President Biden has been trying desperately to quell calls for him to stop campaigning for the presidency, but to no avail: A growing number of leading Democrats have openly called on him to step down and expressed misgivings when asked whether he could beat former President Donald Trump.
This indicates that the game is over. It is no longer a question of “if” to withdraw, but only when and how Biden will withdraw.
Politicians never give up power easily. They’ve spent their whole lives pursuing it. No one gives up their lifelong dreams without a fight.
But other politicians who find themselves in a similar predicament eventually conclude that it’s time to step down. The idea of someone who is a political liability to their party is like a beachhead for an amphibious invasion: once secured, it’s only a matter of time before the invading forces push inland for victory. Just ask Richard Nixon or former British Prime Minister Liz Truss, both of whom put up valiant resistance but ultimately succumbed to the inevitable.
Biden’s chance to undermine this beachhead was in the first 48 hours after his debate debacle. He needed to demonstrate publicly that he could speak clearly without a teleprompter, and privately reassure allies in person and by phone that he really could. After days of simply not being able to do that, Democrats across the country came to one logical conclusion: He wouldn’t do it, because he couldn’t.
Biden’s falling approval ratings only reinforce this feeling. In theory, a candidate could bounce back from a six-point deficit with four months left in the race. In reality, before the debate, Biden already had the lowest approval rating of any first-term president at this stage in his term. It’s unclear how an incumbent president who has been historically unpopular and plagued by a belief that he’s too old for office will ever recover.
Moreover, Biden would need to win the national popular vote by at least two points to have any hope of winning the Electoral College. Private polls leaked by the progressive group OpenLab showed Biden trailing or at par in typically Democratic states like Minnesota, New Mexico and Virginia. These data are entirely consistent with a six-point lead nationally, a drop of 10.5 points from Biden’s 2020 margin of victory.
Democrats will not want to risk Biden unseating their entire nominee, especially given how much their party members hate and fear Trump. There is only one way to resolve this dilemma: Biden must step down.
That’s unlikely to happen in the next two weeks. Biden is hosting the annual NATO summit in Washington this week. Biden, who prides himself on his foreign policy leadership, is unlikely to host the summit as a lame duck. The Republican convention is the following week, and Republicans will likely use that week to blast Biden. Biden will not want to give Republicans an extra boost by withdrawing at their own peak.
That means some kind of move is likely in late July or early August. There are only three reasonable scenarios for Biden to take.
The first is to engineer the promotion of Vice President Kamala Harris. This may be limited to Biden and party leaders jointly endorsing Harris as part of the president’s withdrawal announcement. Harris may be successful in being promoted, but their endorsement does not legally confer the nomination. If Biden withdraws, his delegates will no longer be bound and will be able to choose whom to endorse. They will likely follow the leadership’s instructions, but there is no guarantee.
The safer, more dramatic path would be for Biden to also step down from office, which would automatically give Harris the presidency. No one wants to challenge a sitting president, especially considering why she ran for office in the first place.
This scenario would also avoid the challenge of a sitting vice president trying to set his own course while the president is still setting policy and the agenda, as Hubert Humphrey tried unsuccessfully in 1968 when President Lyndon Baines Johnson stubbornly refused to change course on the Vietnam War until it was too late to help the vice president. Any wise person would want to avoid this challenge of Biden stepping down from public office entirely.
The last scenario is the riskiest for Democrats, but it also has the potential to be the most rewarding: an open convention. Biden could do with Harris what Obama did with him and withhold his endorsement, signaling to Biden’s rivals that running against her is a fair game, and some of them clearly will. This could lead to bloodshed, or it could have the happy outcome of bringing the party together in a nomination that makes the internal divisions public. It would also keep the Democratic race at the forefront for much of August, depriving Trump of the airtime he would otherwise get as the Republican nominee.
Biden could surprise everyone and stubbornly resist pressure and political logic. That’s not what he, or most other Democrats, want. I would rather see him succumb to his fate, sooner or later.
Political analyst and commentator Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
