Checks and Balance: Biden or bust

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It turned out to be a prophetic opening line. Joe Biden looks like the photograph of a great statesman in his youth ran the profile in a Delaware paper, the Evening Journal, in November 1970. You look at it and you can't quite believe how wild haired and scrawny the great man was in his dashing twenties. The piece continued. Joe Biden had just been elected to Newcastle County Council, his first public office in what was then solidly Republican Delaware. The dashing young lawyer quickly caught the attention of Democratic leaders looking for a candidate for the long shot statewide Senate race. Two years later, he has all the qualifications for a great future in government, the Democratic state chairman was quoted as saying. Now the youthful subject of the adoring profile in the Evening Journal is a much, much older man with 305 days until the 2024 election. John I'm John Prideaux and this is Checks and Balance from the Economist. Each week we take one big theme shaping American politics and explore it in depth. Today. Should President Biden stand aside and let someone else run? Joe Biden has been a solid president, but he's unpopular and his age puts many Americans off with him as the candidate. Polls suggest Democrats chances of blocking Donald Trump from another four years in the White House are no better than 50. 50. How did it come to this and what can Democrats do about. With me this week to discuss whether the Democratic Party has a Plan B, and if not, why not Are Idris khalun in Washington, D.C. and Charlotte Howard in New York. Charlotte Idris, Happy New Year to both of you. Idris, you were in the UK for Christmas. How was that?

It was lovely. We were in Devon for a few days, which is very beautiful, saw some red cliffs, walked around, had a very nice time and now I'm back in the swamp.

Sounds good. And Charlotte, how's New York?

New York is great as usual, as you both know, and I'm looking forward to getting started and covering the selection. We started this podcast four years ago about this time as 2020 was kicking off and we're faced most likely with another matchup between Trump and Biden. But this election feels very different, both because we know what Trump is like, because there's no pandemic, the campaigns will be very different. So I'm looking forward to covering it.

With you both yes, me too. And our first issue of the Economist of the New Year is on the presidential election campaign. Idris, you've had a busy few weeks. Yeah.

We have put out a cover story on the starting conditions for the 2024 race and asking whether or not President Biden ought to actually pursue reelection, given how strong Donald Trump is looking at the moment.

Yeah. One of the striking things about the Democratic primary is A, how weak Joe Biden looks if you just go by his polling numbers and B, how few challenges he has. The only really recognized Democrat challenging him is a Congressman called Dean Phillips. And you've spoken to him? Idries?

Yep. So to get the case against Biden, I spoke to one of the few establishment Democrats who's actually challenged him. That's Dean Phillips, who's a representative from Minnesota. He's been in Congress since 2019. He's now running the kind of kamikaze campaign to challenge Biden. He's one of the few who's actually doing it publicly. And I started by asking him why he was in the race.

Normally, Presidents of the United States who are the incumbents are in strong positions, at least reasonably strong positions to win re election. And normally the incumbent president is not facing off against one of the most dangerous human beings, I think, in American history. And that is Donald Trump. Part of the problem, I think, with the two party system and in this case the duopoly, is that the only lens that party professionals see these things in our tradition and conventional wisdom, these are not conventional times. Donald Trump is not a conventional candidate. And President Biden, a man I respect and I think a person of decency and integrity, is perhaps one of the only Democrats who could lose and probably will lose to Donald Trump. So that's the rationale for the why.

So what choice are you offering to Democratic voters? You know, in Congress, obviously you've sided with a lot of the President's agenda so far. What is the choice that you're offering?

Well, starting with domestic policy, you know, I have a very bold vision to raise the foundation as it relates to health care, housing, education, and also food and fuel, which are not affordable for Americans right now. So, yes, healthcare for everybody, housing for everybody, and education for everybody. That is a difference because the policies for which I voted under President Biden, they're good ones. The CHIPS act, repatriating manufacturing, infrastructure bill, finally, even the Inflation Reduction act. Good stuff. But is that helping reduce costs in America right now for people? No, they're not. And the fact is there's a big disconnect between what people are screaming for and what they need and a government right now that seems either unwilling, unable to address it or even consider it foreign policy. Look at the tragedies around the world. Had we done something to prevent Vladimir Putin from taking Crimea in 2014 when Joe Biden was vice president, had we done something afterwards to send a message, maybe we would not be trying to finance in the excess of $100 billion a war that is claiming probably more than a half million lives right now in Ukraine. You know, passing the torch to a new generation from the west bank to the West Wing, I think is really important because I do believe the generation I represent and certainly younger generations are demanding investments in peace. It does not mean we will not be the strongest military kinetically and otherwise. But are we missing allocating resources? Yes. And that is a fundamental difference between me and the president. I'm not in this to win political battles. I'm in this to fix the problems. If we don't fix, we are going to be suffering not just as the United States, but as an entire world for generations to come.

