Despite having always been a walking gaffe-machine, there was once a time when it would have been difficult to deny that Joe Biden was among the slipperiest in the nest of vipers that is Washington, D.C.
That time is certainly not now. It would be bad enough that, as President* of the United States, he’s incapable of taking scripted questions from predetermined and friendly reporters. But the ravages of age have impaired him beyond even the most basic cognitive and physical function. He shuffles about aimlessly, as if lost, whether he’s at the G7 Summit or in the White House Rose Garden. Even with the aid of a teleprompter, his slurring makes his speech incomprehensible. His inability to remember key details, and butchering of simple exchanges with the press and diplomats, has made him the subject of mockery among world leaders.
Understandably, given these circumstances, the looming question is: Who’s going to replace Biden on the Democrat ticket in 2024? This has been a topic throughout his presidency, and it really picked up steam in 2023. Now however, those discussions seem to have gone by the wayside, and we’re all meant to assume that Democrats are prepared to have him headline.
Many would suggest that we’re just too far along to replace him now. “Is it too late for Biden to bow out in 2024?” Thomas Gift asks rhetorically at The Conversation. “Technically, no,” he answers, but he suggests that it’s unlikely due to 30 states already having passed the deadline to get candidates’ names on the primary ballot. And if Biden isn’t replaced by March, he says, then there would be a “high-stakes fracas at the party’s convention” in August.
There are a lot of uncertain things in politics, and predictions are risky. But you don’t have to know much about reading political tea leaves to conclude that Biden’s appearance on the ticket in November of 2024 would be a catastrophe for Democrats.
Biden appears to be simply unelectable at this point, and while I don’t believe that Democrats are diabolical geniuses, I also don’t think they’re too stupid to recognize this.
Some things are so obvious that almost everyone can see them. After having watched Biden bumble around and led around by handlers for a few years, a full 77% of Americans feel that Biden is too old to serve another term in office, for all the aforementioned reasons which have been impossible to ignore.
In the realm of politics in America, 77% is a landslide. You’d have a hard time getting 77% of Americans to agree on anything, and for reference, that’s higher than the percentage of Americans who say that the American flag “makes them feel proud.” But 77% of Americans, including 69% of Democrats, agree that Biden is just too old for a second term.
The news only gets worse from there. According to an NBC poll, Donald Trump has a 23-point lead over Biden on the question of which candidate has the “mental and physical health to be president.” On the matter of who might better “secure the border and control immigration,” Trump owns a 35-point lead. Who can better deal with the economy? Trump by 22 points. Dealing with crime and violence? Trump by 21 points.
Among the only issues where Biden actually leads Trump is on abortion (by 12 points) and climate. The trouble for Democrats is that abortion and climate are prioritized as a top issue by only 21% of American voters. Since each respondent in this poll was allowed to select three of their top issues, and given the fact that these two issues tend to be peculiarly prioritized only by very socially-minded leftists in suburbia and left-wing college students, the 1-in-5 voter who prioritizes abortion is likely the same voter that prioritizes climate policy.
Again, Democrats aren’t stupid, and they see what you and everyone else see in those numbers. And the numbers highlight, Mark Murray at NBC says, the clear reversal of the trends observed just six months ago. In July of 2023, Biden went from a 49–45% lead in a hypothetical head-to-head with Trump, to now being at a 47–42% deficit.
The good news, Murray reports, is that Biden “pulls ahead of Trump when voters are asked about their ballot choice if [Trump] is convicted of a felony.” But even that may be a phantom hope, given that Biden’s lead then only becomes a two-point margin, and that’s within the margin of error.
So, are Democrats betting the farm on a Trump conviction? Maybe, but their efforts to convict him haven’t served them well so far.
The first Trump indictment began in June of 2023, and since then, Biden has lost significant ground in most head-to-head matchups with Trump. This isn’t necessarily because Trump has attracted voters, as the NBC poll numbers show. It’s because Biden has shed voters to an incredible degree.
Whatever the reason for that, whether it’s Biden’s ever more apparent senility, the invasion at the Southern border, or Biden’s weaponized government agencies targeting his political rival, the trajectory is calamitous for Democrats. Biden is obviously in freefall, and I can’t imagine that Democrats haven’t already packed a parachute.
Unlike Thomas Gift at The Conversation, and all the other people pretending that we’re too far along for Democrats to anoint a new candidate, I can recall the 2016 and 2020 Democrat primaries. And I know that anointing a presidential candidate at the convention in August might be much cleaner than again having to cover up the DNC’s efforts to thwart the democratic will of its voters, as it did in 2016 and 2020.
We could discuss the oddities in the coin-flips which put Hillary Clinton on the road to the presidency in 2016; but it’s unnecessary. It was so obvious that the DNC would accept nothing less than a Hillary Clinton nomination in 2016 that the DNC was forced to apologize to Bernie Sanders and his supporters for Party officials’ bias against him, which was exposed by a large cache of leaked internal emails.
But that wasn’t the last time that the Democrat elites sabotaged Bernie’s primary hopes, which leads us to the Super Tuesday Massacre of 2020.
Bernie was running away with the primary in early 2020, you might recall, while Biden was floundering. He finished fourth in Iowa, and placed a dismal fifth place in New Hampshire.
South Carolina was his Hail Mary. House Representative James Clyburn offered to help Joe Biden secure the black vote in South Carolina—if he committed to nominating a black woman as his first Supreme Court nominee.
Clyburn saved Biden’s candidacy in South Carolina, keeping Joe alive for the DNC. But the problem was that all the energy and momentum still remained with Sanders.
Then, a curious thing happened. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, both having performed fairly well in the primary up to that point, dropped out of the race just before Super Tuesday. This cleared the lane for Biden to generally own the “moderate” vote of the Democrat party. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren remained in the race, cannibalizing large swathes of the far-left, socialist voting bloc that would likely have gone to Bernie Sanders.
You may have noticed that Pete Buttigieg, who couldn’t fill potholes as the mayor of South Bend, later got a cushy appointment as Secretary of the Department of Transportation. That’s just a coincidence, I’m sure.
Yes, it all looks really shady. But the fact is that the DNC had decided that, by hook or by crook, Crooked Hillary was going to be on the ticket in 2016. And in 2020, it was going to be the generic Democrat fixture, old Sleepy Joe, who would be campaigning from his basement while the trusty Democrat machine worked to normalize mail-in ballots and change election laws to Democrats’ advantage.
The primary system has proven inconvenient to the DNC, and their past shenanigans to ensure that their anointed candidate is “selected” within the primary framework has been difficult to conceal.
As such, it makes sense that the DNC would wait to anoint Biden’s replacement. The very best scenario imaginable for the DNC isn’t to open the process to ideas and speculation and voters today, but to have Biden eliminated from the race at some time around the convention.
It would be a madhouse of speculation and criticism, of course, but all that would be needed is enough of the delegates that were pledged to Biden to break for the newly-anointed candidate. Superdelegates would have no say unless the convention is contested, though it may be contested to make the process look less rigged. Thus, they would be able to nullify the preceding primary votes and disenfranchise the voters once again in order to anoint the DNC’s preferred candidate—but this time, it will be justified by the veneer of necessity.
Biden represents an unprecedented crisis, and that requires an unprecedented response. He is in freefall, and it appears that he’s outlived his usefulness to the Party. It just makes sense for Democrats to pull the ripcord around summertime.
The only remaining question is, who will be the parachute for the Party?