There Has to Be a Backup Plan. There’s a Backup Plan, Right? Inside the 2024 soul-searching that’s happening in every corner of the Democratic Party.
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On a Tuesday evening in April, nearly half a century after Joe Biden first publicly mused about running for president, an unsettled cross section of the Democratic Establishment assembled at Pinehurst, a golf resort in North Carolina. Inflation was at a 40-year high, Biden’s disapproval rating sat at 56 percent, and editors at the New York Times were readying a front-page report about how his signature achievement — $1.9 trillion in coronavirus-relief spending — has “barely registered with voters.” The lobbyists, donors, staffers, and elected officials were gathering for the spring policy meeting of the Democratic Governors Association, and the scheduled sessions concerned such topics as health care and diversity in governance. But between panel discussions, in the hallways and at the cocktail reception on the lawn, conversation shifted from grim — the midterms — to grimmer: the state of the party’s planning for 2024, when Biden will stand for reelection on the eve of his 82nd birthday
Biden hasn’t formally announced his campaign for a second term, but in his mind there’s no question he’s running. “That’s my expectation,” he said early in his tenure. “Yes!” he told an interviewer nine months later, sighing a little performatively at having to keep repeating it. “It’s been his life,” says one of his longtime advisers. “It’s like a shark that keeps swimming. It’s how he stays alive.” Or as another top Democrat puts it, “He was told in ’16 he couldn’t cut it. He runs in ’20 and everybody rolls their eyes, and he still wins. So why in the world now would he be like, ‘You guys are right. I am old’?” And yet many of the plugged-in Democrats wandered Pinehurst not entirely persuaded, calculating contingencies: If Biden’s health turned, or if his polling truly collapsed, which of the party’s governors might step up and save them from electoral ruin — and the nightmare of a Trump comeback?
Governor Roy Cooper — the conference’s host, who had twice won North Carolina in the same years the swing state was carried by Donald Trump — was the most frequent topic of shadow-campaign chatter. Governor Phil Murphy, the New Jerseyan whose national ambitions are among Washington’s worst-kept secrets, was a close second. Also in heavy rotation, according to Democratic power brokers in the mix (and familiar with months of similar conversations): Governor J. B. Pritzker, the billionaire hotel-chain heir from Illinois, and Governor Jared Polis, the Coloradan with a mandate-light approach to COVID. When the conversation stretched into the bar, it lingered on Governor Gavin Newsom, who is coasting to reelection after defeating a recall attempt in California, and Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who knows from personal experience about the rising threat of white nationalism in Michigan.
Toward the end of the event, phones buzzed with an alert: A memo from Bernie Sanders’s last campaign manager had been leaked to the Washington Post. “In the event of an open 2024 Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Sanders has not ruled out another run for president,” Faiz Shakir wrote to the senator’s aides and surrogates. It was the first acknowledgment that the two-time candidate is still considering his options. “So we advise that you answer any questions about 2024 with that in mind.”
Inside the White House, 330 miles north, a handful of Biden’s aides were monitoring Pinehurst and reading the Sanders memo with a measure of bafflement, even scorn. From their perspective, the hypothesizing was absurd. Every one of the would-be candidates has consistently maintained that their own presidential prospects are moot because Biden is running with their full support. As far as Biden’s camp is concerned, there isn’t any ambiguity about 2024 at all. He has said in private that he sees himself as the only thing standing between the country and the Trumpian abyss and has instructed his aides to redouble their planning for a rematch. “People ask me with some regularity, ‘When is Biden going to come out and say what he’s going to do?’ ” an exasperated longtime Biden adviser told me recently. “And I say, ‘Well, he has!’ ”
Relatively few people outside the White House totally buy it. With Trumpism reascendant, ambivalence about Biden’s age and political standing is fueling skepticism just as the image of his understudy, Vice-President Kamala Harris, dips even further than his. The most recent analysis from the Los Angeles Times has her net approval rating at negative 11. The result is a bizarre disconnect within the Democratic Party, with two factions talking past each other. One group consists of Biden and his loyalists, who are convinced that while the ticket’s numbers are undeniably bleak, they’re historically unsurprising for a president and VP facing their first midterm and will surely bounce back. The second group comprises a broad swath of the Democratic elite and rank and file alike, who suspect that vectors of age, succession, and strategy have created a dynamic with no obvious parallel in recent history.
