Earlier this week I voted in the Democratic primary for Joe Biden. It wasn’t a hard choice for me.
Before even discussing the political calculation of my choice, my vote for Joe Biden represented my trust in this 81-year old public servant to finish the terrific job he has done for the country over the last three years. He is arguably the most experienced President in American history since John Quincy Adams, and I believe he is the best U.S. President in my lifetime.
No other President in my lifetime, not even Obama, could have accomplished what Joe Biden did over the course of his presidency with a Senate split down the middle at 50-50 and a 5-seat majority in the House of Representatives. At the start of his presidency, Joe Biden led without any fear or hesitation. He helped guide the passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which brought the economy back from the brink of collapse. Joe Biden successfully pursued the passage of the largest infrastructure bill since the 1950s, the first gun control law in 30 years, allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs, unprecedented changes in veterans’ healthcare, student loan relief, and the largest investment in solving climate change in human history. Only Joe Biden could’ve accomplished this much, because his years of experience and wisdom guided him through every challenge. Joe Biden had the courage to finally withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, a graveyard for empires that we overstayed our lease in. Joe Biden, despite all the odds, mustered such a strong response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine that despite all of its challenges, Ukraine is alive, NATO is alive, and the reputation of the Russian army is dead.
The Real State of the Race
Ultimately, the election is not going to come down to the over-hyped narratives of the New York Times and other mainstream outlets, but a single math equation: Joe Biden, assuming he wins the popular vote, will be guaranteed 226 electoral votes, by default. Donald Trump, assuming he doesn’t lose the popular vote by more than 5% (which would end the election anyway), will likely be guaranteed 235 electoral votes - the same 25 states he won in 2020.
The election will be decided by six states: Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia - a total of 77 electoral votes. If Joe Biden gets at least 44 of those electoral votes, no matter what combination, he will be re-elected. That’s it. That’s the election. Anything else is either gravy, or it’s a distraction.
More importantly, I don’t trust all of the so-called Democratic “alternatives” to perform as well as Joe Biden in the six crucial swing states. Unless the Democratic convention goes to over a dozen ballots, the desire for the “path of least resistance” is going to result in the nomination of Kamala Harris, and to a lesser extent, Gavin Newsom. I don’t really know if those two have the ability to connect with swing voters in parts of western Wisconsin or working-class areas in Pittsburgh or northeast Pennsylvania. But I do know that Joe Biden can win over these voters, because he has done it before.
If Donald Trump faces no criminal consequences before the election, I think Biden will still win, but narrowly (3-4% in the popular vote). I think he holds an inherent advantage in Michigan and Pennsylvania because of strong midterm performances and organizational strength by Democrats in both states, and he will win Arizona and Nevada because both of the states are holding referendums to legalize abortion. That would earn Biden a total of 277 electoral votes, and end the whole thing. This is not to discount Democrats’ newfound advantage in Wisconsin, where the state Supreme Court is now controlled by a 4-3 liberal majority of justices who will likely strike down any attempt by Republicans in the Badger State to suppress the vote. This would include protecting access to vote-by-mail and/or ballot drop boxes across urban areas in Milwaukee and Madison that were previously struck down by the high court when conservatives held the majority.
If Trump is convicted of (criminal) business fraud in New York but nothing else before November, I predict Biden to win the popular vote by 5-6%, winning all six crucial swing states by over a percentage point in each, and the margin in North Carolina will be within 0.5% for either candidate (giving Biden between 303 and 319 electoral votes).
If, by Election Day, Trump is convicted in D.C. and/or in Fulton County of trying to steal the election, but is not actually in jail on the day of the election, I predict Biden will win the popular vote by 8-10%, and will carry, in addition to comfortable margins in the six swing states and North Carolina, a combination of Texas, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, and Maine’s 2nd congressional district (between 359 and 416 electoral votes).
If Trump is actually in prison on the day of the election, all bets are off. Any state in which Donald Trump won by less than 20% of the vote in 2020 (excluding Louisiana and Mississippi, who harbor the nation’s most statistically unmovable voters), should be considered up for grabs (up to 461 electoral votes for Joe Biden).
