The dirty little secret of why Joe Biden is running again

I'll tell you!

Joe Biden isn’t going to drop out of the 2024 race — for one VERY specific reason. I tell you what it is below! 🤫🤫🤫

Over the last week, the “should Joe Biden drop out” talk has reached new heights.

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein dedicated an entire podcast to his case for why it’s time for Biden to step aside. “I think Biden, as painful as this is, should find his way to stepping down as a hero,” said Klein.

And then, on Monday, numbers guru Nate Silver made the same case on his Substack. Wrote Silver:

Biden is probably a below-replacement-level candidate at this point because Americans have a lot of extremely rational concerns about the prospect of a Commander-in-Chief who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. It is entirely reasonable to see this as disqualifying.

I find myself in (general) agreement with that view. While I have made the case in the past in this space that Biden was the strongest candidate Democrats could nominate (even with his flaws), the persistence of his low approval ratings and the fact that he continues to trail Donald Trump both nationally and in swing states even as voters begin to focus on the election has convinced me the party would be (likely) be better off with another option.

But, I also like to deal in reality. This isn’t fantasy football where you just swap one presidential nominee for another, press “save” and be done with it. And I continue to believe that there is NO way that Joe Biden is not the Democratic presidential nominee this year.

The “why” behind that belief is what I want to talk about today.

Joe Biden is running again, even at his advanced age, for ONE primary reason: He believes himself to be the only person in the party who can and will beat Trump in November.

We know this. Biden has even admitted that “if Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running.”

But, there’s something important buried in that belief — and it’s this: Joe Biden does not believe his vice president, Kamala Harris, could keep the White House for Democrats this fall.

Now, of course, he’s never said that publicly — and he never will! But, let’s just walk through the thinking here.

For all of the talk that a Biden retirement would set off a free-for-all in the Democratic primary, that’s almost certainly not true.

Harris, the first black and Indian American woman to ever serve as vice president, would be the clear favorite to be the party’s nominee for a two very important reasons:

1. She is VP right now. Duh.

2. She represents — as a black woman — two CRITICAL constituencies within the Democratic party

To pass over Harris given those facts would be read as (and be!) a MASSIVE slight. And Democrats can’t afford to piss of African Americans and women — much less both of them.

Biden and his inner circle know this.

And they also know THIS: Kamala Harris is not very popular.

In an NBC poll released earlier this month, just 28% of the public viewed Harris positively while 53% regarded her in a negative light. Even more troubling for Harris is that the intensity is all on the negative side; 10% felt very positively about her while four times that number (42%) felt very negatively.

And those numbers are far from an anomaly. Here’s a look at the aggregated approval/disapproval polling data on Harris as collected by FiveThirty Eight:

Harris has — as has been well documented — struggled to adjust to the demands and strictures of the vice presidency.

(Sidebar: I have written before and deeply believe that being vice president is a HUGELY difficult job that almost no one —particularly someone who wants to be president one day — does well.)

I think the New York Times nailed what has been missing for Harris in a recent profile of her. Wrote author Astead Herndon:

But if Biden’s age is the Democrats’ explicit electoral challenge, Harris, 59 this month, is the unspoken one. Three years after she and Biden were presented as a package deal, a two-for-one special that included a younger, nonwhite candidate to counterbalance Biden’s shortcomings, Democrats have not embraced the president in waiting. In interviews with more than 75 people in the vice president’s orbit, there is little agreement about Harris at all, except an acknowledgment that she has a public perception problem, a self-fulfilling spiral of bad press and bad polls, compounded by the realities of racism and sexism….

…Republican presidential candidates like former Ambassador Nikki Haley have already argued that a vote for Biden next November is a vote for a President Kamala Harris. Trump recently gave an interview to the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in which he mocked Harris’s speaking style and also said aloud what many people seem to be whispering: that the closer Harris gets to the presidency, the further she has become from convincing the country that she is presidential.

That’s it exactly. Biden cast himself during the 2020 campaign as a “bridge” to the next generation of Democratic leaders. In picking Harris as his vice president, Biden seemed to be hand-selecting that next leader.

But, Harris has not emerged — certainly as Biden would have wanted her to — over the past three years. The Harris people would argue that is the fault of the president, who stuck her with difficult issues to manage — including the border.

Just look at this reporting from Sunday — via CNN — that suggests that the VP still finds herself on the outside looking in at Bidenword:

More than two dozen sources tell CNN that Harris has been gathering information to help her penetrate what she sometimes refers to as the “bubble” of Biden campaign thinking, telling people she’s aiming to use that intelligence to push for changes in strategy and tactics that she hopes will put the ticket in better shape to win.

Not great!

There’s also this: Harris’ ground breaking status as the first woman and first black and Indian person to be elected vice president makes some people in the country uneasy. There remains some bloc of voters who will not cast a ballot for a woman (or a black and Indian person). Period. How big is that group? And how much does it have to do with Harris’ unpopularity? It’s virtually impossible to accurately measure.

The point is this: Regardless of the “why”, Biden and his team do NOT believe deep down that Harris can win this election against Trump.

And they DO believe that losing the election would have catastrophic consequences not just for the party but, more importantly, for the country.

Those twin beliefs are why all of the talk about Biden stepping down are bullshit. Barring some sort of massive medical event, he’s simply not going to do it.