So why aren’t Democrats trying to sabotage their incumbent presidential candidate? While I share the broad concerns about Biden’s age, the time to resolve this conundrum was back in 2015, when many younger Democrats were champing at the bit to be president. Democratic elites took stock of what was on offer and swung behind Biden; voters proclaimed their support for him soon after. Credit Phillips for consistency—he endorsed the comparatively younger Amy Klobuchar during the last primary. But another bed got made back when it mattered, and there’s no choice but to lie in it.
And so, I’m sorry to say, the die is cast: Biden has the best chance of any Democrat to win right now, and no one who might have a shot at the Democratic nomination in 2028 is going to burn bridges with the party pursuing a 2024 campaign that is likely to fail and hurt Biden’s chances. If Dean Phillips and his donors want to mount a campaign and ride a single percentage point all the way to becoming the answer to a pub trivia question in the years to come, they can be my guest.
Here’s some good news for Democrats, however. Joe Biden is definitely aging better than this quote: “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” That line was spoken by a “senior Republican official” who, on November 8 of 2020, didn’t really see a problem with Donald Trump’s constant stream of “baseless assertions that fraud had cost him the election”—after a week in which the former president was indicted for a series of alleged criminal activities that led to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Which brings us to this week’s New York Times/Siena poll showing that Trump is eviscerating his primary competition—including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who trails him by a cool 37 points.
Why isn’t DeSantis faring better? Probably because his candidacy is a knotty tangle of contradiction and nonsense. TNR’s Grace Segers deftly summarized the DeSantis campaign’s raison d’être like so: “I’m not Trump, but I’m like Trump, but Trump has baggage, but he also won the 2020 election, but I’m better than Trump, but Trump was also an incredible president.” This will fit real nice on a bumper sticker.
As I wrote back in April, this was the obvious contradiction at the heart of the candidacies of Trump’s rivals: Few have reconciled their support for Trump’s stolen-election claims with their desire to supplant him. So the people who should be fighting to tear Trump down have instead bestowed on him the sheen of an incumbent, and the Republican base has, to no one’s surprise, followed these cues. As my colleague Alex Shephard noted this week, this latest polling underscores just how deeply entrenched the idea of Trump’s Avignon presidency has become—and how it remains a third rail for challengers like DeSantis.
Still, all things being equal, you’d rather have the Democrats’ problems (that Biden is extremely old) than the GOP’s. (And here I should belatedly add that Trump, in addition to being a one-man wrecking ball of criminality and corruption, is also really frigging old.) Besides, as TNR contributor Osita Nwanevu once noted, Biden’s most important campaign promise is that he’ll beat Trump, and should he succeed again, there’s nothing stopping him from getting re-inaugurated, taking Jill out for a few spins on the dance floor, and then waking up the next morning to resign from office. That would resolve the concerns of Democrats swiftly and handily. And Republicans might wish for Biden to beat Trump in 2024 as well, because let’s face it—the only thing that’s likely to solve their Trumpism problem is a savage, election-year shellacking.
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