Joe Biden Is Going To Beat Donald Trump, and Replacing Him As The Democratic Nominee Is A Really Bad Idea
Yes, Joe Biden is losing in the polls. So was George H. W. Bush in 1988 against Michael Dukakis…by 17 points. John Kerry led George W. Bush around this time in 2004. I don’t particularly trust the polls anymore, not because I think math is fake, but because the American people have a way of always making the polls look ridiculous. I could spend countless paragraphs discussing my ever-increasing skepticism with the veracity of the polls, but instead, I want to distill my electoral argument for Joe Biden down to the simplest it can be:
There’s a political science professor from American University named Allan Lichtman, 76, who is famous for correctly predicting the result of every presidential election since 1984 - sometimes years in advance - all with just a 13-variable model. He calls his system the “13 Keys to the White House.” It’s based on the premise that most voters, in the end, are unswayed by the debauchery of presidential campaigns and horse-race politics, and simply choose the next President based on the performance of the party holding the White House, whether or not any blame or credit is warranted. According to the model, if five or fewer of the statements in the 13 Keys are “false,” then the incumbent party will win the election. If six or more turn false, then the incumbent party will be thrown out of office.
I don’t believe that Professor Lichtman’s keys are perfect, but I do believe that every one of the 13 variables in his model do matter the most in presidential campaigns, and it does us no good to ignore them. Right now, the 13 Keys show that Joe Biden is on the path to victory over Donald Trump in 2024, but if he drops out of the race, the model says Trump will probably win the election. As Professor Lichtman puts it, the shiny objects we are drawn to, such as polls and the endless noise from the press are just snapshots in time. Ultimately, the 13 Keys will shape the race into the correct outcome. If Joe Biden continues on his path towards the nomination and ignores the baseless calls for his removal from the ticket, here’s what the 13 Keys say about 2024:
Variable (Key) #1: “After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.” (FALSE)
This statement is false, and it almost always is for the incumbent President’s party. After the 2018 midterm elections, the Democrats held 235 seats in the House. That number was reduced to 222 in the 2020 election, and subsequently reduced again to 213 in the 2022 midterms.
Variable #2: The incumbent party’s nominee wins on the first ballot with over 2/3rds of the delegates, and there is no serious drama or deep vocal divisions after that candidate wins the primary (i.e. 1968 or 1980). (TRUE)
If Joe Biden doesn’t drop out, this statement will remain true. He is winning an overwhelming percentage of the vote in the Democratic primary.
Variable #3: “The incumbent party candidate is the sitting President.” (TRUE)
To steal some words from Thomas Jefferson, we hold this truth to be self-evident.
Variable #4: “There is no third party candidate receiving more than 5% of the vote.” (LEANING FALSE)
This statement is leaning towards FALSE. Most pollsters show Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - the son of Attorney General and Senator Bobby Kennedy - with between 10-15% of support from registered voters. However, it’s important to note that third party candidates almost always poll better than they actually perform in the election, and its unclear whether Kennedy will even gain access to the ballot in the states that matter. Unless Kennedy’s name is on the ballot in Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and/or Georgia, this key will remain true.
Variable #5: “The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.” (LEANING TRUE)
This variable is leaning heavily towards TRUE. Most economists define a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative year-over-year GDP growth, which doesn’t seem likely in a period of extremely low unemployment, and expectations of a modest lowering of federal reserve interest rates. By the time the Democratic and Republican conventions are held, we will know the results of the first two quarters of GDP growth. If both are above water, the chances of a rapid economic meltdown by November are almost zero.
Variable #6: “Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.” (LEANING TRUE)
This variable is quite easy to calculate. Real U.S. GDP (in 2017 dollars) was at $17.489 trillion at the end of Q4 in 2012, and finished at $20.724 trillion at the end of Q4 in 2020. Therefore, real GDP growth over the course of the two previous presidential terms clocked in at +$3.235 trillion. Divided over that eight year span, it averages out to an average annual growth rate of $404 billion per year.
In Q4 of 2023, real GDP reached $22.672 trillion, which means that over the course of the preceding three years, the U.S. economy grew by $1.948 trillion. Divide by 3, and the average GDP growth per year clocks in at a sweet $649 billion.
In order for this key to turn false, the economy would have to shrink far enough in 2024 that the average real GDP growth per year drops below $404 billion. $404 billion multiplied by 4 years equals $1.616 trillion, which is actually $332 billion less than the GDP growth since G4 of 2020 was at the end of last year. Therefore, the economy would have to shrink by $332 billion in 2024 for this variable to become false. As a percent, it would require a change of -1.64% in real GDP growth over the next eight and a half months. To provide some historical context, the highest year-over-year losses during the Great Recession were during the period from 2008 Q2 to 2009 Q2, in which the U.S. economy shrunk by about 3.9%. A 1.64% reduction in GDP over the next eight and a half months would represent an average annual loss of 2.32%.
Therefore, in order for this variable to turn false, the economy must undergo a recession that is 59.5% as severe as the 2008 financial crisis by the month of November. That’s probably not going to happen.
