Let me share with you my nightmare scenario for the 2024 election. It's been going through my head for a year. Please do not share it with Donald Trump, or he might do it.
What Trump would do is: choose a female running mate, win the election, retire after three years with the understanding that he'll immediately get pardoned, and then go down in history forever as the man who gave us our first female president.
This would be an amazing conclusion to his hero’s journey — one last swashbuckling escape from his enemies. Glory attached to his name forever. But according to reports, Trump has narrowed his field down to three dudes, which is right on brand for him. (Does he really want a middle-aged or older woman in pictures next to him? Unlikely.) So maybe this will never happen.
And yet ...
• We’re in a disaster. We have one way out.
Joe Biden is losing the election. He's been losing constantly for two years. The reason he's losing is because he's too old. Everybody thinks so, even Democrats, who wanted a different candidate from the beginning but never had a choice because the stupid Democratic Party is hidebound. The voters still want somebody else right now. The polls are brutal.
Let's put this as clearly as we can: Biden had one job in 2020, which was to beat Donald Trump, and he did it. That’s over now. He had one job in 2024, and that was to not be too old. He has failed.
What if we had a different ticket? My choice would be Amy Klobuchar and ... Pete Buttigieg or Abigail Spanberger? Others have voiced different choices, but it seems incredibly obvious that Democrats have gone in the wrong direction and what we should be doing is electing the first woman president this year. That would put a fine point on the abortion issue, for one thing, but more than that it would excite people instead of make them cringe. Remember how psyched we were to elect Obama? We would be that psyched again.
If you say Biden should get out, people have two objections: 1. The inevitable fallback would then be Kamala Harris, who is unpopular and would lose, and 2. If Harris falls on her sword too, then black voters will be angry and not show up.
The NY Times had a panel discussion about this in Sunday's paper, talking about the "downsides" of Biden leaving the race.
Jamelle Bouie: I’ll be the fly in the ointment of this emerging consensus that Biden should drop out. I don’t think one has to excuse or apologize for the president’s poor debate performance to also observe that the hyperventilating panic obscures the extent to which there are serious, perhaps fatal downsides to Biden leaving the race at this stage.
Healy: The fear of the unknown — Democratic chaos, a fractured party over a new nominee — may do more than anything else to keep a lot of Democratic leaders on Biden’s side. What do you see as those downsides, Jamelle?
Bouie: First, in the same way that George McGovern’s decision to replace Thomas Eagleton vindicated Richard Nixon’s argument that the Democrats were in too much disarray to trust with the presidency, a Biden decision to leave the race at this late stage vindicates the Republican argument, deployed during the debate, that the United States under Biden is unstable and insecure. Consider, as well, the pressure for Biden not just to leave the race but to leave the presidency.
I read this and suddenly realized, oh my god, THAT'S NOT A DOWNSIDE!
This is the nightmare scenario, but we do it to them. The right thing for Biden to do is: Resign now. As soon as possible — the Fourth of July would be outstanding.
Look at what happens then: Kamala Harris becomes the actual president. Biden goes down in history as having done that. (And PS: Trump doesn't!) Harris — let's be honest — is a flawed politician and a terrible speaker, but she has also been diminished in her role as vice president. So now she gets to be elevated in her role as president. She gets to do strong, powerful things. She dominates the news for the rest of the year. She gets to stand up for women. Maybe she gets a cease-fire in the Middle East. The American people have four months to get used to her in that role, and by November we've grown into a country that fucking did it and finally has a female president.
And the contrast between her and Trump will be accentuated. Suddenly we have a young candidate instead of an old one, and we have a sense of excitement, instead of dread, about what we're doing here. Young people will have something to believe in, and women will be hyper-focused on re-electing her instead of the creepy orange man. When Fox News freaks out, we call them sexist and racist. And bonus, a new vice president is something to get excited about too. I think we beat him.
Instead of this, I've seen what liberals are doing — they're screaming at anyone who tells the truth to get back in line and keep rationalizing the status quo. This is dumb. We have a choice of what we want to work on between now and November, and it will be easier to make Kamala Harris presidential than to make Joe Biden youthful. If we’re going to all fall in line, let’s fall in line behind her. Let’s make her better, together.
We have to do something — let's do this.
I have been thinking along similar lines. I don’t think it will happen, but your logic makes sense to me.
I also think I heard that the campaign money WOULD be transferable. Firstly, Biden can spend his campaign money as he wishes, and, if Biden backs out, it would be from the Biden/Harris ticket, so the money would roll over to Harris.
We've been disappointed by the American people before. But, besides the fact that polling serves the interests of whoever is projected to win, I think there's real reason to believe that election results are skewing farther and farther to the left of polling results. Polls tend to reach older voters with land lines and people who answer spam emails.
Aside from that, Biden has had exactly one poor debate result, and has seemed quite a lot stronger since. He has a lot of money in his campaign chest, which I understand is non-transferable.
Maybe we shouldn't jump the gun.