Welcome to one of our favorite segments on the Dash Files, "Liberal Media..." - I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.
Segment #2: Biden Running Again?
I have felt the need to respond with fire and fury to one of the most ridiculous and visionless New York Times opinion articles written by a liberal that I have read in quite a while. "Biden's A Great President. He Should Not Run Again." I don't often go on Twitter, but one of my favorite accounts to read is the "New York Times Pitchbot" which makes terrific parodies of the Times' often idiotic double standard for democrats. An example: "The real winner of tonight's State of the Union address? Ron DeSantis." If I saw this headline without any context, it could pass as a joke. Because this article is quite literally a joke.
Michelle Goldberg, the author of this article, argues that while Joe Biden has accomplished a plethora of great things as President, including the Inflation Reduction Act, he should bow out of the 2024 race. I don't want to read you the whole thing; if you want to take three minutes of your life, pour gasoline on it, and throw it in a fire, go ahead and read it; but I can distill her argument into about three main points.
First, a majority of democrats (58%) have responded to pollsters saying that they want a candidate other than Joe Biden to be the nominee in 2024.
Second, Joe Biden is too old, and his age could be a serious liability against the possible DeSantis candidacy.
Third, the democrats have a deep bench of qualified candidates, so he should not see himself as the only person who could win the election.
In response to her first point, I would say that in 1994, when Bill Clinton's presidency was struggling under his failure to pass universal healthcare, and a republican sweep of Congress was imminent, two-thirds of democrats polled said he shouldn't run again. And this was when he was 48 years old, not 80 years old! If you had asked any political pundit in 1994 or 1995 who they thought would win the presidency in '96, the first name would not have been Bill. But, just like Joe Biden, the media and conservatives across America underestimated President Clinton. Bill Clinton won his second term by rallying his party back together after the republicans tried to destroy Social Security and Medicare in 1995, shut down the government, and alienated moderate voters who wanted a Congress run by sane people. In fact, Clinton's 49-41% victory in 1996 over Bob Dole is still the largest popular vote victory in a presidential election by either party since 1984. "Democrats fall in love, republicans fall in line," says Bill Clinton. Joe Biden has a whole two years for democrats to fall in love with him again, and fall in love with the idea of watching Trump lose again.
In terms of Biden's age, I understand her reasoning behind this, but I think she weighs this factor too heavily with editorial exaggeration. One quote from the article: "For Democrats, the visual contrast alone [against DeSantis] could be devastating." Yeah, okay Michelle. I'm sure from the perspective of a New York liberal like you who lives in a journalism bubble and primarily talks to the die-hard liberals ordering chai lattes at Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts (to be fair, I am a big liberal who loves going there) who have between a 100% chance and a 150% chance of voting for a democrat in 2024, this "visual contrast" may be something they think about. But the 45 year-old mom with two teenage girls living in suburban Detroit who just got a job at the new Ford plant making electric F-150s does not care about which candidate has white hair and wrinkles; she's concerned about two things: The fact that Biden passed legislation making it possible for her to get that job, and second, she doesn't want her teenage girls to live in a world where they can be raped by a classmate and forced to carry the resulting baby through a nine-month pregnancy while in school because of republican abortion bans. Michelle, what you're suggesting is a bunch of malarkey, and I suggest you step outside the office and get some fresh air in the real world.
And third, it is definitely true that Democrats' bench of possible candidates is stronger than we thought, especially after people like governor Gretchen Whitmer dismantled republicans in the midterms. But, I would like to remind people of one stubborn little electoral indicator: Allan Lichtman's 13 keys to the White House. If you don't know about what this is, essentially, it is a system of 13 true or false questions that can determine which party will win the presidency. It was developed by a professor of political science at American University, and it has been correct at predicting the President going back to the 1880s (performed after the fact before 1984). Here are the 13 true/false statements:
1. "Party mandate: After the midterm elections the incumbent party holds more seats in the US House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections."
2. "Contest: The candidate is nominated on the first ballot and wins at least two-thirds of the delegate votes."
3. "Incumbency: The sitting president is the party candidate."
4. "Third party: A third-party candidate does not have at least 5 percent of the popular vote."
5. "Short-term economy: The National Bureau of Economic Research has either not declared a recession, or has declared it over prior to the election."
6. "Long-term economy: Real per-capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds the mean growth during the previous two terms."
7. "Policy change: The administration achieves a major policy change during the term comparable to the New Deal or the first-term Reagan Revolution."
