On June 27th, President Biden debated Former President Donald Trump and his poor performance ultimately ended his campaign for reelection. Why the Democratic Party pressured President Biden to drop out of the race reveals important lessons about the party and what it is capable of.
The stated reason that Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and others pressured Biden was the dire polling about his reelection chances, especially in swing states. Supposedly, this was the ultimate reason President Biden dropped out.
However, it is hard to believe that there would have been such a coordinated and widespread effort against Biden simply because he was behind in the race. Plenty of incumbent presidents have had poor polling going into a reelection cycle, yet they were not forced out of the race by their parties.
The real reason is much simpler: voters feared he could not do the job even if reelected. This often gets lost in the conversation about the polling. Roughly 44% of voters said they would vote to reelect Biden even though 86% said they thought he was too old for a second term. This was not about who they would vote for; it was about what was the right thing to do.
The office of the Presidency demands the absolute best of America’s leaders, and Biden, in his diminished state, was not going to be able to fulfill that responsibility for the next four years.
A continued reelection effort would require suspending common sense and, more insidiously, deceiving the American people. He, his staff, and his surrogates would have to loudly proclaim that he was not slowing down, that his stamina was great, and that he was fit to serve another term.
In the chance that President Biden won the election, any further physical and mental decline would have exposed the lie and would have further destroyed trust between the American people and political elites.
I believe it is for this moral - rather than simply electoral - reason that the Democratic Party pushed so hard on their Commander-in-Chief to step aside. And, in doing so, the Democratic establishment showed the wisdom, power, and commitment to truth that has eluded the Republican establishment.
Democratic voters and party leaders chose principle over political strategy. When Senator Peter Welch of Vermont became the first Senator to call for President Biden to end his campaign, he stuck his neck out for the sake of his party and his country; he was not simply responding to his own political incentives. After all, as the Senator of the state that gave President Biden the largest vote percentage in the country, his reelection was not imperiled with Biden atop the ticket. In fact, just the opposite. Senator Welch risked the wrath of the President and Party by being a dissenter.
And, it cannot be overlooked that President Biden, the Democratic Party standard-bearer, is the kind of elected leader who listens. He could have ignored the pressure campaign, and he would have been formally nominated. But he put his ego aside and did the right thing.
This is in stark contrast to a Republican Party that has sacrificed their integrity to indulge former President’s Trump’s lies about the 2020 election to maintain power. A likely factor in Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate was Senator Vance’s expressed willingness to do what Mike Pence would not - support Trump’s big lie and overturn the election.
Replacing Biden also showed that political parties can still be a vital vehicle for solving collective action problems on the most existential issues. As I have engaged with this work, I have been surprised at the attitude of many strategists, candidates, and elected officials who believe coordinated action within the party is a fool’s errand. Of course, it can certainly be challenging - parties are diverse coalitions with individual actors responding to different, local incentives - but it is not impossible. Recent events have shown us that.
Nancy Pelosi showed how collective action can work. According to Politico:
[She] worked behind the scenes to encourage others in the party toward the kind of collective action that might finally push the president to end his campaign… “Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” said one Democrat familiar with private conversations who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”
This is an important lesson: the Democratic Party is capable of doing the hard things that require coordinated effort. More needs to be done to strengthen the party infrastructure to overcome the Party's brand problems and I wish that Democrats had kept this can-do attitude going by choosing a competitive process to replace President Biden rather than simply anointing VP Harris. But Democrats should be proud of how their party behaved, build on their cooperative momentum, and ride it to victory this fall and beyond.
VP Harris was well qualified to step up, and given the short time frame, having a competitive process to replace Biden at the top of the ticket could have been chaotic.