Presented a certain way, the story of Joe Biden’s decision not to seek reelection reads like a top-down movement to overrule the will of Democratic voters. Biden had won all 50 states and 87 percent of the vote in an effectively uncontested primary. Then, just weeks before the Democratic National Convention, a steady drumbeat of calls to drop out from mega-donors and party bigwigs grew too loud to ignore.
In this framing, the options for fairly representing the will of Democratic voters are slim. The realistic best-case scenario for popular sovereignty is moving Kamala Harris, whom Biden has endorsed as his successor both electorally and Constitutionally, to the top of the ticket, but she failed to ever reach even 15 percent support in polling averages during the 2020 primary and dropped out before any votes were cast. Then there are the plainly anti-democratic and anti-Democratic scenarios being bandied about in donors’ conversations and newspaper op-eds, like tasking convention delegates to pick a candidate after a series of Republican-moderated “blitz primary” debates, or nominating 2012 GOP standard-bearer Mitt Romney.
So why is it that almost every left-of-center person I have talked to, from establishment-friendly moderates to old-school liberals to online leftists, is thrilled by Biden passing the torch? Why does what was effectively an insider power play feel like a populist victory? Because, in the meme-ified words of the likely new nominee, this news comes in the context of all that came before it. For the first time in years, Democratic Party leaders have responded to their base’s concerns with introspection instead of condescension.
On the eve of the Georgia special elections in January 2021, Biden promised a substantial stimulus plan to put badly needed cash into the pockets of pandemic-weary Americans. If Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their Senate races, he announced that “$2,000 checks will go out the door” once he took office. Lo and behold, the Democrats won both Georgia Senate seats, giving Biden a legislative trifecta at the start of his term. Yet the American Rescue Plan Act, which Biden unveiled on Inauguration Day and signed into law in March, prescribed payments of just $1,400.
Biden’s camp quickly spun this lower amount as consistent with his pledge. Weeks earlier, Biden had described the $600 authorized in December’s stimulus bill as a “down payment” towards future assistance. The new $1,400 plus what Americans already received from the Trump administration equaled $2,000 — though that’s not what many if not most voters heard when Biden referred to “those $2,000 checks.”
Few prominent Democrats acknowledged the dissonance; pundits dismissed disappointed constituents as naïve and ungrateful. The administration could say they had kept their promise on a technicality. But at the very least, Biden used ambiguous language such that there was a widespread good-faith understanding that he had pledged an additional $2,000, not $1,400. Did voters who were counting on that extra $600 take comfort from belatedly reading the fine print?
The salience of this story has ebbed with time — I can’t imagine many 2024 swing voters would tell you this arguably broken promise is why they now prefer Trump.1 But it foreshadowed the ethos of technocratic self-assurance that would define the party establishment under Biden. The White House could not fail, they could only be failed. Or, to quote a tweet I think back to often: the Democrats’ effective slogan has been shut up everything’s fine.
For all that can be said about Biden’s legacy, positive and negative, to me the true hallmark of his term has been his complete disinterest in his own agency. The most blatant example is abortion. Despite having a month of lead time after a draft of the majority opinion leaked and hearing years (if not decades) of Republican promises to overturn Roe, the administration was caught completely flat-footed by the Dobbs decision. Biden never seriously attempted to use his uniquely ballyhooed legislative prowess to get Congress to write Roe into law. He was broadly dismissive of Supreme Court reforms like adding justices (an idea he had promised to consider if elected), and insists in spite of the mounting evidence to the contrary that the renegade judiciary can police itself. In short, the Democrats’ response was to simply tell the American people to vote — which we did, for them, largely because Biden had promised multiple times that he would codify Roe.
More broadly, whether he’s negotiating with Congressional Republicans or foreign leaders, Biden has made no effort to cultivate or wield political leverage. From climate change to public health to road safety, his instinct has been not to lead but to shrug his shoulders. He couldn’t even be bothered to send an aide to do the Sunday shows after the Uvalde school shooting, saying “they were leaving it up to Congress to act.”
With this torpor has come a particularly thin skin for criticism. For years Biden has fumed about what he sees as a rabble-rousing media and an ungrateful electorate who don’t give him enough credit for their accomplishments. In 2022, then-Press Secretary Jen Psaki impatiently responded to disillusioned voters’ concerns by proposing a bill for “bunny rabbits and ice cream.” Multiple White House spokespeople have accused journalists of supporting Russia or ISIL for asking standard follow-up questions at briefings. Three years later I’m still aghast at how reflexively scornful Psaki was when a reporter suggested the White House distribute free COVID-19 antigen tests in the midst of the initial Omicron surge — a proposal so pie-in-the-sky radical that the White House eventually fulfilled Psaki’s sarcastic offer to “send one to every American” merely a month after she dismissed the very premise that Biden could be doing more to keep people safe.