So you identified quite a few policy differences there. And the polling you mentioned earlier as well. Right. It is true that, you know, 60 to 80% of Americans say that they don't want Biden to run for re election, depending on what the poll is. Do you think that that kind of feeling of malaise among Democratic vot is the result of just worries about the president's age, or do you think that it is a repudiation of his policies in office?

I think that, well, the data speak for itself. I believe that his age is an issue that most Americans have decided precludes them from supporting him. That's what the data is saying. And the fact is Donald Trump should be in the same category. Both of these men will be in their mid-80s, in the middle of their next terms. And I don't think America is saying that they want that. In fact, what is so troublesome is that when you have 75, 80% of total voters saying that they don't want either, and you have two political parties that are essentially saying, well, this is what you got, something needs to change. And I think my role here, as much as it is to take that torch and provide competent, thoughtful, high character leadership, strong leadership in the White House for the future, is now matched with pointing out the truth, saying the quiet part out loud about what our two parties are doing to reduce debate, to reduce participation and to frankly suppress candidates.

And you know, the argument that people do make is that anytime an incumbent president has received a serious primary challenge, not only has, you know, in some cases the president stepped aside, but oftentimes the emerging candidate tends to lose. And so people argue that a intra party primary against an incumbent will enable Donald Trump how to react to those arguments.

Yeah, that's the perfect response from people who make their livings in political worlds to actually cast the blame on the challenger, not on the one being challenged. The fact of the matter is the only time a president would be challenged is if he or she is poorly positioned to win an election. I believe there's a fundamental difference right now between the Democratic Party's principles, which are to elevate candidates who can win, and its practices, which are to protect a candidate who is going to lose. And that's why I think this is terribly important. The Republicans are essentially taking on an incumbent. It's Donald Trump, he's way ahead, way ahead. But Republicans recognize that you need to have a backup plan because what if, what if Democrats should be looking at it exactly the same way? And lastly, I'll say this adr, the conversations right now are about the politics, about the why would you challenge an incumbent? Or is the party doing this or that? And I understand and I have to speak to it. But what I want to present is this notion that our country and this world are facing challenges coming down the pipeline that nobody is preparing us for. Nobody is talking about. And let me just start with artificial intelligence. I don't even think Donald Trump or Joe Biden have a sense at their age and stage of life of what this is going to mean to this country. You know, these are things that next generation candidates understand, whether it's peace, whether it's social media regulation, whether it's gun violence prevention or of course, climate. And that's going to require a very distinct difference in leadership as we move forward. And most candidates were waiting until 2028. So my proposition is let's not wait. There may not be one if Donald Trump wins. And time to start anticipating these great challenges.

Idris, I found it refreshing listening to Dean Phillips there, but I want to start with something he said at the beginning of your conversation. He said that President Biden could and probably will lose to Donald Trump. What's the evidence for that view?

So the evidence is that at the moment in the polls, Biden seems to be trailing Donald Trump. And a few months ago, polls came out in a few of the battleground states that will decide who the next president is that also showed Biden trailing The Donald Trump. All of this is happening when Donald Trump ought to be completely unelectable, both after January 6th, after all of the trials, the 91 criminal indictments, and yet his strength is showing. So that is what is causing the fear among people that Joe Biden isn't up to the task. What the Biden folks say in response to that is that polls are not predictive this far out. There is a lot of movement between now and what happens 11 months from now, and that's certainly true. But they say that there is a billion dollar campaign that is yet to be waged. Donald Trump will be shuttling between criminal trials and rallies. And for enough Americans, that might be just too much for them to deal with. And so they are preaching calmness even as people think that Biden is in a difficult spot.