Variable #7: “The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.” (TRUE)
This variable is one of the first truly subjective of the thirteen “keys” to the White House. However, to Biden’s credit, Professor Lichtman himself as said on multiple occasions in the past year that the President’s policy accomplishments such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill earn him a “True” for this variable. It seems like an accurate analysis. Professor Lichtman marked this variable as “True” during President Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 for having passed the Affordable Care Act, but did not give Hillary Clinton credit for the variable in 2016, because nearly all of Obama’s second-term policy proposals died in the Republican-controlled Congress.
Variable #8: “There is no sustained social unrest during the term.” (LEANING TRUE)
The final verdict on this variable is the most unstable of them all. In order for this “key” to be turned false, it requires both sustained and nationwide violence during the election campaign. Professor Lichtman has stated multiple times that the bar is unusually high for this variable to be false. For example, he did not count the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles against President Bush, nor did he count the anti-war protests in 2004 and 2008 against the Republicans. The only two elections in post-WW2 politics in which this key has turned false, according to Lichtman, was in 1968 and 2020.
This key may be the ultimate pivot point in the 2024 election, which is why we should be on the lookout for both the Russians and the more clandestine parts of the Trump campaign, such as Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn to put in every effort to turn this key false against Joe Biden. At this point in 2020, this variable would actually have been leaning heavily towards true, but we know that within just over two months, the death of George Floyd changed everything. This factor will probably remain true, but only time will tell.
Variable #9: “The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.”
Professor Lichtman has been very circumspect over the years about awarding this variable to the opposition party, because according to him, unless there is widespread and bipartisan acknowledgement of impropriety, the median voters tend to ignore allegations of wrongdoing that appear to be the product of partisan politicking. For example, Professor Lichtman declined to turn the key false in 1988, despite the Iran-contra scandal. However, in 1976, 2000 and 2020, after the resignation/impeachments of Nixon, Clinton, and Trump, Lichtman turned the key false.
Lichtman has said the Hunter Biden laptop “scandal” is not nearly enough to turn the key false. Well under 50% of Americans believe Biden did anything truly wrong in the case, and with the recent indictment of the House Republicans’ supposedly infallible informant for lying to the FBI, this variable is going to stay TRUE.
Variables #10 and #11: First, the incumbent administration achieves a major foreign policy success and second, the incumbent administration does not suffer a major foreign policy failure. (ONE TRUE, ONE FALSE)
I grouped these together for a specific reason. This key is quite subjective, but Lichtman has a set of clear criteria to parse through the gradients of foreign policy events that can occur during a presidency. In order for the foreign success key to be true, an event must occur that greatly improves the prestige and interests of the United States. Some of those events that Lichtman has counted towards the incumbent party include President Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the collapse of the Soviet Union, apparent coalition victories in Afghanistan from 2001-2002, and the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden.
On the other hand, for an administration to suffer a major foreign policy failure strong enough to turn the second variable false, it has to significantly undermine the standing of the United States and/or erode trust in the president's leadership. According to Lichtman, failed attempts at major diplomatic initiatives such as the failed two-state treaty between Israel and Palestine in 2000, do not turn this key false. Events that have turned this key false include the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vietnam War, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Iraq War quagmire during Bush’s second term.
This is where foreign policy events and their effect on these two variables become a bit unclear for Joe Biden. Does the withdrawal from Afghanistan count as a significant failure? It’s a tough call. Large majorities of Americans agreed with Biden’s Afghanistan policy, and wanted the United States to get the hell out of Dodge. President Biden, however, suffered his absolute worst decreases in approval rating during the unavoidable chaotic exit from Kabul. Secondly, what about the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza? Arguably, that conflict shouldn’t be affecting these 13 variables, because Joe Biden has not and will never put our troops on the ground in Gaza. Perhaps one could argue that as long as President Biden can keep the war in Gaza contained and avoid a regional war with Lebanon, Syria, and/or Iran, it should not count as a foreign policy failure.
If one does count these two factors in totality as a failure against Biden, it’s hard to avoid hypocrisy by claiming that the successful defense of Ukraine and the addition of Finland and Sweden to NATO is not a foreign policy success that represents to American voters strong leadership from their President.
I’m not a professor, and I am not the creator of the “13 Keys to the White House,” so I will leave the final decision to Lichtman on how these keys pan out in the end. But in my opinion, one key should be true, and one should be false.
