In February, I predicted that it can’t be Biden on the Democrat ticket in November, while also suggesting that Democrats were already aware of that fact, and that they were likely already scheming to replace him this summer.
Betting markets are finally agreeing with my prediction about Biden being replaced on the ticket, but I’m now wondering if I haven’t given Democrats far too much credit in assuming that their political wargames, or even that anything more than hushed musings at cocktail parties, actually included this bombshell scenario or its potential fallout. The presidential debate and its aftermath have certainly raised questions.
I have no reason to doubt the truthfulness of famed pollster Nate Silver, for example, as he’s sounded the alarm repeatedly after Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Though admittedly partisan, he “still believes in empiricism and probabilistic thinking,” he says, and in light of recent polls and the evidence his eyes witnessed at the debate, he conceded a “new reality: Trump is probably going to become president again.”
He wasn’t alone. Van Jones, Cenk Uygur, Joe Scarborough, and even Joy Reidall expressed similar shock at Biden’s epic calamity on the debate stage, each effectively calling for a potential replacement on the presidential ticket.
Admittedly, Biden’s debate performance was even worse than most conservatives would have imagined. But “empiricism and probabilistic thinking” had already reasonably suggested that Biden was a catastrophe back in February, when only four-in-five Americans believed Biden to be too old to run for president, and he was already in a head-to-head deficit in polling by double-digits in each of the top issues among voters, including on his mental and physical health, the economy and inflation, border security, and on violence and crime.
One could forgive my error in presuming that Democrats had thoughtfully considered the possibility of a Biden replacement and having created a contingency plan. After all, to have not done so is nothing short of stupidity, and, Scarborough and Reid excepted, I hadn’t thought any of these others to be stupid people.
Yet, they appear to have been blindsided by all this. How is that possible?
Dogs Chasing Cars?
One explanation, which seems to me the likeliest, is that Democrats weren’t prepared for the spotlight to ever be moved away from Trump. His convictions in a sham trial, which was orchestrated by a former honcho in the federal Department of Justice who took an unprecedented demotion to a local prosecutor’s office that just happened to align with a prosecution against former president Trump, among other sham political indictments at the federal level, were meant to captivate the public. This yielded countless successive “Get Trump!” news cycles that led to tunnel vision for guys like Nate Silver, who didn’t manage to peer outside of his polling spreadsheets long enough to actually see and hear what other Americans were witnessing in Biden’s obvious physical frailty and cognitive decline, I guess.
After months of chasing stories about Trump’s alleged criminality that have only yielded positive gains in his polling, the leftist media are now scrambling as to how, and with whom, Biden should be replaced. These calls for replacement among leading Democrats have increased over the past week, and we can expect that this trend will continue in the coming days.
Democrats being in disarray with no plan as to how to proceed seems to be the going narrative at the moment. That may be true, of course. But Nate Silver presents a reason as to why the Biden replacement is all but assured — the story of Biden’s obvious impairment and his potential replacement is both journalistically important and makes for highly compelling reading. That makes it pure gold for the media, and therefore its spread is unavoidable.
One of the reasons that he believes the story is compelling is that “there’s an element of palace intrigue: who really holds the trump cards within the Democratic Party?”
That’s a great point, and I’ll admit that my curiosity is piqued by that mystery. Whoever does hold the trump cards in the Democrat party obviously does not include the wonks crunching polling numbers at Silver’s 538, or the talking heads at mainstream media networks who appear to be woefully in the dark about how any of this could have possibly happened to the Democrat party’s incumbent.
Dogmatic Geniuses?
We are left with two possibilities.
Either every player on the political left is incredibly stupid, having been utterly incapable of seeing the necessity of a Biden replacement that has been painfully obvious for arguably years now, or there are some holders of “trump cards” in the Democrat party who have predicted this and have a game plan to manage it.
Having paid modest attention these past years, however, it remains exceedingly difficult for me to imagine that an unprecedentedly early debate, with an unprecedented amount of preparation for the incumbent, and with that incumbent’s campaign having determined each and every guideline of the debate without objection by the challenging candidate, could have yielded such extraordinary failure without prior knowledge of that failure being the likeliest outcome.
Perhaps Joe Scarborough and Cenk Uygur and Nate Silver were aghast, and much more surprised than you, at the frail, imbecilic president presented to a mass audience of Americans on that debate stage. Now, imagine being on the president’s staff and having witnessed the, oh, let’s generously say 20 dry runs of the debate with all the expected (perhaps scripted?) questions over a six-day period.
Can anyone who watched that debate imagine that more than one or two of those dry runs went differently than what we saw on stage? There was at the very least a 90-percent chance that the debate would go precisely as it went, and that the people putting Biden on stage knew that. The left-wing media may very well have been in the dark because they’re either distracted or stupid, but anyone else, whether closely watching those dry-run debates, holding “trump cards” in Democrat decision-making, or simply having paid attention to Biden’s decline these past years, would understand that Biden was presented as a lamb to slaughter on that night.
It seems difficult to imagine that Biden wouldn’t lose to Trump in 2024. That hasn’t been a secret for some time, and the poll margins have shifted in such a way that no amount of voter fraud would even be convincing at this point. For example, in Pennsylvania, Trump now holds a 4.5% lead over Biden in the Real Clear Politics average. In 2020 at this same period of the election cycle, Biden held a 6.5% lead. That’s an 11-point swing in a state that was decided by 1.2% in 2020, even with election law changes which granted explicit advantages to Biden in that election.
Of course, contrary to my earlier suggestion that Democrats were actively game planning for this moment since early this year, the most likely scenario is that Democrats just failed to prepare for it. It’s also incredibly unlikely that any Democrat players holding “trump cards” would have willingly assassinated the media’s credibility so ruthlessly. And since that now appears to be the likeliest of circumstances, and since there’s seemingly no ace-in-the-hole to replace Biden, perhaps Nate Silver has the best strategy for the Democratic Party’s future — find a way to cast Dementia Joe aside while anointing Cacklin’ Kamala in 2024, who will proceed to flame out and “clear the field” for a Democrat reset in 2028.
That is the first Democrat idea about the 2024 election that makes any sense to me. But one thing is clear. Whether it was by design or as a reaction, the knives are certainly out for Joe Biden. And all I can think, given that it appears that few on the left, if any, actually imagined this scenario, is…
Dig in, Joe.