In the past few months, though, many of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors — even as they pledge to back Biden’s reelection in earnest — have quietly started to poke around for alternatives in 2024, partly out of a sense of responsibility just in case Biden steps aside. Several have bombarded Obama’s old associates with pleas for insight into some sort of top-secret real that must exist for the next presidential contest.
There is no substantial precedent for the volume of questions about Biden’s future.
It’s not clear if anything can change the dynamic — not even the epochal shock that the Supreme Court is all but certain to overturn Roe v. Wade . After Politico broke the news, Biden had an opportunity to revitalize his standing. But rather than galvanize his party around a cataclysmic moment, Biden, who has never been comfortable saying the word abortion out loud, issued a statement but didn’t upend his schedule.
As they look toward 2024, Democrats are unified in their conception of doom: the restoration of Trump, joined down-ballot by anti-democratic Republicans who will end fair elections and any hope of combating climate change. But Democratic divisions remain over how to prevent that dismal future. Many are preoccupied by the midterms, which are less predictable now that post-Roe fury may well send more pro-choice voters to the polls, and others are focused on the even more immediate threat of rampaging inflation. Hanging over it all is a genuine debate over whether Biden’s being on or off the ticket is the best course of action.
Imagining an alternative is far from just a D.C. parlor game. Only three in ten Americans think Biden will seek a second term, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll. That survey also revealed that even among Democrats, a group that likes and approves of Biden in general, fewer than half are sure the president is planning on round two and a third outright think he isn’t. Biden can’t discredit the findings; the data was gathered in part by the research firm led by his own pollster, John Anzalone. More troubling — because it indicates that such doubts aren’t just about transitory twitches in popularity — is that similar skepticism arose in a series of private focus groups conducted by left-leaning organizations supportive of Biden last year. And that was before his approval ratings started to approach Trumpian lows.
This untenable state of affairs — in which Biden insists he wants the job until he’s 86 but much of his party won’t listen — is only partially a by-product of his not yet officially declaring his candidacy.
With family tragedies and two brain aneurysms in his past, he has always allowed that he might step aside if his health declined or if “fate intervened.”
He did get Trump out of D.C. and away from the nuclear football. But after the immediate crisis slunk away to Palm Beach, Biden’s presidency passed from early success into torpor, dragged down by a chaotic exit from Afghanistan, sometimes shocking rises in prices, and the determination of two senators from his own party to block his grandest legislation, all while the virus lingered longer than expected. It is possible for Democrats to feel profound gratitude to Biden for vanquishing Trump and even to love some of his work as president (Ukraine, vaccines, Ketanji Brown Jackson) and at the same time to retain an intense feeling of unease about a visibly aging 79-year-old whose Republican opponents are only growing more extremist.
This might be more straightforward to process if not for the slide in Harris’s public image, which has been in some ways more startling than that of Biden’s. In the summer of 2020, Biden was clear that he chose her to join his ticket in large part because he thought she represented Democrats’ future and saw in her not just the first woman vice-president but also possibly the first woman president. Yet in Washington, that was a political lifetime ago. After the inauguration, Harris took on a substantive but, in hindsight, politically impossible portfolio, focusing on voting rights and the roots of the Central American migrant crisis.
Harris has a rapport with Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, with whom she confers regularly, but Biden has let their regular lunch meetings slip from weekly to biweekly to just twice this year. The two get along, but when Harris tested positive for COVID in late April, the administration was put in the awkward position of admitting that she was not technically one of the president’s “close contacts.”
There’s a quiet frustration among some of Harris’s allies about the consistently negative tone of her coverage. They point out that women leaders, especially women of color, are too often criticized as hostile and unlikable. A few have encouraged Harris and her new staff to fight back more aggressively against the barely coded racist and sexist attacks she receives regularly from right-wingers; some wish Biden’s aides would back her up more.
In the meantime, nothing has budged Biden’s sense that nobody but him can keep Trump out of the White House. Anzalone articulated it on a Politico podcast this spring: “A lot of us feel that if Trump runs, there’s no one else that could beat Trump than Joe Biden.” Facing a country dubious that he will run, Biden just gets more convinced that he must.