8. "Social unrest: There is no social unrest during the term that is comparable to the upheavals of the post-civil war Reconstruction or of the 1960s, and is sustained or raises deep concerns about the unraveling of society."
9. "Scandal: There is no broad recognition of a scandal that directly touches upon the president."
10. "Foreign or military failure: There is no major failure during the term comparable to Pearl Harbor or the Iran hostage crisis that appears to significantly undermine America's national interests or threaten its standing in the world."
11. "Foreign or military success: There is a major success during the term comparable to the winning of World War II or the Camp David Accords that significantly advances America's national interests or its standing in the world."
12. "Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is a national hero comparable to Ulysses Grant or Dwight Eisenhower or is an inspirational candidate comparable to Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan."
13. "Challenger charisma: The challenger party candidate is not a national hero comparable to Ulysses Grant or Dwight Eisenhower and is not an inspirational candidate comparable to Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan."
Now, the rules of the 13 keys stipulate that if six or more of those statements are false, the incumbent party will lose, which in 2024, would mean Trump, DeSantis, or some other unknown republican would be President.
If Joe Biden runs again, as we expect him to, here's how the 13 keys could turn:
1. Midterms: Democrats have 213 seats, but after the 2018 midterms, they had 235. FALSE
2. Contested primary: Joe Biden would be uncontested or near-uncontested for the nomination. TRUE
3. Incumbency: TRUE
4. Third party: It's technically possible, but not very likely. TRUE
5. Short-term economy: As long as the possible 2023 recession resolves itself by the summer of '24, this category should be fine. TRUE
6. Long-term economy: This will definitely be true, because of the recovery from the 2008 recession in Obama's second term, and the pandemic in Trump's term. TRUE
7. Policy change: This one is subjective, but Professor Lichtman said Trump's tax cuts qualified as major changes, so I think Joe Biden's successful agenda in the 117th Congress including the Inflation Reduction Act qualifies too. TRUE
8. Social Unrest: This one is a bit subjective, too. The country is seemingly coming apart from the seams every day, but we'll have to see how bad it gets in '24. Things could get very bad in 2024 as the election approaches. For now, we'll say FALSE
9. Scandal: Republicans will likely impeach Biden one or twice, maybe three times, but most Americans just don't care about Hunter Biden's laptop. TRUE
10-11. Foreign failure/success: These are very subjective. Any republican would say that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a failure, but a democrat could also argue that the war in Ukraine and Russia's slow demise from power has been a huge foreign success. The way I see it, the two are like offsetting penalities. I'm trying to be as honest to this analysis as possible, so you can either say there was so major failure and no major success, or you can say there was a major failure, but also a major success. ONE TRUE, ONE FALSE
12. Incumbent Charisma: I love Biden, but he is not FDR or Kennedy. FALSE
13. Challenger Charisma: Trump never earned this key in 2016 or 2020, and I'm sorry, but Ron DeSantis, the creepy high school teacher who went to parties with 18 year old girls is not charismatic or inspiring to a large swath of Americans. TRUE
So with Biden running, four of these statements are false. According to the system, Biden wins a second term.
However, if Biden doesn't run, now the democrats have a problem. Unless one person runs away with the nomination and gets two-thirds of the delegates, something which has not happened since Al Gore's primary victory in 2000, two keys will have turned false: Incumbency and a contested primary. According to Lichtman's system, the republicans would win if Biden bows out of 2024.
Let me be clear: I'm not saying that Lichtman's system should be viewed as the God of electoral politics. Our country's politics has gone from civility and bipartisanship to chaos, disfunction, and hyperpolarization in just 30 years; maybe the system of "keys" is outdated. It certainly doesn't factor in things like "Is the majority party in the House run by shit-for-brains, paint-sniffing lunatics?" or "Has the GOP nominee been criminally indicted for trying to end democracy?" But pin those "keys" in the back of your mind as a metaphor for the serious challenges democrats will face in 2024 if Biden doesn't run again. I know that it's tempting for some democrats, especially those who were not on board with Joe Biden in the 2020 primary, to look for alternatives; but let's focus on taking down fascism first before we start arguing between which pro-democracy candidate is better. Let's start by making sure we still have a pro-democracy President when 2025 rolls around.
