On Thursday night, President Joe Biden gave a widely panned performance in the debate against Donald Trump, causing panic throughout the Democratic Party and raising questions about whether Biden should continue on as the Party’s candidate. Biden is already trailing Trump in national and swing-state polls, in which voters have registered significant concerns about the President’s age. (He will be eighty-two in November.) At the debate, Biden stumbled over his words, at times appeared to blank out entirely, and had trouble giving clear answers, likely entrenching these concerns among voters. (A CNN poll taken immediately after the debate found that fifty-seven per cent of viewers said they had “no confidence” in Biden’s “ability to lead the country”; for Trump, the number was forty-four per cent.)
More than four months ago, the Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein wrote a column titled “Democrats Have a Better Option than Biden,” in which he called on the Party to convince Biden that “he should not run again.” He worried that Biden was on a losing path, felt that it was imperative for Democrats not give in to “fatalism” about the race, and argued that the Party should push for an open convention in which another candidate could be chosen. The column caused a splash, but obviously did not lead to Biden being significantly challenged in the primaries, or to a major push for him to step aside.
On Friday morning, I spoke by phone with Klein about what happened on Thursday, and what Democrats should do now. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Why do you think what you suggested should happen in February didn’t happen?
I think it is very hard to get around an incumbent President who wants to run for rëelection. I don’t think anything that I argued in February was particularly unusual or not felt by many Democrats, including many top Democrats. I got a lot of feedback on that piece, and the feedback I almost never got was, “You’re wrong. Joe Biden is a strong candidate. He’s the best candidate the Democrats could put on the ballot in November.”
What people said was, There isn’t another option. There isn’t another option because he won’t stand aside. There isn’t another option because, even if he did stand aside, Kamala Harris isn’t strong enough. There isn’t another option because you don’t think Kamala Harris would win in a convention, and if she didn’t win in a convention it would tear the Party apart. To me, the blockage in people’s minds was not so much whether Biden’s age had become a really substantial risk on the campaign trail or even within the Presidency but in imagining that the Party was strong enough to do something else and take on the risk of doing something else.
There was a collective-action problem. Any individual politician or Joe Biden staffer or adviser or confidant who stepped out of line and said privately or publicly that Joe Biden shouldn’t run faced real career risk. Whereas saying nothing did not pose a risk.
Challenging an incumbent President is generally seen as both hard for the challenger and potentially damaging for the incumbent. One thing that does occur to me, though, which I wish I’d thought of at the time of your column, is that when the incumbent’s main issue is his or her age, there’s an added benefit to challenging them: something like this debate could have happened during the primaries, which I really think would’ve shaken things up.
I had planned that exact piece out with my editor, and I was going to run it right after the midterms. Then the Democrats did so unexpectedly well in the midterms that you could feel the possibility of a challenge drain out of the Party. My understanding was that people were at least considering entering a primary for this exact reason, and might have been amenable to the argument that Democrats needed a primary simply to see if Joe Biden was still capable as a campaigner. There was no chance of it after the Democratic performance in 2022, which was called upon—incorrectly, I think—as proof that I was wrong not just about Democrats but about Joe Biden.
Something we’re seeing this year is Biden trailing congressional Democrats. They’re leading in the key Senate races, in states where he is running behind. So it’s clear now that people are more willing to vote for your median Democrat than for Joe Biden, and it’s very plausible in my view that the delta on that is age.
The problem was, again, the Party. I want to keep coming back to this: the Party would’ve needed to make a more strategic decision. The Party would’ve needed to do things that were uncomfortable to manage downside risk. Instead, there was a cohering around the best possible case for Joe Biden. Sometimes people say that I walked my piece back after the State of the Union, but that’s not how I think about it. What I said after the State of the Union was, essentially, “If this Joe Biden shows up every day until the election, people saying what I’ve been saying are going to look a little silly.” But he was not going to show up that way every day between now and the election.
I don’t really know why his State of Union was so strong. But the hope that you were going to get that guy every day when anybody who watched his speeches and his performances regularly knew you were not getting that guy every day is a problem.
Even if you didn’t watch his speeches or performances, he’s eighty-one years old, and you’re probably not getting that performance every day simply because he’s eighty-one.