I've not heard much from Dean Phillips and I thought that interview was fascinating. But the reason we're doing the episode primarily right is that we, I think, are in agreement with the view that Donald Trump is a deeply dangerous candidate for America itself and for the world. So how is it possible that we have such a weak Democrat as his primary opponent? So why is it that Joe Biden's the nominee? Is it in Democrats interest for him to remain so? And if he is the nominee, how can he overcome his shortcomings? And I think to Adrisa's point, the reason why these questions have become more urgent and more filled with panic among Democratic circles is because of the gravity of these polls. All of these polls are really worrisome for Democrats. So it is quite late in the day to be having this discussion. And I would note that there was a time, particularly when he was running for president, that Biden was not saying explicitly, but at least intimating that he would be a one term president. He talked about himself as a bridge to the next generation, the next generation that Dean Phillips was alluding to. And there is a deep bench of Democratic governors in particular who would be interesting candidates, as Idris and her colleagues in Washington have written about in the past. You have Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, a Democratic governor in a swing state. You have Democratic governors in red states, like Andy Beshear in Kentucky. There are effective members of his own administration, namely Gina Raimondo, who is the former Rhode island governor who's currently Secretary of Commerce. But you don't have those people throwing their hats into the ring. You have the likes of Dean Phillips, who very few people have heard of. You have Marianne Williamson, who's this woo woo candidate who I find fascinating, but we can go into that another time. And I would pinpoint this as the midterms address. And I'm curious, in your view, the midterms, they didn't go as badly as Democrats thought. And that was the turning point where Biden really felt like he was going to be the one. And that changed the thinking in the administration. What does your reporting indicate about when it was that Biden really became fixated on himself being the nominee, or was this actually the intentional lung?

Well, he said as early as 2021 that he was going to stand again. There was expectation that the midterms were going to go badly and that Biden would bow out afterwards. They didn't go very badly. And so I think that's when the talk all stopped. What the Biden folks will also say is that the midterms went well. The 2023 elections in Kentucky and a few other places, the abortion referenda, all went well for Democrats, and therefore they think that the votes are going to be better than the polls suggest. And that might be true, but single issue referendum on abortion, I think are different from voting between Biden and Trump. The Republican Party was also hampered in 2022 by basically a candidate equality problem. They picked people, often in Donald Trump's behest, who were pretty ill suited to win races they should have won. In Arizona, Kerry Lake lost to Katie Hobbs, who was a particularly weak candidate, but she did so because the Republicans couldn't coalesce around a more moderate, appealing candidate. So Democrats take some hope there. But the lesson that they've learned from that is that Biden will do well in the year ahead. And there is no real kind of discussion of any kind of Plan B within the party. There is no real even indication that questions about the President's age are worth having. They want to brush those questions away as impolite and move on, which I think works within the Democratic Party itself, but within politics at large, obviously it's not going to be a winning strategy.

Idris, you put to Dean Phillips the question of whether his candidacy would damage Joe Biden, and he was pretty dismissive of that. Do you think it will?

I don't think it will substantially harm his candidacy. At the moment, Dean Phillips is not scoring very highly in the polls. There could be some change in the coming months, but this is not going to be a serious challenge to Joe Biden in the way that the other primary challenges that we think about, McCarthy against Johnson or Ted Kennedy against Jimmy Carter were. But the thesis that people have that challenging a president basically dooms him to lose. Dean Phillips didn't like that argument and I think he's right that that confuses cause for effect. Weak presidents attract challengers. It's not that challengers weaken presidents. So I think that that is what is going on here. I think Biden is a weaker president, not really by dint of his record, but by dint of his age. And so therefore he's attracted to challenger. And he's actually done a pretty good job at stamping down any kind of pretty prominent challengers like Gavin Newsom and whatnot who could have actually I think made a dent if they had challenged him head to head.

Yeah, that sounds right to me. I also agree with what you said about Biden's weakness as a candidacy and strength of his record. I do think he's got a pretty good record. I think he's a weak candidate. I worry that the polls in some ways might be even worse than they seem, and they seem pretty bad. To underline that Donald Trump at the moment looks 5050 to return to the White House if you just take the popular vote. As Idris has said already, the swing state polls look a bit worse than that. But we ran a really good piece a couple of days ago on polling in 2016 and 2020 which pointed out that in both those cycles, pollsters systematically undercounted support for Donald Trump. People tend to forget that this happened in 2020 and that 2020 was in fact an even bigger polling miss than 2016 because it didn't ultimately matter for the outcome. Joe Biden won in 2020, but he was miles ahead in the polls in 2020, and then the election was really close. So it seems very possible to me that Donald Trump is in fact farther ahead than he looks in the polls at the moment, which is an alarming thought. You can listen to that article for free in your feed if you are an Economist podcast plus subscriber. Okay, we'll go back and look at what happened the last time a sitting president decided not to run in his party's primary. At the start of 1968, the course of the election seemed a foregone conclusion. The sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, would surely take on the former Vice President Richard Nixon. But then in a televised address in late March, LBJ made a shock announcement.