Variable #12: “The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.” (FALSE)
Lichtman describes this variable as meaning that a candidate has extraordinarily persuasive or dynamic personality that gives him or her very broad appeal across a majority of the American public. Since the turn of the century, the only candidates who have qualified for this key have been the two Roosevelts, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama (I think Bill Clinton should be included, but Lichtman disagrees). A candidate can also lose the charisma variable over time - in 2012, when Obama ran for re-election, Lichtman stated that Obama had lost his unique appeal with the American public. His explanation actually makes a lot of sense: “He didn’t really take the lead in the healthcare debate [and] he didn’t use his speaking ability to move the American people during the recession.”
I believe Joe Biden is the best President of my lifetime, and one of the kindest-hearted and empathic leaders we could ever wish for. I would trust an 81-year old gaffe machine who cares about ordinary people over a slimy creature of Hollywood who can make people feel good about their country while mutilating everything that actually made their country great in the first place. Some of our greatest leaders in history were viewed as terrible speakers in their own time. Jefferson was so bad at public speaking that he refused to speak for the State of the Union, and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address was panned by the Chicago Times in 1863 as “silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances.”
Unfortunately, Joe Biden does not have the magic of a Roosevelt or a Kennedy. This variable is FALSE.
Variable #13: “The challenging party candidate is NOT charismatic or a national hero.” (TRUE)
Donald Trump is certainly a once-in-a-generation candidate, and he is arguably “charismatic.” He is, by every definition, a cult leader. But Lichtman has a very easy explanation for why Trump actually does NOT qualify for this variable. A candidate’s special talent for connecting to the voters with his or her charisma has to be wide-spread and cross party lines to earn a majority of the public’s support. But never once has a majority of the public had a favorable opinion of Donald Trump, There has long been a clear correlation between Trump’s poll numbers and how prominent he is in the news. The more Trump appears on TV and in newspapers, his poll numbers drop significantly. That’s not the mark of a candidate worthy of the charisma variable. This key is TRUE.
As you can see, Joe Biden is on his way to re-election, and Donald Trump is on his way to prison. The most likely outcome of the 13 Keys to the White House by November 5th is that Joe Biden will have 3-5 variables going against him. The only way for Biden’s count of “False” variables to reach the magic number of 6 to indicate a Trump victory in 2024 is for a litany of things to simultaneously turn against him at once.
I do not believe the 13 Keys to the White House to be an unshakable, godly force. But in totality, what the state of Professor Lichtman’s model should show all of us is that the media and certain Democrats are just overreacting. Half of American voters don’t even know who the two nominees will be in November; it shouldn’t be a mystery why polling is a mess right now. The 2024 hyper-ventilators who think Joe Biden is doomed are too online and too oversensitive to “recency bias,” which is when a person overstates the importance of the most current events as far more significant than they actually will be in just weeks or months down the road. I like to compare it to one’s reaction to a very emotional breakup. In the first few days, anyone who experiences a terrible end to a romantic relationship should and will cast it as the end of the world, and that nothing can ever be just as good again. And then within weeks, most normal people will feel better, and are ready to move on with their life.
The Absurdity of Removing Joe Biden
The reason I’m emphasizing Professor Lichtman’s 13 Keys to the White House so much, besides the fact that they are stunningly accurate, is that they clearly show that Democrats are much more likely to hand the Presidency to Donald Trump if President Biden drops out of the race. Not the other way around. If Biden were to drop out of the presidential race, Democrats would lose one of the variables by default, because the nominee of the party would no longer be the sitting President of the United States. Secondly, and most importantly, the strength of variable #2, the possibility of a largely uncontested primary would immediately collapse. Even if Kamala Harris to were barely scrape by with the nomination on the first ballot at the Democratic nomination with the ominous and creepily coincidental magic number of 1,968 delegates, thus avoiding the quintessential “brokered convention,” the rules of Lichtman’s 13 Keys state quite clearly that it would turn variable #2 FALSE. And as Lichtman’s system tells us, that would hand the Presidency to Donald Trump.
For me, the impact on Lichtman’s 13 Key model of Joe Biden dropping out is enough for me to throw in the towel. Joe Biden should be the nominee; end of discussion. Democrats can settle their ideological differences on the political battlefield in 2028 for the next leader of the party. That day is not today, and that year is not 2024. Yes, I would be more comfortable if Biden was leading Trump by at least 5% in the polls. And yes, his age worries me too. But why in the world should Democrats purposely move IN THE WRONG DIRECTION of Lichtman’s model predicting the downfall of Donald Trump? It’s 100% avoidable political suicide.