I think this is something that Democrats have been treating as a superficial issue as opposed to a substantive issue.
Right, one of the most interesting things you talked about in your piece and have talked about since is this idea of whether Biden is too old to run for President versus too old to be President. How do you think about that now?
The point I made in the piece, which is something I heard from a lot of people around Joe Biden, is that he was perfectly up to the job of the Presidency. I would be told, although I’m not in these meetings, that if you were in meetings with him, you’d see he was sharp, he was making good decisions, that people had no concerns about his ability to perform the role in terms of decision-making. His ability to perform the role in front of cameras was another thing. So I made this point that he did seem up to the job of the President, but that he did not seem up to the job of campaigning for President.
I thought about that line a fair amount after I published the piece because I felt the situation was a little less clear than I made it sound. The way I put it now is that I think it’s a blurrier distinction. I don’t think Joe Biden is senile. I don’t think he’s making bad decisions. But I do think, first, the ability to communicate is part of the job of the President. In the classic formulation in political science, the power of the Presidency is the power to persuade. Joe Biden has become quite limited in his persuasive capacities. Part of the job of the President is to instill confidence in people that you have the manifold problems of the world under control.
The Democratic Party has become this party of normalcy and of systems and of institutions in a way that’s different from when I got into politics, when business was very aligned with the Republicans. You really have this alignment in which every major institution in American life has become much closer to Democrats. So, in a way that I think is a little bit complicated for them, this party that is on the one hand the party of reform is also the party of preserving what we have. It’s a party of both conservation and change.
The difficulty that Biden posed is that in a party that on some level wants to be making the argument that it’s the party of normal, competent people who will appoint normal, competent people to positions and do a normal, competent job, Joe Biden had come to seem aberrational to voters. And Democrats weren’t listening to them. Democrats were telling them they were wrong in the same way the Democrats had told voters they were wrong in 2016 when voters said that they didn’t like Hillary Clinton. I was somebody then who said, “You’re wrong. You’ve inhaled Fox News and years of sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton.” But you can’t tell voters they’re wrong. That doesn’t work.
I agree that you can’t tell voters that they’re wrong on something like this. Putting that aside—with Biden, do you think that the voters are right?
I think that the ability to communicate clearly, the ability to persuade, the ability to instill confidence in your leadership are all parts of the job of the Presidency. I have trouble saying that Joe Biden and his team are not making reasonable decisions in terms of governing. I think they mostly are. But, in terms of campaigning, they’re clearly not. I don’t think running Joe Biden again is the right decision.
And, even if you believe the only problem here is that Joe Biden is not that quick on his feet rhetorically anymore and seems quite ancient and physically limited when you watch him walk down a tarmac, that that is separate from the job of the Presidency, or that campaigning is separate from the job of the Presidency, or that being able to articulate your record and what you’re doing and why in a clear and convincing way, which we didn’t see last night, is separate from the job of the Presidency—those things are part of the job of the Presidency.
I think it’s even more than that. If you want to say that the job of the Presidency is to pass policies and govern in a way that is good for the American people, the single most important thing that will impact how the United States is governed in the next five years is whether Joe Biden can beat Donald Trump in an election. In fact, probably the single most important thing to determine whether the policies that Biden’s passed have an impact, whether we’re talking about economic policies or aid to Ukraine, is whether Joe Biden can beat Donald Trump in an election. So the distinction seems to me to be almost irrelevant at a certain point.
Yeah, that’s also true, obviously, that running for President—getting reëlected—is also part of the job of the President. To me, the governing comparison here is Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I really wonder if Joe Biden and the people around him have internalized what it is going to mean for his legacy if he loses this election. After Ginsburg died and her death led at least partly to the evisceration of Roe, that became her legacy, much more than the other work she did, and there’s real anger toward her, I think justifiably. I think that if Biden loses, the set of decisions he made around this election is going to look really, really bad.
This conversation also makes me think there is something unique about age as a political liability in the sense that it does seem inherently harder to assuage people’s doubts over it. Because what people are not doubting is some specific issue that you can address. They’re doubting something about the future. Even if you seem more together on a particular day, it just seems much harder to say, “Well, in three years’ time, I’ll be O.K.”