With American suns in the field, far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any Duties other than the awesome duties of this office. Accordingly, I shall not see and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

Johnson was facing three grim an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, his fear of his ailing health, and the possible indignity of losing his own party's presidential nomination. He had already attracted strong primary challenges from Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy.

I run for the presidency because I want the Democratic Party and the United States of America to stand for hope instead of despair, for reconciliation of men, instead of the growing risk of world war.

Johnson didn't withdraw until the end of March. It was a surprise even for his vice president and most apparent heir, Hubert Humphrey. Afterwards, the primary became even more chaotic. The campaigns hurried to get themselves together. At the time, the nomination was not tied to the result of primary votes. Some states didn't have elections. Others weren't binding.

Speaking to and mingling with the voters, the Vice President urges a continuation of the Democratic administration in Washington.

After thinking it over for weeks, Humphrey finally dived into the race at the end of April. He didn't contest the popular primaries and instead focused on wooing the party establishment. Meanwhile, Kennedy's campaign was gaining momentum, winning the majority of primaries that he entered.

What has been going on within the United States over the period of the last three years, the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our society, the divisions, whether it's between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups or in the war in Vietnam, that we can start to work together. We are a great country, a selfish country and a compassionate country.

On June 5, he won the South Dakota and California primaries.

Mayor Yorde has just sent me a message that we've been here too long already. So my thanks to all of you, and now it's on to Chicago and let's win there.

But moments after finishing his victory speech in LA, RFK was shot and killed. It was just two months since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr had sparked race riots across the country. At the Democratic National Convention in August, violence continued. Thousands of protesters streamed into Chicago, where the convention was being held and were brutally dispatched by the police.

There is an odor of tear gas.

Still left in the air here from tear gas shells that have been going.

Off periodically for the last hours.

Inside the convention hall, protected by bulletproof glass and barbed wire, party grandees gave Humphrey the nod. After lobbying from the president, Colorado cast.

16 and a half votes for Vice President Humphrey, 10 votes for Senator McCarthy.

Humphrey won the nomination despite not having entered a single primary.

I proudly accept the nomination of our party. We have heard hard and sometimes bitter debate, but I submit that this is the debate and this is the work of a free people, the work of an open convention, and the work of a political party responsive to the needs of this nation.

After 1968, the old nomination process was replaced by the modern primary system. But the Humphrey campaign couldn't quite recover from the chaos of the primary. It went on to lose to the law, order and stability message of Richard Nixon.

It's funny how much people are referring back to this LBJ moment in the context of the discussion about Biden, because the first lesson of 1968 is that an incumbent Democratic president can back out. And then the second lesson of 1968 is that it goes very, very badly. And I think now it's particularly troublesome for Democrats because back then you had Nixon, who got to be the law and order candidate. Right now, if you're a Democrat, you really don't want to seem to be a party of chaos. When a main critique against Donald Trump is that he's a chaotic candidate and a chaotic leader, you want to cast Democrats, and Joe Biden in particular, as having a steady hand. Adris, what are the other differences that are worth drawing out in the primary process? In particular, I was interested in the technicalities here, how primaries have changed so dramatically. The system for nominating a presidential nominee now versus how they were in 68.

Well, the primaries now were a lot more Democratic than they were back then. So even though McCarthy and Kennedy had been contesting the primaries against Johnson and then later against themselves, the nomination ultimately went to Hubert Humphrey, the Vice President who didn't contest the primaries. He just worked the room. And what we have now is a complicated system in which there are these votes and states and those result in delegates who are pledged to certain candidates. And ultimately the nominee is whoever wins the majority of the delegates. And there are some superdelegates who are not pledged. Basically, they're party officials who emulate a bit of the smokefield room. But in the Democratic case, For example, only 16% of the delegates at the DNC are superdelegates. So it is tilted much more in favor of the popular vote as opposed to the smoke filled room. What's interesting in this case is that Biden has no intention of stepping aside. He's not going to. The only way in which he would is if something happened to his health that meant that he had to basically drop out. If it were to happen. When Biden had already accumulated delegates, and he probably will accumulate them quite quickly. By March, more than half might have been assigned already. Those delegates would suddenly become unpledged, and you would have a reversion to the 1968 style working in the smoke filled room in order to pick the next candidate. If there were to be a vacancy in the nomination ticket after the DNC that's even more smoke filled. Basically, the DNC meets in secret and decides who would be at the top of the ticket. Obviously, that would be incredibly chaotic. And so the Biden campaign wants to dispel any sort of speculation about that point. But given that the man is 81, obviously everyone wishes him good health, but it can't be guaranteed at that age.

