Readers, between last night’s debate, the fall of Chevron, the Rahimi concurrences, and the reopening of J6 prosecutions, there is too much news! I’ve gotta pick a lane for today, and I’m going with the horse race.
Early this morning, Nate Silver called on Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race:
I am loathe to disagree with Nate in the hour of his vindication. He has obviously been correct for months that Biden’s too old to continue running for president, he took a lot of crap for it, and he is entitled to a victory lap now that the Democrats are, finally, realizing Nate was right all along.
Nevertheless, I think his call for an immediate drop, on the cusp of July, is too hasty, tactically speaking.
Now, take this with a grain of salt. I am writing about this because it is an interesting and unprecedented tactical question in the horse race, and I love handicapping the horse race. However, I hate the Democrats and actively wish them ill. I like to think that being a double-hater (I also hate Trump!) gives me objectivity, but it may also make me weak to schadenfreude, which could bias my analysis.
Eight years ago, on 18 August 2016, I called on the Republican National Committee to replace Trump. At the time, Trump’s moral defects seemed overwhelming, and (worse yet for the GOP) his position in the polls had slid to their nadir: when I started writing, the FiveThirtyEight model showed Clinton with an 88% chance of winning the election. I renewed my call on 9 October, shortly after Trump’s pick-up advice (“Grab them by the pussy”) leaked to the press. Clinton had an 82% chance of winning the election at that time, but soon topped out again at 88%. Trump was genuinely toast until he had the astonishingly good luck of James Comey discovering (and announcing) new emails in his investigation of Hillary Clinton. This timely discovery very likely cost Clinton the election.1 Trump surged in the polls. By Election Day, he had a 29% chance of winning, FiveThirtyEight ran the famous article, “Trump is Just a Normal Polling Error Behind Clinton,” a normal polling error occurred, and Trump became President.
So, in 2016, my benchmark was, “Replace the nominee for severe moral failings once his chance of winning falls to about 15%”—and, even following that conservative heuristic, I would have been replacing the candidate who ended up winning the election!
Today, Biden’s odds of winning the race are about two to three times better than Trump’s were in 2016 when I called for his removal. The Silver Bulletin forecast2 put Biden’s chances at 35% as of the debate. Now that the debate is over, they may sink, as Nate Silver predicts they will. There’s good reason to expect that. (Some reason to doubt.) If they do sink, it is possible that they won’t bounce back, as Nate Silver predicts they won’t. There’s good reason to expect that, too…
…but also good reason to think that Biden probably will bounce back. Most things in American presidential elections do not have a lasting impact. Most things cause a “bounce,” which lasts a few weeks and then fades. Mr. Trump was just (unfairly) convicted of a number of felonies. This appeared to have no effect, then briefly seemed to have some effect, and this week seemed to be fading again. All told, a few felony convictions seems to have earned Biden, like, two points for, like, two weeks. Will the debate debacle hit harder or last longer? Maybe!
But it hasn’t actually happened yet. Today, Biden still plausibly stands at about a one-in-three shot at the presidency. As Nate correctly says in his article:
We’re playing the highest-stakes game of poker you can imagine, and you do whatever in your power to improve your odds — even if it’s only from 25 percent to 35 percent.
However, with Biden’s pre-debate baseline already at 35%, it isn’t obvious that swapping his horse for another would improve the Democrats’ odds. Nate also acknowledges:
These aren’t ideal circumstances. Picking a new nominee via superdelegates at the convention would be like attending a shitshow at a plumbers’ convention. And Harris remains quite unpopular too, although her disapproval ratings are now notably better than Biden’s. Either of these candidates are probably below 50 percent to win against Trump.
How far below 50 percent, though?
Well, there’s a reason that, in 2016, I didn’t think replacing Trump was plausible enough to write about until his odds were all the down to the teens. A brokered convention would probably be less damaging for the Democrats than my proposal (an RNC coup) would have been for the Republicans, since at least the delegates will get to decide the nominee. Certainly I am personally a huge fan of brokered conventions and would love to see one on national TV, regardless of party. Nevertheless: a brokered convention that nobody planned as a brokered convention could very quickly and very easily turn into a tremendous debacle.
