The Backchannel

I wanted to do a short post on expectations setting now that we’ve absorbed the stunning and sometimes euphoric news of the last 48 hours. What will the polls say about this new race? What are Harris’s chances of winning? As my colleague David Kurtz has rightly stated, we’re truly flying blind here. There are so many unprecedented variables we can’t be certain about anything. My own best guess is that we should be not so much expecting but prepared to see Harris roughly where Joe Biden was before the late June debate. That speculation is based mostly on the fact that the polls have been primarily driven by the size of the Republican and Democratic voting blocks with a large percentage of voters supporting third party candidates.

We’re now a day out from President Biden’s semi-expected but still shocking decision to depart the presidential race and the rapid ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris as presumptive nominee. We don’t know what the first polls will tell us. We should be prepared for them, at least at first, not to be dramatically different from Biden’s in the weeks leading up to the big and now genuinely historic debate. That’s not pessimism about Harris’ campaign. It’s a recognition that the best argument for the switch is not that she would instantly transform the campaign but be better able to make the case against Donald Trump over the next three months. But now the great majority of Democrats are treating her ascension with something approaching euphoria.

That’s both a measure of her as a candidate and an end to the protracted agony of the last three weeks. But already we’re hearing that this rush of support for Harris is yet another bad thing. Democrats have only just changed the last terrible thing pundits said they were doing only to be told that their solution is also a disaster in the making or at least a mistake. I don’t want to pick on anyone but this piece by Graeme Wood seems to capture this whole new storyline. In a way the argument is just a continuation of the Thunderdome craze of the last six months: a contested convention, blitz primaries, and the like. The new terrible mistake is rallying around Kamala Harris too quickly. Because this just compounds what Wood and seemingly many other pundits and columnists feel is the belief that “Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning.”

I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about the current state of things with President Biden’s candidacy. See it more as comparing notes with you than reporting, per se.

Yesterday there was a frenzy when President Biden’s interview with BET was released and he said that he would leave the race if doctors told him he had some medical condition or illness that made it necessary. Was this planting the seed? Was this how it was going to happen? When it was reported a couple hours later that Biden had COVID, I thought to myself: Are we going full Aaron Sorkin here? Is this really happening? It was one of those few moments when I literally couldn’t figure out what was going on. Is this for real? Are we saying the interview was a cue up for the COVID? Does he really have COVID? Are the writers just pushing the bounds of realism?

But as I alluded to yesterday afternoon there are other things happening that are not cinematic. Random backbenchers telling Biden he should end his candidacy was never going to do it. As we’ve said from the beginning, the people who can deliver that message to the President are Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, perhaps Barack Obama, though that last one is a lot less clear to me. Starting yesterday it became clear that all three congressional leaders either had or were in the process of doing that. That matters, in ways that all the other stuff does not.

I’ve heard various takes and reactions to Trump’s JD Vance decision. I’ve thought of it as a choice that shows Trump thinks he’s in the driver’s seat and doesn’t have to appeal to any groups for support. I’ve heard others say that this is to nail down Blue Wall states in the Midwest, in part on the basis of people who remember the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy. It’s quite possible that the biggest thing is the more mundane and human fact that Vance did the best at cozying up with Don Jr. over the last year. But the most substantive and real thing is that this creates a deeply and coherently authoritarian ticket: big into Trumpian executive power, very anti-abortion right down to unleashing red states to surveil women’s travel and reproductive health services, deeply anti-U.S. alliances, the whole package.

Let me share some reactions to Saturday’s surreal and horrifying attempted assassination of Donald Trump. The first is that so much about Trump and the whole world he has brought into being is bombast and fakery. So much about Trump’s world is carried over from the world of professional wrestling, the bombast and taunts, histrionic and willfully over-the-top presentation, the play-acting. Friends become enemies and then friends again. There is high-tension falling out and then making back up. And at it’s core the whole thing is fake. It’s all one big reality show.

But this was not fake. This was as real and grave as it gets. A deranged kid — it really seems to me this guy may not have had any recognizable politics, though we might find that he did — came within an inch of assassinating Trump on live TV. Beyond the personal tragedy and the grave wound to our whole political system, it is difficult and terrifying to imagine what that act would have unleashed. And by the merest luck it didn’t happen.