Consider this fact: Since Grover Cleveland became the first Democrat elected after the Civil War, there have been seven “contested” conventions held by the party holding the White House, meaning before the convention, it was unclear who the party’s nominee would be. Only one of those nominees won the election. Who was it? It was a trick question: The answer is Matthew Santos, a fictional character from the West Wing. That’s because NONE of the six real-life nominees won the presidency. Every single one of them went down to defeat in the general election. Only in fiction are there happy endings to brokered conventions, and we’re not going to beat Donald Trump by trying to insert West Wing fan fiction into the real world where it doesn’t belong. Real-life brokered conventions for the incumbent party end in disaster. If you think it would be fun, entertaining, and healthy for the party to hash out our differences for days at the convention, I highly encourage you to talk to two-term President Gerald Ford, President Adlai Stevenson, President James Cox, President William Jennings Bryan, and President James Blaine about how fun, entertaining, and healthy for their party it was to lose the election.
If you have reasonable complaints about the accuracy of a 13-variable election model that doesn’t include things like age or “Is the challenger party candidate a felon,” I completely understand. Suppose you want to disregard the 13 Keys as a valid argument for keeping Joe Biden on the ticket. Then I present you with the following question: How in the world would such an endeavor to replace Joe Biden actually work?
This is, of course, the problem. There is no actual plan to replace Joe Biden, because it doesn’t make any logical sense. Here’s my demand: Any of the dozens of people in the media who have called for Joe Biden to step down, such as Michelle Goldberg, Ezra Klein, or Steven Shepard at Politico must list exactly who should be Joe Biden’s replacement. None of them have done this. Yes, I realize they have all listed out an extensive list of possibilities like Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer. But in the absence of a singular candidate, a singular voice who can represent an actual majority of Democrats, these writers are opening admitting the inevitably of a multi-ballot train-wreck in Chicago.
Finally, this is where the “dump-Biden” proposal truly disintegrates into a pile of ash: Since we’ve already determined that both history and proven election modeling shows that the incumbent President’s party almost always does worse when they have a contested nomination, that means the only logical reason to get rid of Joe Biden is because his poll numbers are bad. Okay, fair point. Accept here’s the catch: If your decisions are based on the polls, you can’t support nominating Kamala Harris, or you would be contradicting yourself. Kamala Harris consistently polls between 2-2.5% worse against Trump than Joe Biden in the polls.
Of course, no candidate other than Vice President Kamala Harris or President Biden can actually win the Democratic nomination on the first ballot, because we know that at minimum, about 35-40% of the Democratic delegates, a lot of them from the South, will want to vote for Kamala Harris by default, she being the first black woman to serve in the Vice Presidency. Therefore, by process of elimination, if you are arguing for Joe Biden to step down, you are arguing in favor of a multi-ballot dumpster fire. Just a bit of simple math would tell us that even if a plethora of alternative candidates were to hold Vice President Harris to as unrealistically low as a third of the vote, the convention would be forced into at least a second ballot, if not dozens more, because another candidate would have to take a whopping 75% of the remaining delegates. And if such a mystery candidate were to ever beat Kamala Harris for the nomination, as a completely unelected nominee (which I don’t have a problem with, but many voters do), do you really think the Democrats’ core constituency of black voters is going to be very pleased with that outcome? No, of course not. They’re going to be very angry about it, and perhaps that’s why Allan Lichtman’s 13 Keys put such an emphasis on the harm of contested conventions.
Of course, people like Ezra Klein at the New York Times who live in a completely alternative universe from the large numbers of Americans who are low-information voters, think that a brokered Democratic convention would be the “most fun of your whole life,” “great reality TV,” and that “people would get into it, and I think they’d like it.” Sure, it would be an interesting experience for the millions of Americans who are news junkies and know who they’re voting for. But I’m not interested in those people, nor do I care about helping political reporters pursue their wet dreams of sprinting across a Chicago convention hall as the convention goes from ballot to ballot. I want to beat Donald Trump, and if that means every last Op-Ed writer for the New York Times gets denied the opportunity for weeks and weeks of columns about convention drama, I’m not shedding one tear for them. Not one. Democracy is a bit more valuable to me than Maureen Dowd having her salary tied to the corniness of her pop culture references.
For the rest of Americans who don’t consume news like rabid dogs, the convention would look like a spectacle of stupidity, and a microcosm of a governing party in complete disfunction and chaos. And don’t even get me started on how the Israel-Hamas War will completely fracture the Democratic base into a full-out civil war if there’s an open convention. I’m not having it. This would be chaos: Chaos that will make Donald Trump the next President of the United States.
That is, of course, why I voted for Joe Biden. He deserves to be the nominee. He deserves another four years to finish the job. He is the one person who can best unite the Democratic Party in a time of great urgency. And most importantly, he is the candidate with the best chance of beating Donald Trump.
(Part 2 will be released in the coming days)