I’ve told this story before, but long long ago in my callow youth, I was a Ron Paul guy, and we got ourselves elected as delegates to a local Republican district convention and contested it. The district GOP Rules Committee was aware of our plans and tried some maneuvering to shut us down, but we also maneuvered, and nobody was really prepared for the mechanics of a district convention that hadn’t been seriously contested since the late 1970s. The method adopted for counting ballots was ill-suited to a true contest and basically broke down, with hours required to count votes. A convention which had opened at 9 AM with a call from the chair to “keep things moving so we can be out of here by noon, because we get extra charges on our rental if we stay longer” did not finally adjourn until 11 PM. (The Paulites were decisively routed. No quarter was asked or given.) There were maybe a couple hundred people there, all Minnesotans, all therefore experts at getting along. (Indeed, I later became friendly with lots of people on the “other side”.)
In Chicago in August, the DNC is going to have several thousand delegates in attendance, from all over the country, most of them (alarmingly) not Minnesotan! Back in the days of brokered conventions, parties chose their delegates in part based on their capacity to navigate a brokered convention: do you take orders from the local bosses well? Are your politics sound and helpful to the party? Do you understand the convention rules and how to exploit them? In 2016, the Republican state parties, anticipating a possible brokered convention, did start picking delegates with an eye toward these qualities. In general, though, that’s not how we pick delegates. In the one delegate election contest I clearly remember (2012 MN CD-2), the delegate candidates campaigned on length and intensity of service to the local party. The guy who organizes the phone banks, the faithful precinct captain who’s knocked on doors for thirty years—let’s send one of them off to a big party in Tampa, rewarding them with a good time for all their efforts. Getting elected delegate is like winning the “top seller” door prize at your grade school’s magazine drive.
Now some three thousand of them are descending on Chicago. What are their politics? Do they take orders? Nobody knows! Probably not even the Biden campaign that formally selected them! (Or maybe they do. I’ve never been a Democrat. Maybe they’re super well-organized and just look dumb on TV, like masterminds.) They have been elected without regard to quality, because the rules treat them as automatons.
Oh, and don’t forget that this is lawless Chicago, governed currently by a mayor who seems to hate cops and the DNC about equally, at a time when the pro-Hamas, anti-Semite far Left is vocal and at least open to violence.
Ultimately, I think the delegates probably would pull through and pick something approximating the candidate who gives them the best odds while still being very left-wing. (The DNC’s actual best shot to beat Trump would be centrist Joe Manchin, or perhaps John Bel Edwards, but I am confident they would sooner slit their own throats, so they will get some kind of compromise instead.) I have a lot of faith in random Americans thrown together by circumstance. It’s just that getting there with untrained, unindoctrinated delegates could be very chaotic. I’m not even thinking about intra-party tensions boiling over on the floor (which might actually be energizing for the party). I’m thinking about the fact that the Dems have thousands of inexperienced delegates, roll-call rules that haven’t actually been test-driven since roughly 1972, no obvious heir apparent… and they’ve only rented the United Center for four days (not the rental time you’d want to reserve for an open convention). When our long district convention started to crash into the night, there was a looming possibility that the school building we had rented would close and we would have to reconvene in the parking lot in the dark to end the convention. What do the Democrats do if things break down and they run out of clock? I don’t think the United Center’s parking lot is big enough.
Still… there’s superdelegates, the rules are on the books, the delegates are probably more ideologically united than, say, the delegates to the Klanbake… it’s a good bet that they could get it done in fewer than 5 ballots. All I’m saying is that having a brokered convention without planning a brokered convention carries significant risks, and they aren’t the kinds of risks you think of, because we haven’t had a brokered convention in 50 years and we haven’t had an unplanned brokered convention ever.
(Man, that makes me salivate. I hope they do it. Even though it probably won’t explode, the mere chance would be enough to get me tuned in.)
Let’s assume it all goes well, though. The Democrats pick someone who has a better chance at beating Donald Trump than Joe Biden—someone who is able to race into a national campaign at the eleventh hour, smoothly take over the Biden campaign apparatus, and quickly build national name recognition and support. Given how intensely unpopular and objectively awful Donald Trump is, given how desperately Americans are yearning for any other option, this shouldn’t be hard.
