Thoughts on Joe throwing in the towel.

Turns out you can do some good thinking stuck in traffic in New Jersey.

I found out Biden was declining the nomination while stuck in traffic on 95 South after dropping my oldest daughter off at Newark International Airport. So, yes, Biden’s historic announcement is forever going to be linked, for me, with the New Jersey Turnpike. What a world.

My instant—provisional—reactions:

1. As someone who has been more focused on Biden’s age as a governance problem than an electoral one, I am happy—but honestly mostly relieved—that he has decided to let go of the nomination. The presidency is a demanding executive job that requires a 24/7 on-call capacity, as well as energetic leadership and management; a second Biden term was going to feature significantly degraded version of both, and could easily have slipped into an outright dangerous situation. In the end, elections force voters to choose the least-worst option, and the thought of having to choose an 81 year old showing obvious signs of declining physical and mental capacity was really making me queasy. Even if Harris has somewhat less chance than Biden to beat Trump—and I don’t think that’s true—as as governance matter we have significantly reduced the possibility of someone unfit for the job holding the office in 2027. That’s good, period.

2. There are not many days when you know you are living in the history books. We’ve now had two in under a week.

3. I was surprised Biden issued his letter on plain stationary, rather than campaign or official presidential letterhead. That had to be on purpose. Maybe the latter was out because this isn’t official business, but the plain paper look of the document really struck me.

4. Biden had at least two other important decisions to make concurrent with leaving the race. The first was whether to resign the presidency. He did not. You’ll see some Republicans making hay over this—“if he can’t run, he shouldn’t serve” or similar—but I don’t think there’s much here politically. Biden has as perfectly sound argument—he can do six more months but not four more years—but more importantly, my hunch is Biden is going to become old news faster than you can spit. Two weeks from now, I’m not sure he’s going to figure all that much into electoral politics as all.

5. I would have preferred Biden resign.

6. The other decision, of course, was whether to endorse someone. He chose to endorse Harris.¹ Not surprising. I suspect that alone will be enough of a thumb on the scale to get her the nomination pretty easily; it should scare away other strong contenders (who might want to be VP, or might want to keep their powder dry for ‘28 or ‘32) and signal to enough delegates (who were almost all picked by BidenWorld) that this isn’t an open race. Had Biden purposefully not endorsed anyone, he would have had a third decision—what sort of candidate selection process would he have liked to see. I suspect now he will stay mum on that and leave it up to the DNC to setup a procedure, or not.

   

7. I have a very hard time seeing Harris not getting the nomination. I suspect she will face, at most, a token alternative candidate of not particularly strong quality. And probably not even that. A torrent of endorsements have already come in—Pelosi, the CBC, the Clintons, a pile of House and Senate Democrats, and so on—and that is going to further dissuade any high-quality candidate who might have been taking a sniff this week from getting in. The range of endorsements is a good sign for Harris, the real danger here was ending up in a situation where the Biden coalition developed a crack that couldn’t be fully patched. And with a few exceptions—and with the caveat that it’s very early—I haven’t seen anything that looks like a crack yet.

8. That said, no idea if and/or how much of BidenWorld is going to be openly bitter, angry, or—more importantly—at all vindictive about this. It’s going to cost some people campaign jobs and potentially WH jobs and all the related influence and power, but that’s probably less important than whether a group of elite leaders who were strongly sticking with Biden (think AOC/progressives) can’t let it go. My default is that they will fall in line quickly and unite for Harris and against Trump, but I’ve seen plenty of grudges in politics ruin coalitions, so you can’t rule it out.

9. The non-BidenWorld Dems and their various political allies are also getting the flowers out for Biden, applauding his Noble Decision and Selfless Behavior. That’s mostly party unity junk food nonsense. Biden was pushed out because the public and the party decided he was a losing bet for November. Nothing wrong with this sort of party behavior—it’d be malpractice not to fete Biden here, just wait till you see the role he gets at the convention—but you don’t have to believe the instant-hagiography being sold to you. Biden saved them the real game of chicken at the convention, but he didn’t go willingly with a smile on his face.