Yesterday I heard from TPM Reader GZ in response to the Backchannel email newsletter. (I always encourage you to write to me. You can do so simply by replying to my newsletter. Comes right to my personal inbox.) “Even though you aren’t saying Joe should drop out you are participating in the fun of talking about it,” he wrote. “Giving air to negativity.”

I think a lot of people are having fun with this. Many of the most prominent journalistic voices. But I felt the need to correct the misapprehension. “If you think I’m participating in any fun you gravely mistake my thoughts and profound anguish over this … The last two weeks have been pure agony,” I wrote. As I went on to explain, I don’t get into my personal experience of any of this because it’s simply not relevant to what I’m writing. But I took both sides of this exchange as examples of the toll this extended and seemingly frozen crisis has had on so many people.

Today I have been corresponding with a number of readers about, well … what’s happening? Like, some want this and some want that. But everyone is wondering wtf is happening or, to put it more specifically, why the whole thing hasn’t been decided yet.

Just in the last hour or two there was a rush of new articles which report that top people in the Biden campaign either think Biden won’t be able to hold on or that he has no path to victory, etc. In a way, these are all versions of the same thing, or one inevitably relies on the other. I think the real issue is that a presidential candidate simply can’t lose the confidence of his or her congressional party. Why that happens or whether it’s fair doesn’t really matter after a certain point. Or rather it doesn’t matter in an operative way. And it does appear we are either at that point or near to it.

There are two additional points I want to note. They may seem contradictory and they are at least in tension. But I think they’re both true.

When we collectively wrestle with a situation like the one Democrats are now grappling with, it is important to remember that multiple things can be true at once. I’ve spent most of the day thinking that Joe Biden has very much not ended this “drop out” question — which I kind of thought he had by Monday evening — and thinking that withdrawing in favor of Kamala Harris may be the least worst bad option available. But there are a couple dynamics I want to mention that are helpful to think about.

One issue I’ve written about is the disjuncture here between elite responses to this political tornado and the responses of ordinary voters. This turns out not to be specific enough. All of the information I’ve gotten on this is anecdotal. But some anecdotes are better and more valuable than others. It seems clear to me that quite a few ordinary Democratic voters want Biden to step aside. I’ve published some of their emails below. I really have no idea what the relative percentages are. But it’s certainly not like the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal where DC political elites rapidly developed an iron consensus that Clinton had to resign and then realized that there was an angry and large majority of regular Democrats saying absolutely f—king not.

I am going to try to write a few pieces today and tomorrow taking stock of the truly unprecedented and almost unimaginable standoff that is not so much wracking the Democratic Party as simply holding it in place, in limbo, for more than a week now. But before doing that I thought it was important to share some general thoughts on where we are with all of this. First I must say that I can’t think of many other or perhaps any political situation I’ve written about at TPM over decades that was more difficult for me to make sense of, either as a matter of what is happening or will happen, or what should happen. I’ve been mainly focused on the first question.

For the second half of last week I was basically certain that Joe Biden would be forced to end his candidacy and that it was simply a matter of time before he did so. Then, starting Saturday, things seemed to shift. These things work in waves. For any politician the best way to avoid being forced to resign (and here I’ll use “resign” as a proxy for Biden ending his candidacy, not actually resigning the presidency) is simply not to resign. It’s one of those truisms that contains more depth and nuance than one at first realizes.

This may seem like a minor point. But I thought it’s worth saying because I have seen a minor rearguard argument to this effect: that the SCOTUS immunity decision doesn’t actually change any laws, doesn’t change what a president can and can’t do. It simply removes the possibility in many or most cases for post-presidency prosecution, something which has actually never happened in American history until last year. This is notionally a good point, but in a purely notional way. It’s true as applied to presidents who didn’t need this kind of hammer hanging over them. All of us are constantly through every day abiding by laws even though we’ve never been prosecuted — or at least most of you, maybe some have been prosecuted before — for breaking a criminal law. We report all our income on our taxes; we don’t fraudulently sign documents; we don’t steal from the store. Most of us act that way just because it’s the right thing to do, though most of us have been tempted at the margins. But laws work in complicated ways. Much of our understanding of what is the right thing to do is in fact conditioned by the laws themselves. As we’ve noted before, laws and prosecutions are not only to keep people in line and punish wrongdoers. They are how societies speak to themselves about what is acceptable and what is not.