So who is it?
Kamala Harris, the heir apparent? She’s a far-left incompetent who is universally unappealing. She’s wisely stepped out of the spotlight for the past few months and (probably as a direct result) is currently enjoying a surge that has made her more popular than Joe Biden… but she’s still statistically tied with Donald Trump in approval, and that’s before the attacks begin in earnest.
Gavin Newsom, the king of California, a profoundly dysfunctional state best known to the rest of the country right now for the anarchic conditions in San Francisco and some of the most rapid out-migration in the country? The guy who took on notoriously uncharismatic Ron DeSantis in a primetime debate and lost?
Gretchen Whitmer, the lockdown queen, who has little national profile and has never fought a tough race against a strong opponent? (Maybe. After all, Trump is a very weak opponent.)
Mayor Pete? Al Gore? Jimmy Carter? Barack Obama’s fourth term? A unicorn?
Do any these candidates have a better chance than Biden?3 Biden may be a corpse, but he's a (relatively) moderate corpse who has been able to hold together a (relatively) moderate coalition that relies on a lot of voters who were recently Republicans. He consistently holds the furthest-right positions the Democratic Party tolerates. He was the last Democrat clinging to the Hyde Amendment, and refuses to capitulate today to anti-Israel sentiments within his party that are unpopular in the wider electorate. Does Biden's center-left coalition show up for a more left-leaning candidate? Dubious! Does a more left-leaning candidate amplify the problems Democrats are already having with minority voters? Probably! This is one reason the Democrats shut their eyes to Biden's age problem for so long: their other options are really very bad!
That is one key advantage that Republicans had in 2016, which Democrats do not have today: a deep bench. If Trump had actually dropped out for being a moral midget, the GOP had Marco Rubio, campaign runner-up Ted Cruz, even (ugh) John Kasich or (yay) Carly Fiorina. (Remember, kids: Santorum woulda won.) It seems likely to me that all these candidates could have squared off against Hillary Clinton and won, probably more decisively than Trump did. Maybe Trump is so weak that the same is true of almost anyone the Democrats put in place. But… it’s a big swing. It’s a big step. For Democrats? A big risk. Do you really think the end result—the risk of serious damage from the convention itself, the risk of an unappealing candidate, the risk of a last-minute swap-out—gives you a better-than-30% chance of winning the election? Do you feel lucky?
If I were a Democrat, I would panic (of course), and I’d start preparations for an open convention, but I would not actually call for Biden’s removal until we had another three weeks of polling or so. Does Biden collapse? Does he stay collapsed? Then yes, pull him out. But if he doesn’t collapse, or if he recovers… Biden’s Still Just A Normal Polling Error Behind Trump. That might be the best Democrats can hope for in this cycle. That’s humiliating for Democrats, of course (just try to imagine losing to Donald Trump after January 6!), but the Democrats are a horrible, unpopular party with a horrible, unpopular platform4 and horrible, unpopular candidates, so… this is not that surprising?
If they do make this desperate swing, despite the multiple risks stacked on top of each other,5 my prior is that their odds of successfully defeating Donald Trump in November are, optimistically, around 15-20% (and only because Trump himself is so unpopular; DeSantis would obviously win in a landslide, as would Haley). Biden’s still above the 15% waterline. If he does fall to 15% in the Silver Bulletin model, in my view, that’s the time to break the glass. Until then, I suspect that Biden is still—despite everything—Democrats' best shot at the White House.
Of course, my prior could be wrong. It’s not based on empirical data, because we have no recent empirical data about brokered conventions, and a mid-campaign swapout is completely unprecedented. I certainly understand Democrats' desire to roll the dice and hope to find themselves in a much better position. It might even work! They might have everything go smoothly, the delegates might have just the kind of political horse sense they used to be selected for, and they might settle on just the right candidate to CRUSH Trump in November. That would be profoundly satisfying for Democrats—far more so than crossing their fingers for the next four months and praying that Biden gets over the finish line, then turning around and trying to turf him out under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment at the first opportunity in 2025.
