Jul.12

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BidenWatch 2024

This is the ninth day in the last ten that our lead item has been about Joe Biden's wobbling presidential candidacy (and the 10th day was the Sunday posting, which was dedicated to letters and questions about Biden's wobbling presidential candidacy). It does not please us that this is the case, but we must follow wherever the news leads us.

Yesterday, of course, was Biden's latest "do or die" test—the press conference held at the conclusion of this week's NATO summit. Here it is, if you haven't seen it already, and you would like to:

The executive summary is that, as with the George Stephanopoulos interview, Biden did not exactly "do" OR "die."

What do we mean by that? Well, Biden went on for about an hour, of which roughly 10 minutes was a prepared speech and 50 minutes were questions from the press corps (the Q&A session starts at 47:30 in the linked video). The good news for the President is that he was, overall, perfectly fine. We'd give it a 7 on our scale of 0 (debate Biden) to 10 (SOTU Biden). If not for the debate, nobody would think twice about yesterday's press conference.

That said, the debate did happen. And so, every slip-up is magnified to the Nth degree. While he did not lose his train of thought, he did stumble over his words a few times. He also made two big verbal slips of the sort that are guaranteed to become soundbites. The first came before the press conference; Biden referred to Volodymyr Zelenskyy as "President Putin." And the second came during the press conference; Biden referred to Kamala Harris as "Vice President Trump."

Truth be told, we don't think those verbal slip-ups are actually all that damning. It's easy to substitute one similar piece of factual information for another, and there's nothing where that is more likely to happen than with names. (As a sidebar, for this very reason, Z does not ask students to recall names on tests.) If you look at the "Vice President Trump" slip-up (the link in the previous paragraph is cued up to that very moment), for example, you can see what happened. Biden was asked about how Harris matches up with Trump, and he answered for the first name mentioned (Harris) but actually used the second name (Trump). Not great, but not terribly unusual, either.

Let us also point out that Trump has this exact same problem, and—arguably—to a greater extent. The former president has, for example, swapped in Nikki Haley's name for that of Nancy Pelosi. And he did it four times in the same speech, which is at least a little less defensible, since it was not a single slip of the tongue. From where we sit, the biggest difference between Biden and Trump, when it comes to their "senior moments," is that Biden tends to pause (sometimes looking like a goldfish when he does so), while Trump just keeps talking, even if his words make little to no sense. Think Hannibal Lecter, or electric boats, or the danger posed by sharks, or any of a dozen other word salads he's served up during this campaign.

Unfortunately for Biden, Trump's mental acuity is not the BIG story right now. And, at least at the moment, the President finds himself in an impossible situation when it comes to "proving" he is up to the job of being president for 4 more years. Nobody can make it through 20 or 30 or 40 minutes of extemporaneous dialogue without making the occasional verbal error. We have delivered thousands of lectures between us, and we've never pitched a perfect game. And then, add to the general challenges of extemporaneous speaking the stresses of being president, the effects of age, and a lifelong stuttering problem.

What we are suggesting here, in so many words, is that Biden—however diminished he may be—is clearly able to put up a capable performance, even in these unstructured fora. But it is also the case that Biden—however competent he may be—is not going to deliver a performance strong enough to silence most/all doubters. The President has agreed to do his second post-debate interview, this time with NBC's Lester Holt, on Monday of next week. It will air Monday night at 9:00 ET. We'll be watching, but we also feel very confident in predicting, right now, that he's going to do... OK. Another 6 or 7 on the scale of 0 to 10.

Before the press conference, at least six members of the House said that if Biden performed poorly, they would come out and publicly call for him to step down. And after the press conference was over... three of them did so. The new members of the "Biden must go" brigade are Reps. Jim Himes (D-CT), Scott Peters (D-CA) and Eric Sorensen (D-IL). It's possible that the other three will make announcements tomorrow, but it doesn't look that way. And if a split decision like that—with three members deciding the press conference was acceptable and three deciding it wasn't—does not speak to a Biden performance that was neither great nor terrible, we don't know what does.

So that's the press conference. And now, let's move on to some other Biden-candidacy-related storylines from yesterday:

• Bad News for Biden, Part I: We have written many times that there are a handful of senior Democratic politicians who could probably push the President out of the race, if they go public with their opposition. At the top of that list are Barack Obama and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). And now, that pair is officially wobbling. Reportedly, Pelosi is working behind the scenes to encourage Biden to re-think his plans to stay in the race. Meanwhile, Obama talked to George Clooney before the actor published his now-famous Biden-critical op-ed. And while Obama did not endorse the op-ed, he did not object to its being published, either.
  