Now, if you are an avid reader of my blog, you will know that I have already made my 2024 Election prediction, and do not plan on changing it. Biden will win re-election by between 6-7% of the popular vote, winning 359 electoral votes, and flipping the states of North Carolina and Texas. If I am correct, when all the votes are counted, the New York Times 2024 election webpage will look like this:
Now, I believe that while Michelle Goldberg's opinion that Biden should not run in 2024 is most definitely the wrong one, concerns about Biden's age are not completely unfounded. When Biden concludes his presidency on the steps of the Capitol on January 20, 2029, he will be 86 years old, and yes, that's really old! But instead of confining Biden to the one-term presidency and giving republicans a chance to snatch victory from the jaws of electoral oblivion, I offer a better solution: If you believe that Joe Biden is too old to serve the full eight years, Joe Biden could run for re-election, serve out the first two years of his second term, but then retire halfway through and give a new democrat a chance to serve two years as President.
"Whaaaaat???" Yes, I know what you're thinking. I've gone bonkers and need to come home to the land of reality. I am well aware that this proposal sounds very radical, and has never been done before in American history. But hear me out. This is a very common practice in other western democracies, especially those with parliamentary systems. Take the United Kingdom, for example. In the history of the UK's democracy since the beginning of the 20th century, they have never had an open election. Every single time the Brits have gone to the polls, the prime minister has been actively running for re-election. This is because prime ministers will serve for as much time as they remain popular within their own party, but eventually, their political capital runs dry, and they give up the office for their successor to have an incumbency advantage in the next election. Here are two examples of this: Margaret Thatcher, after snatching 10 Downing Street from the Labour Party in the 1979 election, served for 11 years and won two general elections against Labour in 1983 and 1987. But after her election to a third term, she strayed too far away from the mainstream, advocating a very unpopular flat-rate tax called the "poll tax" (very different from an American poll tax). Her political capital ran dry within her own party; but instead of letting her term run until the 1992 general election, and nominating a new candidate to run as the "future leader" while she was in office, the Conservative Party forced her out. They chose a man named John Major to immediately assume the office of Prime Minister and have two years to establish his own administration and political power base. And in 1992, John Major eeked out a close victory against the Labour Party, and his incumbency advantage was certainly a positive factor. In 1997, Brits had grown tired of the Tories' trickle-down nonsense, and John Major was defeated by Tony Blair in a landslide, and Blair subsequently won two more elections in 2001 and 2005. But after Blair had served for eight years, his shine had slowly begun to fade amongst members of his own party, especially due to the war in Iraq. But with an election looming in 2010, the Labour Party decided to immediately move on to a new prime minister, Gordon Brown. Brown would end up losing in 2010 anyway, because of the economic recession, but his incumbency likely prevented the Conservatives from achieving an outright majority in 2010 had Blair stayed the incumbent. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Biden will lose his way and destroy his political capital among democrats in his second term, but these examples of prime ministers' early retirement in our sister nation across the Atlantic should demonstrate that this idea is not out of the mainstream.
We've never done this in America, because we view the Presidency as a much more sacred office than the Brits do, and part of that is our democracy's unique roots. We were the first real modern democracy, born from a small group of wise philosophical giants in Philadelphia, who led a small rag-tag little colony that stared down the most powerful monarchy in the world, and won. The Constitution that was born from that fight, and its first leader having been George Washington, the man who gave up the possibility of being King, makes the Presidency so much more special. Other democracies, like Britain's, were born from a slow, monotonous transition from autocracy to democracy that took generations of step-by-step progress. Because these countries do not view their democratic institutions as born from something sacred, they do not think of the office of Prime Minister as the same. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is seen as just the face of Parliament, and nothing more. He or she is not sworn in on the steps of Parliament on a fixed day, with an hours-long parade of bands and googah, and a sacred oath given by the Chief Justice of the House of Lords inscribed in the Constitution of Britain itself. Instead, the Prime Minister makes a short victory speech the morning after the election while standing in an average-looking street in London, with a not-so-remarkable building behind them known as 10 Downing Street, and after they finish their remarks, they walk inside their new house, they close the door, and get to work. And because of this, the Prime Minister is like a tissue for the party in power. Sure, it's useful to have it to blow your nose, but after you fold it over once or twice, it's no longer useful. So you throw it in the trash and you get a new tissue.
