Klein: This harsh political dilemma isn’t all Joe Biden’s fault

There is no lack of talent or capacity in the Democratic Party. But there is a lack of coherence and confidence.

On Thursday night, after the first presidential debate, MSNBC’s Alex Wagner interviewed Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. “You were out there getting a chorus of questions about whether Biden should step down,” she said. “There is a panic that has set in.”

Newsom’s reply was dismissive. “We gotta have the back of this president,” he said. “You don’t turn your back because of one performance. What kind of party does that?”

Perhaps a party that wants to win? Or a party that wants to nominate a candidate that the American people believe is up to the job? Maybe the better question is: What kind of party would do nothing right now?

In February, I argued that President Joe Biden should step aside in the 2024 election and Democrats should do what political parties did in presidential elections until the 1970s: choose a ticket at their convention. In public, the backlash I got from top Democrats was fierce. I was a bed-wetter living in an Aaron Sorkin fantasyland.

In private, the feedback was more thoughtful and frightened. No one tried to convince me that Biden was a strong candidate. They argued instead that he couldn’t be persuaded to step aside, that even if he could, Vice President Kamala Harris would lose the election and that if a convention didn’t choose Harris, passing her over would fracture the party. They argued not that Biden was strong but that the Democratic Party was weak.

I think Democrats should give themselves a little bit more credit. Biden’s presidency is proof of the Democratic Party’s ability to act strategically. He didn’t win the Democratic nomination in 2020 because he set the hearts of party activists aflame. Biden won because the party made a cold decision to unite around the candidate it thought was best suited to beating Donald Trump. Biden won because Democrats did what they had to do, not what they wanted to do.

Strategic vs. impulsive

And it wasn’t just Biden. While the Republican Party collapsed into its MAGA era, repeatedly choosing wannabe Trumps who lost winnable elections, Democrats kept choosing candidates who could win tough races in challenging states. Since 2018, Democrats have been on a winning streak because they have acted strategically while Republicans have acted impulsively. But the same Democrats had no confidence that they could rise to the moment if Biden stepped aside.

I sometimes asked the Democrats I was talking to what they thought would happen if, in a terrible turn of events, Biden received health news that forced him to end his campaign. Would the Democratic Party collapse into a fetal position and accept Trump’s ascension? Of course not, they said. Then Democrats would have no choice but to build a ticket at the convention. I always found that answer revealing.

There is no lack of talent or capacity in the Democratic Party. But there is a lack of coherence and confidence. What is the party for? Newsom’s comments Thursday implied that the party’s function was to support Biden. “We gotta have the back of this president.” Newsom said that the criticism of Biden was not unfounded, just “unhelpful.” A more astonishing statement came from Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota. “I think we could learn something from Republicans,” he told Fox News. “Republicans will not abandon Donald Trump through indictments, through whatever it may be.”

Do Democrats really want to follow the model of the Trump-era Republican Party? Republicans lost in 2018 and 2020 and badly underperformed in 2022. In March, Lara Trump was elected co-chair of the Republican National Committee. She is, from the traditional party perspective, completely unqualified for the job.

But if you view the committee as a vehicle for the ambitions and whims of Donald Trump, her father-in-law, then she is wholly qualified.

The best case against replacing Biden is that doing so at this late hour would be riskier than keeping him. But that is a choice the Democratic Party made.

It was a choice to support Biden in running for reelection, despite poll after poll showing supermajorities of the American people thought he was too old to serve a second term.

It was a choice, if an understandable one, for zero major Democrats to run against him in the primaries, even as polls showed majorities of Democratic voters didn’t want Biden to run again.

It was a choice, if top Democrats and the White House believed Harris too weak to run or govern in Biden’s place, to do nothing about it.

Democrats have spent all this time choosing to do nothing to solve the most obvious problems they faced in 2024, and now the argument is that there is nothing they can do; it’s too late. Now to even admit these problems is “unhelpful.”

Risks on all sides

I’m not going to end this by pretending that there is some easy path forward for Democrats. No path now is without risk. An open convention would be a risk. Nominating Harris would be a risk. To run an 81-year-old with a 38% approval rating who just got trounced in the first debate would be a risk. Biden was headed for a loss before the debate, and he is likelier to lose after it. To the extent his team has articulated a theory of what was supposed to turn the race around, this was the theory: the unusually early debate, in which the American people would see Biden and Trump on the stage and be reminded of why they backed Biden in 2020. That theory failed. Biden couldn’t pull it off.

Politically, I am more optimistic about a convention than some. It carries risk but also possibility — the possibility of a ticket that reenergizes the Democratic Party, that excites voters who currently feel they have no good choices. But it could go badly, too, just as Biden’s campaign is going badly now. And so what tips me is not really the politics. It’s that I don’t actually believe Biden should be president for another four years. I don’t believe he would be better than the alternatives.

I realize there is no magic mechanism, no unitary actor called the party that can persuade him to step aside. But there are many people in the party with influence over him. There is the support he senses he has from the rest of the party. The Democratic Party may not end up with another choice — it may truly be too late — but it should be trying to make one possible. Because there is not a plausible way for Democrats to convince voters that the man they saw on Thursday’s stage should be president three or four years from now.

So to go back to Newsom’s question: What kind of party would be trying to make a change after Thursday night? A party that was doing its job.

Ezra Klein is a New York Times columnist.