Indeed, I agree entirely with Silver's analysis that the debate likely moves Biden from an underdog to a long shot. It’s just… before you drive Ol' Biden out to the glue factory, you'd better be darn sure that your alternative is less of a long shot. Silver hasn’t made that case at all—at least, not in this post—and nobody else has made it convincingly, at least in my view. Silver should enjoy his absolute vindication: Biden is too old and the Democrats should have replaced him eighteen months ago. For now, though, if I were a Democrat, I wouldn’t go further.
Not yet.
Well…that was supposed to be the first half of this post, really a mere introduction. The second half of the post, the real meat, was going to be a detailed examination of what a contested convention would look like under the Democratic rules. I do love to get legal. However, Substack is flashing the “email length limit” warning at me already, and I have been typing for more than the length of a fair lunch break, so I’m going to send this off now. Hopefully, if nobody beats me to the punch, and my real life doesn’t interfere, I will be back next week with “How to Stop an Exploding President.”
Now more than ever, it is obvious that Secretary Clinton should have been indicted in July 2016 over her criminal email activity, likely destroying her nomination. (Remember, kids: Bernie woulda won.) Trump has been repeatedly indicted on lesser charges, as well as on one roughly equivalent charge (his hoarding of classified documents). Comey’s October announcement was, from one perspective, an astounding stroke of good and/or bad luck, but, from another perspective, it was a welcome act of divine justice where human justice had failed.
Unfortunately, the precedent Comey set (regardless of the nonsense words that came out of his nonsense mouth) was “major-party presidential nominees are immune to criminal prosecution,” so the prosecutions of Trump created a double standard. His supporters reacted by rallying around him rather than abandoning him, and it’s hard to blame them in the face of such open lawlessness on the other side.
…the spiritual successor of the 2008-2022 FiveThirtyEight forecast, and thus the one forecast you should set your clock by.
Yes: Al Gore could do it. You convinced me, @DRodriguez425! But they won’t nominate him and he doesn’t want to be the nominee.
If I were Donald Trump, I would not have brought up that stuff about after-birth abortion in the debate last night, because nobody would believe me, because it’s just too unbelievable.
Nevertheless, Trump was telling the truth about this. The clip of Gov. Northam he referred to is here (defended here, criticized here). I wrote about abortion providers discussing it here. Democrats are absolutely united in their staunch opposition to the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, which Bill Clinton vetoed twice and which they tried very hard to get struck down at the Supreme Court (and which was saved by the conservative justices on a 5-4 vote). As a state senator, Barack Obama fought hard to prevent an Illinois bill to ensure that infants born alive were not left in closets to die of exposure, then lied about it a ton. California and Maryland have both proposed bills to roll back existing protections, ensuring that infants can be killed of exposure in hospital closets, as the progressive Moloch demands.
Democrats are an infanticidal party and there’s no real way to dispute this. They just don’t think infanticide is always such a bad thing.
Rereading my article from 2016 calling on the RNC to vacate the nomination, I think I clearly undersold some of these risks. Possibly I am overselling the risks now!
From a purely "Win the election: standard I think you analysis might well be right. Here is the difference. Everyone should actually care about the office and duties of the presidency. Biden is not capable of serving as president. I have been firm in my assessment of that since early 2021. Now it is common knowledge. To push through with Biden based on not being able to improve the calculated likelihood of victory is cynicism - cynicism about the government as a whole. People who actually hold that line should pay a huge penalty in public opinion. Seriously, a person who argues in incompetent, addled, ineffective, useless figurehead to sign the documents with a shadow cadre of unelected political hacks running the government without accountability or legal authority is preferable to losing an election should pay an enormous penalty in public opinion.
It can't just be about winning the election. It has to be about who will serve as president. at the very least there has to be the tacit admission that really we are electing the VP who will take over shortly - but that gets back to the same thing - we are running the VP as the candidate.
A little over a week later, the calls for Biden to step down are growing, but Joe Biden is defiant.
And the pundits I listen to agree that, for political reasons (including transfer of Biden's campaign funds) the most likely person to replace Biden, should he withdraw, would be his Vice-President and running mate, Kamala Harris.
That does not strike me as any kind of improvement. She is more to the left of Biden, but also in over her head. Whether she could beat trump is anyone's guess.