And 68 is so important in Democratic history because the disaster of Humphrey losing to Nixon in that nomination that stitched up in the smoke filled room in Chicago while young activists are out on the street in Chicago outside the convention center being beaten up by the police at the behest of Mayor Richard Daley, that then prompts this huge change in the nominating process, which, as Idris says, becomes much more Democratic. The flip side of that more democratic process is that nominations are no longer in the hands of the party elite. Were Joe Biden to step aside now, under the system that pertained in 1968 and prior to that, you could imagine Democratic elites getting together and nominating somebody else, somebody hopefully better than Hubert Humphrey. But now that the process is so democratic, it's much harder now than it was in 68 to come up with a nominee at the last moment. Right. Idris, I just want to push you a little bit on this because you might say that given the hole Biden is in in his polling and given the strength of Trump, and given quite how bad a second Trump term would be for America and for the rest of the world, a bit of chaos, a bit of a gamble, doesn't seem like the worst thing. Why did you come out convinced from your reporting that actually Biden stepping aside is really not a good option for the Democratic Party?

It's a bad idea because this primary season would be too short for anyone new and promising on the Democratic bench to really mount a serious campaign. You need a pretty sophisticated infrastructure, and you need to be able to spin it up very quickly in order to accrue delegates and to get the name recognition that you need on the national stage at the moment. If Biden were to drop out now, the institutional favorite would immediately be Kamala Harris, his vice president, and the other people who would be able to spin up an operation very quickly. Are folks like Gavin Newsom maybe or JB Pritzker? Kamala Harris being the nominee, I think puts you in even a worse position if you're a Democrat than Joe Biden, at least according to the opinion polls that we see now. She seems to be less popular among Democrats. People remember her 2020 campaign, which ended disastrously. She didn't even make it to Iowa. She couldn't define herself very well. I mean, that would be a pretty bad outcome. So if you were willing to take a risk, which this would be a risk, and you had a reasonable chance at getting a candidate who you thought would have a much better chance of beating Trump, maybe it would be worth Democrats taking the plunge. But at the moment, I just don't see the case for that. And so for that reason, I think it would be quite unwise for Democrats to ditch Biden at this point.

Okay, in a minute we'll kick the tires on that argument a little harder. But before we get there, Charlotte, Idris, what have you guys particularly enjoyed from our podcast or from what we've published over the past week or so?

Our colleagues wrote an editorial about Bibi Netanyahu and arguing that his time has come to be replaced, which I think is worth a read.

Yep, I'll second that one. Idris, how about you?

We had a very interesting prison letter from Imran Khan, who was the leader of Pakistan until he was deposed, in which he accuses the army of conspiring against him, which I think is undoubtedly true. But he also accuses the Americans of conspiring against him, which the Americans dispute. So it's a relatively spicy letter from him.

Yes, that letter from Imran Khan is really interesting. We do occasionally get letters from inmates in American prisons about our articles, though I do also remember receiving something, I think from a prison in Arkansas saying a copy of the Economist had been turned away from the prison because it counted as an obscene material. I'm not sure why. My recommendation on the podcast front would be the weekend intelligence episodes Penguins and Prejudice, which is our colleague Andy Miller on a children's book about two male penguins who successfully raised a chicken in the New York Zoo and the culture war that ensued. It's really, really good, very well told story and a fascinating insight into America's culture wars at the moment. So do go back in your feed and have a listen to that. In this week's cover Leader, we tackle the question of whether Biden should drop out and decide that, on balance, he probably shouldn't I spoke to our deputy editor, Ed Carr, who writes a lot of our leaders at the Economist, and about how we came to that conclusion.