I think it’s almost better to talk in terms of perceived capacity than age. Because it’s true that Donald Trump is seventy-eight. He is very close to Joe Biden’s age, but he seemed a lot younger up there last night. I would say Donald Trump seemed better up there last night than he was in 2020, and it wasn’t close. And I would say Joe Biden seemed worse up there last night than he was in 2020, and it wasn’t close.
I was texting with a number of Democratic Party people last night who were trying to convince me that Presidents often have a bad first debate. Ronald Reagan had a bad first debate. Barack Obama had a bad first debate. One of the things I heard them say is, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
Do these people have an answer as to why Biden wanted only two debates?
I didn’t ask them that. But I think it being a marathon, not a sprint, cuts in the other direction, too. In a marathon, what’s wrong is going to have many opportunities to show itself: weird moments in speeches, possibly another debate, although who knows. The issue is that Biden cannot sustain a reliably very high level of performance. You can get him now and again, like you did at the State of the Union, but he can’t sustain it. So the idea that this is a marathon is bad for him.
I think he’s been a quite strong President. I have normal disagreements with him as a President, things for which I have a slightly different view on policy. But I think he’s been a good President. I don’t think you can project what he’s projecting to the American people and have a strong enough chance of winning rëelection. If you believe what Joe Biden tells me he believes about Donald Trump, then you have to take that really seriously.
I think a lot of people—even people around Biden—know that his age is a real problem. What I think they can’t imagine, what I think the Democratic Party can’t imagine, is doing something different.
There is a crazy thing that Gavin Newsom said last night. He basically said, “What kind of party would we be if we gave up on this guy after one bad night?” And then he said, “That’s what a party is for.” A party isn’t there to serve Joe Biden. To repeat this term I like that Charles Sumner used to open the convention that nominated Lincoln, a party is there “to organize victory.” A party’s there to win and get its agenda done. It needs to make strategic decisions in that direction.
Yeah, and I do think there is a dissonance here within people in the Party who support him and think he should stay on the ticket but who I don’t think have really ever answered the question of why his campaign is treating him like he can’t really run at full capacity.
I’ve spoken to Party people about this, and they have an answer to this that I’ve never really believed, but here’s what their answer is. Their answer is that the kinds of interviews that people like Isaac Chotiner or Ezra Klein are saying Biden should do are of no use to them. And there’s a reasonable case to be made for this. But there are a lot of people and a lot of forums they could be putting Joe Biden into that would be electric, a lot of podcasts he could be visiting, if he wanted to, that are not political. But they will not put him in any kind of adversarial or even uncontrollable situations because they’re worried about what would happen. Everybody on some level knows this.
I think Biden’s struggle among people who get their news from YouTube, from social media, from places like that, is not just the surfeit of negative and often misleadingly edited clips of Joe Biden seeming very old. It’s an absence of positive viral moments for him, like great moments in speeches, like really sharp comebacks to people—the kinds of things that people share, supporters share of their own volition all around.
Joe Biden’s diminishment as a campaigner has meant there’s not a lot of positive material about him that people are giving to each other on their own in a way that Barack Obama very much could generate in 2012. When you think about who is out there on YouTube, when you think about who’s out there on TikTok, not just the soft, easy gets but the places where it might be interesting . . . I’m not saying they need to do this, but in some ways it would be interesting to put a Democratic President on Lex Fridman’s podcast or Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Obama used to go on Bill O’Reilly.
They will not put Biden anywhere like that.
Including a third debate.
Including a third debate.
You said you thought Biden had been a strong President. Without debating Ukraine or Gaza or the Inflation Reduction Act, I really do think what is going to determine whether Biden is a good President is what happens in this election. There will be some achievements that will stand if Trump gets rëelected, surely, and others that won’t. But my fear is that we’re going to look back in fifty years and we’re going to say, “Biden was too selfish to step down when he should have. And he chose a Vice-President who’s not a strong politician.” These are the decisions that are actually going to determine what his Presidency was.
There was no vote Ruth Bader Ginsburg cast and no decision she authored that was as consequential as her decision not to retire. ♦