  
• Bad News for Biden, Part II: Yesterday, CNN reported that numerous Biden insiders believe he's slipping, and that his inner circle has choreographed meetings and other events so as to obscure the extent of the problem. As you can imagine, everyone quoted in the CNN piece is anonymous, so the extent to which one believes the story depends on how much one trusts CNN's reporters. That said, if you accept CNN's reporting, even in part, then the story is a pretty bad 1-2 punch when paired with the aforementioned Clooney op-ed, since both speak to people who have interacted with the President recently, and who are favorably inclined to him, and yet are saying that the debate performance was not an anomaly.
  
  
• Good News for Biden: There have been three major new national polls this week. The first, from The Washington Post/ABC News, says that if the election was held today, 39% of voters would vote for Biden and 39% would vote for Trump. The last time this poll was conducted, at the end of April, it was 38% for Biden and 40% for Trump. So, there's been no meaningful change (and what un-meaningful change there has been is in Biden's direction). The poll also included a Harris-Trump matchup, and had Harris up 42% to 40%.
  
  The second poll is from Data for Progress/Split Ticket, and has Biden up 47% to 46% on Trump nationally. This one also asked about Harris, and had her up 42% to 40% on Trump. This at least somewhat implies that undecided voters are even MORE undecided when Harris is on the ticket.
  
  The third poll was conducted by YouGov/The Economist. It has Trump up 43% to 40% for Biden; their last poll prior to the debate had it 42% to 40%. The new poll has Trump up on Harris 42% to 38%.
  
  The very clear conclusion here is that Biden's debate performance, shaky as it was, did not actually move the needle very much, if at all. And that conclusion does not rely on just these three polls. Yesterday, a group of data-crunching political scientists at Northeastern University released a detailed report, based on post-debate polling numbers. And the lead number-cruncher, David Lazer, says:

  Even The New York Times, which is usually better about this, talked about a very tiny shift that was totally insignificant statistically like it was evidence that it was a shift toward Trump after the debate. My hope is that reporters look at this and say, "Maybe we need to be careful in overinterpreting noise as actual signal..."
  
  Trump was convicted of a set of felonies. The impact it had on surveys was zero. Biden had a debate where most people said it proved he was too old. Survey respondents said, "Yeah, I saw that. He's too old. I'm still voting for him." The numbers just aren't moving.

  It is very clear at this point that about 40% of the electorate is going to vote for Trump, no matter what, either because he's the Dear Leader or because voting for anyone with a (D) after their name is anathema. It is also very clear at this point that about 40% of the electorate is going to vote for Biden, no matter what, either because they like him or because he's the only way to stop Trump. It's the other 20% or so who will decide the election, and thus far, that segment of the electorate really hasn't budged. Is it because they are really and truly committed to a third-party candidate, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Because they are not paying attention? Because they are holding out hope that another option will present itself? Probably all of the above, and more.
  
  
• Beware the Tea Leaves: Meanwhile, there are a couple of "negative" signs for Biden that maybe aren't so negative as they might seem. First, he certainly has had a couple of very bad polls since the debate. For example, yesterday we wrote about a New York poll that was much worse than it should be for a Democrat. It is entirely possible that is a product of response bias. That is to say, people who are enthusiastic about the presidential race are much more likely to respond to pollsters than those who are not. If pro-Biden Democrats were depressed after the debate (and they were), it could have reduced their response rate, particularly in very blue states like New York.
  
  Also, we noted yesterday that Biden's fundraising totals in the last week or so have been pretty anemic. Several readers wrote in to point out, quite rightly, that there have been a bunch of stories about how if Biden drops out, the money in his kitty might end up in limbo. Under those circumstances, it makes sense to hold on to one's donations until it's clear how everything is going to shake out.
  
  
• Historical Precedents: Today's godawful op-ed is courtesy of a person named William Hogeland, writing for Slate. Hogeland has written several books on the 18th century, aimed at a popular audience, and on that basis describes himself as a historian. His website makes no reference to any academic training, nor to a college degree of any sort. We do not wish to be snobby, but if someone without any training at all claimed to be an engineer or a physicist, it would cause their ideas to be taken with at least a grain of salt or two. So, we mention his non-CV for purposes of context.
  
  Anyhow, Hogeland's piece was an acidic criticism of (trained) historian Heather Cox Richardson. He decries the emergence of what he calls "resistance historians" and expresses his wish that such people would shut up and return to their day jobs. What he means by that term, in essence, is "historians who presume to draw on the past to make predictions about present-day events." He believes that history is not instructive in this way, particularly when it comes to presidential politics.
  
  For his case study, Hogeland directs his attention to this quote from Richardson, delivered during a hit on CNN:

  My interest is not in Biden or Kamala Harris or Trump or whomever he might choose as vice president. My interest is less in that than in the long-term sweep of American history. I want the whole picture. And in the whole picture of American history, if you change the presidential nominee at this point in the game, the candidate loses ... for a number of reasons. First of all, because the apparatus of the party for the election is set up around somebody else. Second of all, because the news is only going to report all the growing pains of a brand-new campaign, including all the opposition research that the opponents are then going to throw at people.