I think for me, the whole sort of driving force behind this debate is this massive contradiction. On the one hand, you have the Democratic Party thinking that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy and a threat to the republic. And on the other, they seem just sort of incredibly passively accepting the fact that an 81 year old incumbent with the worst rating in history is just inevitably their candidate. And I just find it very hard to reconcile those two facts. Can anyone possibly hold those two ideas in their head at the same time and not go slightly crazy?

I mean, you would have thought not, right? And Democrats are smart. They can read polls. They can see that Joe Biden at the moment is at best 50, 50 to be reelected, which means Donald Trump is 50, 50 to have another four years in the White House. And yet there's this sense of inevitability and almost a paralysis around Joe Biden's candidacy. We had a vigorous debate here at the Economist about whether Biden should step aside. I went in thinking that he shouldn't. Then I sort of almost convinced myself that he should. And now I think I'm back to thinking that he shouldn't step aside. I mean, this is quite finely poised, I think.

Yeah. For me, what makes this particularly interesting is that the big problem that Biden has, which is his age, is something you just can't really change. I mean, there is at this point, no. Oh, it's wisdom, rather. That ship has sailed. It's not going to happen. But he did arrive talking himself as a transitional president and that just hasn't happened. And I think there are some sort of bad reasons for that as well. I mean, if you've labored to be president your whole life, being president must be pretty nice. There are lots of people around him in the White House who benefit and enjoy the sense of power and being able to do things for good reasons as well as bad. And I think there's also a kind of interesting mirror image of what's happened among the Never Trumpers, which is nobody's quite wanted to be the person to wield the knife because it's such a risk for your career. You always want to wait for someone else to sort of make the first blow. I think there's a bit of that too. And so there are kind of bad reasons for why this delay has happened. And then people have woken up at this late and well, we get into now why in fact he may be the best choice, because actually, the process of finding someone else is extraordinarily risky, isn't it, John?

I think that's right. The process is risky. I've been thinking a bit about different political systems. In Britain, where we're both based, both political parties have relatively clean systems for changing leaders, and they can do it quite quickly. And the people who make the key decisions are sort of political insiders, members of parliament, party grandees. In the US there's no equivalent of that system, really, for removing a leader. And we saw that in Donald Trump's rise. That rise happened despite the opposition of plenty of what we used to call the Republican establishment. And the process for anointing party leaders in the primary is open and subject to all sorts of unpredictable outcomes. So replacing Biden seems like the obvious thing to do, given his poll numbers and given Trump's strength. But I think the more you get into the detail, the less obvious it looks.

I think that's right. And there's another factor, it seems to me, which is my sense that observing presidential campaigns, it's quite different from campaigning for any other elected office in the United States. It really tests you out, and you can be perfectly successful as a governor of a state, state or a senator, and they'd just crumple in a presidential campaign. So the sense that you're just jettisoning someone and taking an enormous risk of sort of unknown magnitude, that you might just happen to have someone else pop up, I think that's itself very panicky and destabilizing. And I guess the other thing is, who is the most likely person? Well, it's probably Kamala Harris. And it's not obvious that she's any more electable than Biden himself.

No, I think really not obvious at all. She ran a terrible campaign in 20. If you look at the issue that she's most closely associated with in the White House, it's immigration and the southern border, which has, I think, been the single worst issue for the White House and for the Democratic Party and is Donald Trump's strongest issue. So I think she would be a really weak candidate.

I wonder if there's things that Biden can do to invigorate his campaign. He is 81 and not a particularly young 81, it must be said. So he can't do much about that. But are there things he can do to make his campaign better? For instance, he doesn't get out. He doesn't send other people out. You get the sense that his campaign is actually a bit Distracted by the act of governing, not really focusing hard enough on campaigning. It seems to me from over here in the UK that his campaign is getting everything wrong.

They would say, we're focused on governing and look at all the magnificent things we've done. Inflation's coming down, real incomes are growing, the stock market's going gangbusters, racial income disparities are down, crime's down, oil production is up. They do actually have a lot to crow about. You can question how much of that is due to the president, but generally, presidents get credit for stuff that happens on their watch. And I think, to your point, Joe Biden has a really good record. He doesn't get credit for it, I think, because this thing we keep coming back to, which is his age. And so what can he do about that? How can he change his campaign? Well, one option which we've argued for this week, is a change of vice presidential candidate. The conventional wisdom on that, and the political scientists will tell you the choice of vice president doesn't matter much for the outcome of the election. I'd question whether that's the case when the candidate himself is 81. I think there's a lot more focus on the vice president than there would be ordinarily. I could imagine a different sort of presidential campaign where he said, Look, I am 81. I get the concerns about my age. This job is a lot for anyone. It's particularly a lot for somebody of my age. My second term would be a different kind of presidency. I would share more responsibility with this person, my new pick, and then that person could go out and make the case for a second term that Joe Biden doesn't seem to be particularly effective at making.