America also has this very stubborn inclination to honor political tradition and precedent long after any of its value has been depleted. Because no President has ever resigned with the sole intention of passing the reigns to a successor, it's not something we consider a possibility. If you don't count Nixon, every President who didn't die in office served to the end of its term, and so we, as Americans, take that history as our national tradition. But suppose, for the sake of the hypothetical, that Thomas Jefferson decided to resign in 1807 to allow his successor to be the incumbent, and have the Democratic-Republicans select the new President. James Madison, having won the nomination, would become President upon the resignation of Jefferson and Vice President George Clinton. If such an event happened so early in American history, Presidents would be doing it all the time to choose their successor and give them a better chance of winning, and it would be "tradition."
Tradition is all subjective, and an old adage that holds very true to our politics is "the first time it's an accident; the next time, it's tradition." So yes, in terms of its unprecedented nature, my proposal is definitely radical. But in terms of its implications, it falls well short of crazy, and would be highly beneficial to the Democratic Party. Here's how my proposal would work:
Biden wins in 2024, and hopefully, his victory will carry along enough vulnerable congressional democrats to hold the Senate. If the Democrats keep the Senate in January of 2025 without Manchin as the 50th vote, they will be able to break the filibuster and pass a legislative agenda on par with LBJ in 1965-1966. Joe Biden will have two years to pass the 43-year liberal wish list of progressive policy. But with Biden at age 83 by the end of 2025, he announces that he will be resigning halfway through his second term, and the winner of a 2026 special Democratic presidential primary will be nominated as his Vice President, who will ascend to the Presidency upon his resignation in January of 2027. ¹
Biden would probably not want to announce this until the end of the first year of his second term, so that his Democratic congress would have time to pass their agenda without extra political distractions. If he announced it around Christmas-time, it would give candidates 11 months to campaign - plenty of time to make an impression on voters.
Now, the election for President would be a full national Democratic primary, but because such an election in a midterm year will have never happened before, states will not have laws geared towards holding that election. Many red states would likely not want to help the Democratic party unilaterally choose the next President, so the Democrats would likely have to hold the elections on their own, which would cost millions of dollars. But, this primary election would attract millions of Democratic-leaning voters to the polls in a midterm election where they might not have normally voted. Whoever the candidates are for President would be out campaigning for months before the midterms, reaching out to young voters, to Latino voters, to black voters, and all sorts of people in every corner of the country. It would be a huge boon for national democrats trying to preserve their majorities in the House and Senate. So any cash the democrats might have to dole out to hold an election should just be seen as cash well-spent on voter turnout. In addition, with the Democrats controlling the process of the election, they could hold the "2026 Special Presidential Election" on their own terms and rules. It could be the first election held on a Saturday, and the first election decided by a national popular vote, and it could prove to the naysayers that electing a President by just counting who got the most votes does not result in the country burning down.
While it might be easier for Biden to resign and just make Kamala Harris the President, I don't have faith in her political capabilities as President. Kamala is a fantastic human being who is right on just about every issue, but we gotta win the election. She's a bit too liberal and doesn't have the skills to communicate the issues to voters we need in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. By electing Biden's successor by a national primary, it would be the true choice of the Democratic Party's march to the future, and would give our party a proven electoral winner who would have campaign experience going into 2028 as the incumbent President. And if the Democrats' base turnout is boosted enough by this national primary, the new Democratic president would have a fresh congressional majority to build a platform of proven results for voters.
Now, if is just a bridge too far in the "Weird" category, I understand. As a two term President, I am confident that Joe Biden can go above and beyond in governing, especially if he keeps the Senate in 2024. And, if his economic agenda continues to succeed by the time 2028 rolls around, Democrats should have a fine set of candidates who can win on the back of an eight-tear Biden presidency. But to all the liberal Joe Biden naysayers, I encourage you to take a dose of creativity and imagination before declaring that his presidency must end. I came up with this idea in five minutes while sitting on the sofa and drinking my decaf vanilla coffee that I warmed up on my gas stove (yes, it has not been taken away by the 87,000-strong Biden environmental justice IRS agent army that Fox News warned me of). If I could come with that in such a short time, maybe someone like Michelle Goldberg should try a little harder.
¹ One quick note: Because of the leap day occurring in presidential election years, the 2027 Special Inauguration of the new President would need to occur on January 22nd, not January 20th. There will be 732 days between Inauguration Day 2025 and January 22, 2027, and 729 days between January 22, 2027, and Inauguration Day 2029. The 22nd amendment says "No person who has held the office of President...for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once." Because one year is 365 days, that makes two years 730 days. Holding the Inauguration Day on January 22nd, 729 days until the end of the term, would erase any constitutional questions, and allow the new Democratic president to run for re-election twice in 2028 and 2032.