  Hogeland's critique follows:

  What's clear is that Richardson is invoking an elevated appeal to "the whole picture," and adducing a faux-historical rule, in order to persuade people, many of whom trust her status as a scholar and are unlikely to question her facts, that Biden should stay on the ticket. A leading exponent of the liberal cultural ethos that perpetually bemoans our "post-truth" world has gotten herself into a position where an immediate partisan political tactic, possibly undertaken in a state of desperation, induces her to invent historical fact.

  He's not the only one to slam Richardson; here's another example from Vox, also published yesterday.
  
  Given that we used the term "godawful op-ed," we clearly aren't fans of Hogeland's (not very well written) take. First of all, while criticizing Richardson for assuming facts not in evidence, he... assumes facts not in evidence. There is no basis for the assertion that she is motivated by partisan politics. Even if Richardson is a liberal and/or is pro-Biden, that doesn't mean her answer to the question is informed by her politics, as opposed to by her training as a historian and desire to give some sort of meaningful answer while on national TV. Further, it's kind of a cheap shot to ask someone who is speaking extemporaneously to frame every single observation with absolute precision. Put another way, Richardson had 2 seconds to consider her response. Hogeland had unlimited time... and he still produced mediocre, muddy prose.
  
  Anyhow, that is prelude to what we really want to say here. A couple of weeks ago, we did a brief rundown of parties that dumped incumbents who could have run (including the frequently mentioned cases of Harry S. Truman in 1952 and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968). In those cases, the dumping party went 3-8, which is an argument (albeit a weak one) against changing horses midstream. We also noted that there are clear examples of parties that thought about making a change and didn't (Republicans in 1864, Democrats in 1940) and went on to win. Meanwhile, we had an item yesterday about a couple of last-minute Senate-race changes (the dumping party went 1-1).
  
  After yesterday's posting went live, several readers wrote in to direct our attention to the Minnesota gubernatorial election of 1990. In that one, Republican nominee Jon Grunseth got into a very bad Roy-Moore-style scandal about a month before the election, as two women claimed that when they were 12 and 13 years old, respectively, Grunseth tried to force them to join him and his daughter in swimming nude in his pool at an Independence Day party. This caused the second-place finisher in the Republican primary, Arne Carlson, to announce a write-in campaign. Grunseth, seeing he could not win, dropped out a week before the election. Carlson won the election, 50.1% to 46.8% over incumbent governor Rudy Perpich (DFL). So, that's a case where a last-minute switch worked out fine.
  
  Meanwhile, we haven't seen anyone (including readers) talking about what might be the single-closest parallel to the current situation. On July 25, 1972, Thomas Eagleton—who had already been nominated as the Democrats VP—admitted, after several stories in the press, that he had undergone electroshock therapy for mental health issues. On August 1, Eagleton was forced off the ticket, to be replaced by Sarge Shriver. Given the vagaries of polling, particularly back then, it's hard to know exactly how much this hurt the ticket. But it certainly appears that it did hurt. In the month before the Eagleton scandal, the Democratic ticket was consistently polling in the mid-to-high 30s. Afterward, it was mostly low-30s. In particular, the last poll before the Eagleton news broke had McGovern at 37%, the next five had him at 34%, 31%, 36%, 29% and 31%. So, that's a case where a last-minute switch didn't work out so well (although the Democratic ticket would surely have been crushed either way).
  
  Back when we did the rundown of presidential ticket switches, we wrote: "It's a little bit questionable to draw conclusions from a relatively small sample size, particularly when most of the specimens in the sample are from more than a century ago, when things were quite different. Still, to the extent there's a historical argument here, it argues against dumping Biden."
  
  Having added four more examples to the mix (the two Senate races, the Minnesota governor's race and the 1972 VP swap), we stand by that assertion, and we stand with Heather Cox Richardson. The data isn't great, but even a little data is better than none. And the data weakly suggests that dumping candidates late in the game is a loser more often than it's a winner.

And there you have it—yet another 3,000-word piece on where the Biden campaign stands.

We do not know what is going to happen. We do think it remains more likely than not that Biden remains the Democrats' candidate, but the movement by Pelosi and Obama makes that much less certain than was the case just 48 hours ago. Presumably, that pair thinks that Biden can handle the job for another 4 years, or they wouldn't have been backing him last week. But they are now worried about the answer to a much more immediate question: Do VOTERS think Biden can handle the job for 4 more years?

What we REALLY do not know is what SHOULD happen, if the Democrats want to maximize their chances of winning this election. Biden almost certainly has a higher floor than any of the other would-be Democratic candidates, but he probably also has a lower ceiling. There is no question that some large portion of the electorate (40% or so) will vote for ANY Democrat, just to block Trump. It really comes down to the 15-20% of voters who are not yet backing a major-party candidate. Who can get more of those votes: Biden, or some other Democrat? That's the issue the blue team faces, and they have a week or so to settle on an answer. (Z)