Harris has never let anyone doubt that she expects Biden to seek a second term, and she has made no moves to set up a contingency campaign. She has effectively ceased to have contact with many of the highest-ranking advisers to her own 2020 bid. Yet if Biden did step aside, Harris would start the succession contest as the clear front-runner. A Politico newsletter recently pointed out that 27 surveys have tested the prospect of a Biden-free primary in the past year, and Harris has led 21 of them. Harris’s popularity among Black voters in particular may make her impossible to beat in a primary — which Biden, who won largely on the strength of his own relationship with Black voters, especially in South Carolina, knows as well as anyone.
Most think Harris would win the nomination if Biden backed her, and no one thinks he would ever actively endorse anyone else. But to her doubters, that itself is reason to think that “Biden has to run again, because he desperately has to keep Trump out of the White House and defend our democracy,” as one Capitol Hill supporter puts it. “And I have no doubts Kamala Harris can’t win.”
Buttigieg has kept in sporadic touch with some major donors from his campaign and has indicated to them that he is aware of the brutal dynamics pummeling the president. He is always careful to avoid even the appearance of wanting to discuss his own political future on these calls, according to people familiar with the conversations. But he hasn’t shut down the PAC and nonprofit associated with his old campaign — they’ve been kept dormant but alive by ex-aides — and he hasn’t shied from some of the kinds of meetings a presidential aspirant tends to chase.
Buttigieg isn’t alone. A handful of senators are doing the basic work they would need to do if the opportunity to run opened up, while maintaining plausible deniability that this activity is just standard political hygiene since they’re up for reelection in 2024. It’s unclear if any would truly move against Harris — their former colleague and potentially the first woman president — but recent federal filings show that Klobuchar, Booker, and Warren are all still spending heavily on digital investments or fund-raising consulting. Insider speculation rose around Warren especially after she wrote a widely read Times op-ed in April about how Democrats could save themselves before the midterms.
The same is true of Sanders, though only in recent weeks did the idea of his running in 2024 reignite within his orbit. It was prodded in part by a sense of concern that he was being written off — and his political leverage thereby sapped — when Maureen Dowd quoted a new book by a top adviser concluding that “while Bernie Sanders will never be president, his two campaigns have transformed the Democratic Party and this country. Many close to the Vermont senator would prefer to convince Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to consider running, but they concede that her youth makes it unlikely.
This “Why not at least think about it?” style of reasoning has become popular in moneyed corners of the party, too.
Lately, some of Biden’s associates have reminisced uncomfortably about his obvious exhaustion during the 2020 primary and expressed wariness at the prospect of another campaign. “I’m 66 and I’m f*****g exhausted,” one of his longtime buddies told me recently. “I can’t even imagine being 78, 79, 80, 81, 82 and starting again. Just waking up is a chore.” Anyone who has watched Biden can see that he walks more stiffly now — as noted publicly by his White House physician late last year — and that he appears to speak more slowly at times. Biden doesn’t hide his seniority.
The consensus of people who deal with Biden in person, from aides to journalists to senators, is that he has shown no signs of slowing down mentally and that the clips frequently circulated by right-wing media personalities of his momentarily struggling to speak are nothing new — just examples of his lifelong stutter and his (long notorious within Washington) difficulty with teleprompters. To think anything else, the Biden faithful argue, is to fall for Republican misinformation.
Biden is sustained by his contempt for Trump and the imperative of keeping him out of office. “If Trump is alive,” one veteran adviser says, “Biden is running.” But in recent weeks, Florida governor Ron DeSantis — widely regarded as the second favorite in the 2024 GOP field — has risen in Biden’s hierarchy of disgust, and some of the president’s aides have been thinking about whether it makes sense to intensify the politically spicy fights they’ve begun picking with him.
Still, Trump is who Biden can’t stop thinking about. Whatever doubts his party harbors, his inner circle believes that “if it’s Trump, Democrats will circle the wagons,” in the words of a former aide. “We’ve done this before. Yeah, everything seems bad, but when it’s game time and you’ve got a fascist up there, everyone will say, ‘Let’s do this.’ ” In private moments, Biden has been reflective, recently musing about his predecessor in a way that reminds his confidants of the aftermath of the 2017 neo-Nazi attack in Charlottesville — the moment Biden started to take 2020 seriously. The first question he asked his advisers was whether he could beat Trump. Then he lingered on a second one: “If I don’t run, who’s going to beat him?” He didn’t know it would remain an open question half a decade later.
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24 May 2022, 8:59 am