10. I suspect the convention will be a lot less freewheeling than most people think. If Harris becomes the consensus presumptive-nominee this week with no alternative candidate declaring interest, you’re gonna get a tightly scripted infomercial, no different than any other modern convention. With the exception that you’ll probably get a huge tribute to Biden as a theme, along with a lot of Pass the Torch style stuff.

11. I also have no idea how quickly a Harris campaign can get off the ground, or how much it hurts a campaign to enter the election this late in the modern age. But no one else does either. We really are in mostly-unprecedented territory for a contemporary presidential election. Historically, there’s nothing unusual here: from 1832 until well into the 20th century, candidates often didn’t know they had the nomination until the convention. But the post-1972 system changed all that, and we really are living in a different age of campaigns, fundraising, media, and party. Who knows.

    

12. Two things I do know: first, Harris will almost certainly have to rely on more Biden campaign infrastructure that she might have chosen had she fought and won a primary in an open-field nomination race. Staffing, GOTV operations, opposition research, fundraising, policy positions, and campaign strategy will all, to some degree, lean on existing Biden campaign work. Second, the Trump campaign is also going to have to pivot pretty hard, and a lot of the work they’ve done on strategy and media and GOTV and policy will have to go straight to the shredder in light of a new opponent.

13. There’s every chance Harris loses, perhaps even badly. That outcome doesn’t really inform our assessment of whether Biden should or should not have dropped out of the race. In poker or bridge, we call this results-oriented thinking. If someone offers you 2-1 odds to on the flip of a coin, you jump on the opportunity and don’t worry if you happen to get tails and lose.² I don’t see this as a spot where the Democrats had any great options; it’s often that the decision with the highest expected value is actually just the least-worst decision. When the choice you face is lose 70% of the time or lose 90% of the time, the best choice means you’re still going to lose a lot of the time. Note this argument is also true if Harris wins. That doesn’t prove it was wise (electorally) to replace Biden.

14. The entire political world seems to think that the best VP running-mate for Harris is a moderate white guy governor—Beshear, Cooper, or Shapiro—and I have no reason to disagree. The only dissent to this I hear is a case being made for Whitmer—she is a popular statewide official in a must-win state—but my hunch is that the party will flinch at a ticket with two women, for reasons unfortunate but true, but also for reasons that are mostly paranoid illusions.

15. That a party apparatus can still politically lean on a president and push him/her out of a nomination is, on balance, a good thing. We’ve built a dangerously powerful presidency—much more powerful than I would like—and a month ago I would have told you I had my doubts that a party could ever dislodge a president in this sort of situation, even when it was plainly the right thing to do, perhaps even more clear than the current situation.

16. I do not believe the Democrats have illegitimately upset some sort of popular legitimacy here, and I think most of the people arguing that way are quite obviously not speaking in good faith. That said, it’s not nothing to push Biden out after he won the primaries, but parties have all sorts of overlapping democratic elements to them, and it’s not obvious to me that the primary electorate is somehow more important than the others.

17. I’m fascinated to see if Harris tries to turn the age issue against Trump now that Biden is out of the way. My view has always been that both Biden and Trump are far too old to be president, and that Biden’s severe decline over the past four years has masked a pretty significant decline in Trump as well. I would welcome Harris running a “Too Old, Too Incompetent, Too Extreme, Too Dangerous” campaign.

1. That he didn’t do it in the original dropping out letter didn’t strike me as meaningful. While that letter certainly wasn’t devoid of politics, it seemed to want to strike a historic tone, and be about Biden. Endorsing Harris almost would have seemed weird in combination with the paragraphs he chose to write.

2. This is only true if you are sure the coin is fair. There’s a Bayesian adage in proposition gambling that goes something like this: if a man walks up to you and bets he can make the Jack of Spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear, don’t bet, for you are sure to end up with nothing more than an earful of cider. When people offer you too-good-to-be-true bets, be very wary.