate being considered for Biden’s successor who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I think he was shocked at the start of this debate by how he came across and how he sounded. He seemed a little disoriented,” David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s chief political strategist, told CNN after the debate. “He got stronger as the debate went on, but by then I think the panic was starting to set in.”
A core mechanism in the party's rules that allows candidates to be swapped comes from changes approved decades ago after the contested 1980 primaries. Then-Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy challenged a weakened President Jimmy Carter for the nomination. After a contested convention won by Carter, Democrats agreed to eliminate the so-called robot rule. The robot rules required convention delegates to at least vote on the first ballot for the candidate they chose to support. said Elaine Kamak, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, who played a central role in this change.
Instead, she told me last night, the rules say convention delegates “must 'according to their conscience' vote for the person they were elected to represent.” She added that this means “there is a presumption that you will vote for Biden, but 'according to your conscience' can encompass a lot of things.”
If Biden were to step down, the party would be forced into a succession process reminiscent of the days when the party’s leader chose the nominee at the convention, not the primary. “If he were to do it himself, there are a lot of ways to replace him,” Kamarck told me. “There are about 4,000 people who have already been elected to the convention. If Biden were to step down tomorrow, there would undoubtedly be a number of people running in the primary, and the primary would consist of calling and persuading these people.
“It will be an old-fashioned competition.” she continued. “The 4,000 delegates who pledged to Biden will suddenly become independents, and you’ll have a small campaign.” Under changes approved after the Hillary Clinton-Bernie Sanders 2016 race, so-called superdelegates (approximately 750 elected officials and other party figures) will be elected if no candidate receives a majority on the first ballot and the race will proceed to a second ballot at the convention. You are eligible to vote only if:
Even if Biden remains in the race, another candidate could sue the convention delegates to replace him. But even after last night’s performance, Kamarck doubted that any serious party leader would try to do so. “I honestly don’t think anyone is going to challenge him,” she told me. “I think there’s a lot of depth of feeling in the party about him.”
But Biden advocacy strategists who anticipate challenges believe the operation could proceed in a similar way to the two-step process that helped persuade former Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson to not run for re-election in 1968. That year, Johnson was initially challenged by Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy against his opposition to the Vietnam War. After McCarthy, a relatively peripheral figure in the party, demonstrated Johnson's weakness in the New Hampshire primary, a much more powerful opponent, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, jumped in. Fifteen days later, Johnson announced that he was withdrawing from the race.
mewave challenge The strategist predicted that if Biden develops before the August convention, it will unfold in a similar way. The first person to emerge from the box, the strategist said, will be a secondary figure with little chance of winning the nomination. But if that person shows enough support for a replacement candidate, the strategist predicted, heavier contenders like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and California Gov. Gavin Newsom could quickly follow.
Once the initial shock of last night’s debate wears off, talk of replacing Biden may fade. Most Democrats who want to replace Biden are extremely skeptical that his current running mate, Kamala Harris, can beat Trump. But if she does seek the nomination, not giving it to the first woman of color to serve as vice president could be divisive for the party. The fear that such a fight could virtually guarantee defeat in November is one reason Democrats who are nervous about renominating Biden have been quiet for so long.
Still, it seems difficult to imagine the prospect of the party simply moving forward with Biden as if nothing happened last night. Even before his disastrous performance, Democratic Party anxiety was growing as disturbing opinion polls about Biden were released one after another 48 hours before the CNN debate. National Quinnipiac University and new york times/A Siena College poll released Wednesday found Trump ahead of the president by 4 percentage points, the challenger's best performance in weeks. Yesterday, Gallup released a shocking national poll that found the percentage of Americans with a favorable view of Trump is increasing, while the percentage of Biden is decreasing. More respondents said Trump had the personal and leadership qualities a president should have than Biden.
Three-quarters of those polled by Gallup said they were concerned that Biden was “too old to be president,” exactly twice the percentage who expressed the same concern about Trump. times/In the Siena and Quinnipiac polls, Gallup also found that Biden's job approval rating remains below 40%. This is much closer to historical results at this point in recent races for incumbents, as Gallup points out. lost than those who ran for reelection (Carter in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1992, Trump in 2020). won Second term.
The day before the debate, not all the polls were so gloomy about Biden. But the overall picture suggests that the poll boost Biden gained after Trump was criminally convicted in a hush-money case in New York a month ago has evaporated. Instead, polls show the former president regaining a narrow but persistent advantage nationally and in crucial battleground states.
All the usual warnings about the obvious conclusion from last night's set piece apply even if it was a fiasco for Biden. The presidential race is a marathon with unpredictable twists and turns. Many Democrats still believe Biden was a decent man who was an effective president. Resistance to Trump remains deep and persistent among the majority of the American electorate.
But Biden's chances of success are Because any candidate who could beat Trump's lead looked much more doubtful the moment the president took the stage last night. Biden's performance has justified all the fears of a cadre of longtime party strategists like Carville and Axelrod, who have publicly expressed concerns about renominating him that many others have shared only privately.
But Carville didn't feel the joy of “telling you that” last night. His last words to me were, “I hate being right.”