Whither Biden 2024?

You know what's depressing about the popular-vote result of the election?  Although Donald Trump got as many votes as he did in 2020, millions of Democrats decide to stay home rather than vote for Kamala Harris.

But what if Joe Biden had remained at the top of the Democratic ticket?

President Biden originally intimated that he would serve only one term, but he never declared his intentions for 2024 one way or the other in the first two years of his term to avoid being seen as a lame duck.  When the 2022 midterm elections turned out to be unexpectedly not awful for the Democrats, Biden took that to mean that he would be in a strong position for 2024.  Also, there was the paucity of serious contenders for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination; too many Democratic rising stars had ended up with brilliant futures behind them when they lost important statewide elections for governor or Senate, and the few Democrats who had the chops to replace Biden at the top of the ticket were handicapped by prejudice or stereotyping.  As I said at the time, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer had just gotten re-elected but still had to deal with her sex as a political liability, given the American people's resistance to the idea of a female President.  There was Pete Buttigieg, but he was too young.  Bernie Sanders, by contrast, was too old.  California governor Gavin Newsom was connected to socially liberal San Francisco, where he'd been mayor.  And the Kamala Harris of 2022 was the same Kamala Harris of 2024 - a black woman whose husband is a Jew.  But any white man with her chops would have been handicapped by simply coming from the San Francisco Bay Area like she did.  And Gavin Newsom clearly was. 

In short, the consensus was that it was either Biden or a houseplant.

So what if Biden had resisted calls to step down and tried to persevere?  We'll never know.  It's all good and fine to suggest that he would have been able to eke out a victory if his own party - and George Clooney - hadn't publicly trashed him this past summer.  Certainly Biden would have done his best to recover from that debate with Trump in a second debate.  Obviously he would have gotten out more in front with the voters, an opportunity the pandemic denied him in 2020.  Clearly he would have talked a lot about economic issues, which would have rung more true from him given his background.  No doubt he would have done his darnedest to make the election about Trump - because if it was about Trump, the Democrats might have gotten an edge.  But the evidence for a Biden victory had he gotten the full support of his party and not had to deal with jokers like Dean Phillips is nonexistent.

So what if Biden had decided not to stand for re-election much sooner?  What if he had decided not to do so in January 2023 and had announced that he would not seek re-election in his February 2023 State of the Union address?  Despite the apparent lack of able contenders to succeed him, there is, to be sure, that someone will make the argument that an unlikely presidential possibility - former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, Kentucky governor Andy Bashear, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, or someone no one, not even I, has heard of - would have won the nomination in a fair and open primary/caucus contest and gone on to win the general election.  But the case for a dark horse flies in the face of the likeliest scenario - the party would have immediately coalesced behind Vice President Harris, as Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) insisted should happen back in 2022.

But at least, if Harris had become the presumptive Democratic nominee much earlier, she might have been able to get more people to know her better and had much more time to do so that the 105 days or so she did have.

Then again, maybe the American people never really did want as President a black woman whose husband is a Jew, and no difference of circumstances would have changed that.

It is just this sort of second-guessing and pondering what might have been that is going to plague and bedevil the Democrats as they prepare for next year's gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia and the 2026 midterms . . . assuming they're still on under Trump 47.

Trump is already teasing the idea of a third term for himself, which is possible only if he terminates the Constitution.