These qualities have shaped Biden’s responses to two major ongoing issues. The first is Gaza. For months it has been apparent that most Americans (especially within Biden’s party) are opposed to Israel’s depraved war in Gaza and our government’s role in it. Meanwhile, Biden seems genuinely perplexed that his strategy of offering Israel its full rhetorical and material support and repeatedly backpedaling from his stated “red lines” has failed to reign in their campaign of wanton destruction. A child could understand why telling Benjamin Netanyahu don’t invade Lebanon, but we’ll help you if you do has not defused the threat of full-scale regional war. Yet Biden has dug in his heels. Despite the conspicuous centrality of American Jews to the ceasefire movement, Biden is so committed to the lie that Judaism and Zionism are one in the same that he has espoused anti-Semitic rhetoric even as he claims to act in my name. Yet I’m not aware of a single prominent Democrat disavowing Biden for his callous complicity in these war crimes.
The President’s lack of self-awareness and humility were also evident in his initial decision to run for reelection and his stubborn refusal to step aside for nearly a month after his disastrous debate performance. That he sought a second term at all is another example of truth-by-technicality that conflicted with what he’d clearly implied: During the 2020 campaign, Biden described himself as a “bridge” and “transition” candidate, and aides leaked that he planned to pass the torch in 2024.2 Questions about his fitness for office were percolating long before the debate debacle. Democratic voters have said they prefer a new candidate since at least last summer. For months, polls have shown Biden losing to a man who’s been convicted of 34 felonies since he lost four years ago. Even with his theoretical incumbency advantage, Biden was specifically, personally, uniquely vulnerable, consistently running behind downballot Democrats in swing states. And despite mounds of evidence to the contrary, he vainly insisted that he was the only person who could beat Trump, long after public perception of his acuity had clearly passed the point of no return.
In a political party that consistently reflected the will of its members, it would be a given that a candidate would pass the torch if a majority within his own party wanted a new nominee. But that’s not how the Democratic Party operates. For years — certainly since Biden’s inauguration, though you can trace the thread through my entire adult life — the party’s preference has been to work backwards from the first principle that its leaders are doing the right thing. Even when their strategies clearly aren’t working, or when they embody the same harmful policies or personal behavior that they rightly condemn from Republicans. Whether you chalk it up to polarization, cognitive dissonance, or party unity, rare are the occasions when the Democratic establishment have deigned to acknowledge that their internal critics have a point.
And that is why Biden stepping aside feels so exciting. Whatever (and whoever) comes next, it is a massive symbolic departure from the party’s typical omerta around introspection. It is a sign of having gained at least an inch or two in the fight for a platform more inspiring than Shut Up Everything’s Fine.
The honeymoon period for Harris — or even more so for whoever leads the ticket if it’s not her — will not last forever. It should be fair game to critique her role as the public face of Biden’s draconian border policy, and her earlier record as a prosecutor. Her family connection to Uber may not bode well for continuing Biden’s labor-friendly legacy. While there are indications that Harris will take a more-humane approach to the war in Gaza, she has yet to meaningfully break with Biden on the most-urgent moral question in American politics. Still, the energy surrounding her candidacy is palpable, even from blocs who were skeptical of Harris in her previous campaign. Both because of a widespread genuine belief that she has a better chance to win in November, and because her (presumptive) nomination is the result of having successfully pressured Biden to pass the torch.
Biden’s last defenders argued that the movement to push him out was plutocratic, not populist. There is some truth to this — it was not until fundraising dried up and party elders began twisting arms that elected officials started calling for Biden to bow out — and I respected those who feared mega-donors were using doubts about the President’s acuity as a pretext to move the party to the right. But dismissing this pressure as fundamentally elite-driven is rooted in that same stubborn assumption that Biden can do no wrong. Contrary to this belief, it is possible for voters to think the economy is not working for them without watching Fox News; to understand the horrors Biden is supporting in Gaza without scrolling TikTok; to have been shocked by POTUS’ debate performance before the New York Times editorial board weighed in.
However the message was ultimately disseminated, Biden standing aside is ultimately a rare, belated acknowledgment that he and the party were wrong, and that ordinary voters’ concerns could not be brushed aside. To ignore that context in which we live is to not see the forest for the coconut trees.
Though a larger stimulus would have offered some extra cushion ahead of the inflation that would start to drag down Biden’s popularity a few months later, and mitigated the “vibecession” disconnect between how the administration and the general public perceive the economy.
When I wrote about this sleight of hand a couple weeks ago, some Biden supporters argued that I had read too much into his careful ambiguity. Since then Biden has spoken multiple times about the tension between his words and his actions, and confirmed that he indeed changed his mind.