How do you think that would go down in the party, though? I mean, Kamala Harris, as an African American woman, basically being thrown under the bus, not great.

But I also think Democrats need to care a lot less about how things look to their core constituency and care a lot more about winging swing voters in swing states.

I mean, it's funny, isn't it? You get the sense that although the stark fact of the probability Trump's reelection is right out there in front of you and Biden's not a great candidate, the options are not fantastic either. I mean, like you, I have veered around on this, and I've come to the view that it's better to put the tremendous energy and resources into a really good Biden campaign, make the best of it, make the best arguments, than kind of carry on worrying at the moment. But just now we're in a terrible situation where people are not enthusiastic, continuing to ask in the dark watches of the night whether there might be another candidates possible. And it's kind of caught in the headlights moment.

That point that you raised, John, in your conversation with Ed about worrying about the base versus worrying about voters in certain swing states. I don't know about the math on that. Right. Because if people just don't show up who you're counting on showing up in those swing states, then all of a sudden they do become really important. Right. And so I do worry about throwing Kamala Harris over, even though I agree that she is a particularly bad campaigner for someone who's chosen to make politics their profession. Whether she'd be good at governing is kind of a different question. It's amazing how those two sets of skills can be quite distinct, that of being a good campaigner versus good in office. But the question of who would run instead is a bit for me like our episode that we did in the run up to Christmas in which we explain our wish list for policies like who we think would be great may not be actually who is great. But I think the idea of a Gretchen Whitmer or a Gina Raimondo is very compelling as a compliment to Joe Biden. I don't think that either of those women, though, will end up being the vice presidential nominee. Idris, how do you see that shaking out?

There is a bit of fantasy football element to this, which is kind of fun to think through. And obviously Whitmer, I think has political talents. I think Raimondo has political talents as well. Even people who also ran in 2020, like Amy Klobuchar, might be better. But for the moment, I think it's a bit of a moot point because not only is the Biden administration not going to do it and they're not considering it, but there are real issues, like you said, to throwing over a vice president, even one who's particularly unpopular among African Americans, for example, among college educated women, there could be a real enthusiasm dent to campaign that stepped over Harris for someone else, even if she's not the kind of vote getter that we might think a vice president is. When I talked to Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama's successful reelection campaign in 2012, I asked him how much the vice president matters for these sorts of decisions. And he said that Basically people in D.C. think about the contingencies and who might succeed. But he thinks even for people as old as Trump and Biden, that most voters are going to be basing their decision on who is at the top of the ticket and how they feel that person is going to help them or their family. He's one of the people who's preaching calmness. He says that if he were a poker player, and he is, he'd rather have the Democratic cards and the Republican cards. But he has no illusions that it's going to be an easy contest. He said that it's very close and it will be very close as well.

Idris, I thought your interview with Messina was fascinating and shows just how close top tier Democrats think this race is. I just want to gently push back on this question of Harris. I mean, it may well be right that the vice president doesn't matter that much the identity of the vice president. I think it would be possible to kind of reimagine the hierarchy of those roles. I mean, typically a vice president is so subservient to a president. You could imagine one who is more front and center than typical Veep picks. And then as for this question of whether it would put off the base, every election I've covered in every country, and there's a lot now because I've been doing this for a while, has come down to arguments about base turnout versus persuasion. And I've noticed that almost inevitably the candidate that's losing or that doesn't want to take any risk talks about base turnout and that people underrate persuasion. I think that's particularly true in the US now. YouGov, our pollster, the Economist, also partners with an outfit called the Liberal Patriot, and they had some polling recently which said that 88% of American voters are dead set on who they're going to vote for. And so there's 12% who are not. And those 12% are the ones who will decide the election. And those are the ones you really want to be laser focused on and particularly in the swing states. And show me the voter in the swing states who will switch from Joe Biden to Donald Trump because Kamala Harris is not on the ticket. And I will show you a unicorn.

So your point there is that switching Kamala Harris out would have no negative impact on the base and only positive impact for swing voters?

