Six weeks ago, it seemed fairly clear the country was uninterested in the Biden-Trump rematch. Even the ratings for the first debate, consequential though it was, were shockingly low. At 51 million viewers, it was the lowest-rated first general election debate for a presidential race since we started tracking TV viewership for these things.
Polling also indicated lower interest in this campaign and an extreme distaste for the choices the two major parties were offering. North of 50% of voters were regularly saying they’d like to see anyone other than these two run for president.
In short, voters were telling us in all sorts of ways that this matchup was one they didn’t want and they weren’t going to tune in to — until, perhaps, the last possible minute. After all, these two candidates, as far as voters were concerned, were well-defined. What new information would voters think they needed? One of the reasons I believe the initial post-debate polls didn’t shift much is that the public got the two candidates they expected: a slightly manic fact-free former President Donald Trump versus a barely ambulatory President Joe Biden.
To paraphrase the late, great football coach Dennis Green, yelling from a post-game podium, “They were who we thought they were.”
Well, there’s a reason we political reporters like to utter the cliché that sometimes a month (or a week) is a lifetime in politics. Because right now, we’re in the midst of experiencing a second or a third lifetime politically, just since that June 27 debate.
We are now going from a presidential campaign that left the public disinterested and at times disgusted it to a campaign that I could see generating an electorate that might be as interested, if not more so, as in 2008 and 2020, two of the highest-turnout elections in the last 50 years.
And the more the public tunes in, the more volatile this election could become again.
Before the assassination attempt, there wasn’t a scenario in which I believed Trump could persuade skeptics to give him a second look, let alone win over voters who decided not to support him in 2020 — especially after his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, in particular. And perhaps he still won’t be able to win these folks over. But I do have a feeling that these skeptics will be curious enough about whether Saturday changed Trump to at least check him out, maybe by tuning into some of Thursday’s acceptance speech. And that’s an opportunity.
Meanwhile, if the Democrats do end up with a new nominee — and it’s looking more likely by the hour that they will — that, too, is likely to suddenly trigger interest in what the new nominee has to say, which in turn could engage the electorate in a way that the pre-debate version of this campaign just didn’t.
Bottom line: We are getting awfully close to the moment when it might be fair to say, “Throw out everything you thought you knew about this election.”
The range of scenarios is only increasing, not decreasing. About the only thing I’m convinced of is that the various third-party candidates will start to see their numbers dwindle. Why do I believe that? The GOP appears more united than it has been since at least 2004 and George W. Bush’s re-election. That’s not to say the Trump-skeptic Reagan conservatives aren’t still skeptical, but this convention did a lot to get the party singing more from the same song sheet.
Yes, there are still some blue-state Republicans struggling to support Trump, and they may continue to do so, but it’s a much smaller group of Trump naysayers right now than it was in 2016 or 2020.
And I believe the decision to nominate a replacement for Biden would have some third-party supporters, particularly the supporters of Cornel West and Jill Stein, giving the Democrats a second look. As for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s supporters, his campaign is just not serious, and with both the Democrats and the Republicans regrouping, I also expect to see the Kennedy vote start to slowly evaporate. The lack of serious campaign events may indicate that whatever resources he had for ballot access must be drying up, because it isn’t acting like a fully flush campaign anymore.
But before we get to this campaign reset, the Democrats have to figure out what their ticket looks like and, more important, how quickly they can get their ticket selected and certified by the party.
As of this writing, my sources indicate to me that about the only folks who are still trying to rationalize Biden’s staying in this race all share the last name of Biden, with the possible exception of Biden’s longtime chief political strategist, Mike Donilon — who, as the gatekeeper of the data that makes it to the president’s desk, is starting to get blame along with Biden and his family for Democrats’ being in this position.
Alarmingly, for many Democrats who have talked with some members of the Biden inner circle, it’s not clear the president has seen any true new data about the race since the debate, instead getting memos with cherry-picked numbers that are based less on individual state polls than on “analytics” research that uses a large sample of respondents across states, coupled with voter file data, to model outcomes.
If it’s what I think it is, such data can often end up being glorified projections based on historical performance and turnout estimates, which can struggle to pick up change in volatile moments.
It may help explain why there is such a disconnect between the congressional Democrats and the Biden campaign when it comes to where the president actually stands with voters.
But the reality is that Democrats have passed the point of no return with Biden. And I’m willing to bet that if Biden doesn’t acquiesce to the pressure in the next week, he’ll start losing support among the delegates he has technically won already from the semi-uncontested primaries. The rules on the Democratic side mean the delegates are only “pledged” to Biden, not legally bound to him. And the likelihood that congressional leaders could orchestrate a “stop Biden” movement at the convention is getting stronger every hour.
I can’t imagine it comes to that. At some point, Biden will realize that he wants a positive legacy for his presidency. Does he really want a denial of the nomination to be the coda to his career? The longer this goes on, the harder it is to watch at times. Wednesday night, seeing that split screen with the Republican convention celebrating Trump while Biden was landing in Delaware with Covid, was a reminder that he just doesn’t look like the same guy who won four years ago.
Assuming Biden does bow out, the cleanest transition for the party would be if he simply endorsed his vice president. If he did that, I’m guessing, many of the other top Democrats will follow suit lining up behind Kamala Harris, from the Obamas to the Clintons to, most likely, all the potential 2028 aspirants, including Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
I’m not ruling out a mini-primary of sorts, but I’d be surprised if one develops. It’s getting awfully late, and the party needs to have a ticket in place, money in the bank and ads on the air. Any delay in figuring out its nominee hurts, and the necessity to focus on the GOP ticket will most likely make Democrats rally around Harris in a way they might not have had this been a traditional primary that began months ago.
The only real drama, then, will be about the second slot. The early names getting bandied about the most include those of Whitmer, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona. Three of these four elected officials are fairly popular statewide officeholders in three of the key battleground states, so their inclusion among the Democrats I’ve talked to makes Electoral College sense.
As for Beshear, the case for him is more in messaging. He’s a red-state Democratic governor who has to work with a GOP-controlled legislature to get things done. Beshear also has experience running against a polarizing conservative populist. Beshear won his first term against Matt Bevin, whom many folks in Kentucky refer to as “Trump before Trump,” since he won his lone term for governor in 2015, the year before Trump’s 2016 win. But Bevin was so unpopular in Kentucky, a red state, that he allowed Beshear to win, and Beshear then had enough successes in his first term to win a second term by nearly 6 percentage points — which for a Kentucky Democrat feels like a landslide.
Ultimately, whomever Harris ends up selecting, she needs to pick someone she’s truly comfortable with. If it looks too much like a forced political marriage, voters will sniff that out.
But let’s not sugarcoat things for Democrats. The last time the party scrambled a ticket this late in a campaign cycle was 1968, and while that ticket got a lot closer than many Democrats thought was possible after their chaotic convention, they still lost. It’s not easy building a national campaign this late, though Harris wouldn’t be starting from scratch.
At this point, the Democrats simply want to be competitive. As many congressional leaders believe, simply losing a very narrow race nationally would at least give them a strong change to win back control of the House and possibly find themselves with only a one- or two-seat deficit in the Senate.
But none of this scramble can begin until Biden bows out, and until that happens, the Democrats will remain in this campaign purgatory. Will it last another weekend, a week or the rest of the campaign? For now, it’s up the sitting president to decide.