Yeah, that would be my case. I think Democrats generally need to worry less about the base. I think Donald Trump is a fantastic base motivator for them, and they need to worry more about persuadable voters in swing states.

Ed spoke about the need for a really sophisticated ground game in some of these states. And that's something that I think is worthy of a lot of attention and something that we'll be talking about in more depth over the course of the campaign, but particularly because the 2020 election was so odd, and particularly because Biden can't bank on his own charisma. The importance of delegates and the importance of using Democrats very big war chests and how that cash is deployed is really vital. Adris, what are you thinking about as you start looking at Democrats plans?

Well, we'll probably have a cash advantage over Republicans because they've had that over the last few cycles. Democrats are very effective at fundraising. Trump is actually not a particularly good fundraiser himself. So they'll have money to spend. Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin are all going to be firebombed with campaign ads basically for months and months on end. So our apologies to them. Democrats in 2020 opted out of the door to door campaigning out of fear of the pandemic that obviously will return now. So in that way, I think you'll have a pretty conventional campaign of door knocking, quite sophisticated data operations, social media targeting, et cetera, a lot of campaign ads on tv, digital, et cetera. But the trick is figuring out which set of people are actually persuadable and actually getting messages in front of those people. You need a pretty sophisticated data operation to do that sort of thing. Democrats have traditionally had a bit of advantage on that, but Republicans have caught up pretty effectively. So political campaigns tend to have an arms race quality. People start out with basic nuclear bombs, then they develop hydrogen bombs, then the other person develops hydrogen bombs, and it all just kind of equals out. So I expect that you'll get something like that here as well.

I think that's all interesting and right, Adris, and I think part of the reason why we chose this subject for this week is, as we stated, the polls are so bad and there's this lingering question about whether there's still time for there to be someone else. And I do think it's worth just putting that question to bed and the Democratic Party trying to do as much as they can to put that question to bed, because the longer those questions drag on, the more it serves Donald Trump. And then we can see how effective the Biden campaign can be given all of its shortcomings, as we've discussed.

Yeah, you're right, Charlotte, that the Democratic Party has to put this discussion aside. The thing that would do that is a recovery in Joe Biden's poll numbers. But it's also possible that they get worse. And if they get worse, I think this discussion unhelpful as it is for Biden. Won't go away. Okay, before I let you guys go, it's the first quiz of 2024. We heard earlier about LBJ's decision not to run again in 1968. Two other presidents in the 20th century made the same call. Who were they?

So made the decision not to run again. Truman. Maybe Truman just had one.

There we go.

Truman is one of them. Yep, That's a point.

32. Did. Did. Who did? Hoover. No, Hoover ran again.

You're in this. You're in the right area.

Is it Harding died.

It wasn't Coolidge.

No.

He did too, didn't he? Or is it.

It was Coolidge. Truman and Coolidge, like lbj, both of them were elevated to the presidency after their predecessors deaths, FDR and Warren Harding respectively, and then won an election and then decided not to run. Truman could then technically have run again in 1952 and Coolidge in 28, but both chose not to. Truman dropped out in March 1952 after losing the New Hampshire primary and Coolidge much earlier in the cycle in the summer of 1927. Question two.

Another one.

Okay, question two. What was Coolidge's election slogan in 1924? The clue is in the name.

I have no idea, but I look forward to knowing the answer. Do you know Idris?

It was not Bear with us.

No, it was cool for Coolidge or something. Be cool.

Something like that. That's really cool. It was Keep cool with Coolidge.

Oh, gosh.

Yeah, it worked though. Coolidge won 54% of the vote and took 35 states.

I wonder when the use of cool as its current meaning became the case. There was a campaign in Michigan called Cool Cities, which was when Michigan was trying to get people to invest in its very despairing cities like Flint and Detroit. And I always felt like if you have to call anything cool, it means that it's not. But maybe Coolidge was so on the vanguard with the use of cool.

Well, that's it for this episode. Thank you both.

Thank you.

Thank you.

This episode was produced by Stevie Hertz and Harriet Noble. Weidong Lin is our sound engineer. If you like the podcast, then please let people know and leave us a rating and a review on the Weekend Intelligence. This week there's a story of the American south and the life giving, death dealing power of Khorne. You can get in touch with us via email. The address is podcastseconomist.com. in the meantime, thanks very much for listening. Stay safe and stay sane. We'll have more checks and balance next week.