In the 2024 Elections, It's a Man's Man's Man's Republican Party

One of the most important consequences of Donald Trump's political ascendance in 2016 was the effect it had on the political engagement of women. They played a leading role in the "Resistance" movement of anti-Trump activism in the 2018 and 2020 elections, which often portrayed Trump as uniquely threatening to women's interests in both his substantive policies and personal behavior. The number of female candidates in the Democratic Party made a noticeable jump in 2018, the first election after Trump became president, and Democratic primary voters seemed especially motivated to express their aversion to Trump by nominating women for Congress and other major offices. The Democratic House majority elected that year contained a record number of women, and in 2020 a majority of non-incumbent Democratic nominees were female for the first time in American history.

Less predictably, the proportion of women nominated by the Republican Party also increased during Trump's presidency. Women rose from 13 percent to 22 percent of all Republican House nominees between 2018 and 2020, and jumped from 18 percent to 33 percent of all non-incumbent nominees. Media reports revealed that Republican officials and interest groups, worried about stereotypes of a male-dominated party, had invested in efforts to recruit more women to run for office. The representation of women in the GOP still lagged well behind the Democrats, but seemed to be on a similar trajectory.

However, the parties have since diverged. The picture for Democrats is of relative stability. Since 2018, the proportion of Democratic House nominees who are women has remained between 42 and 48 percent, as depicted in the figure below. But Republicans proved unable to sustain the growth of female nominees achieved in the 2020 election. This year, 84 percent of Republican House nominees, and 83 percent of non-incumbent nominees, are men.

In Senate and governors' races, both parties have produced a fairly steady pattern of increased female representation since the 2000s, but the Republicans experienced a decline in female Senate and gubernatorial nominees from 21 percent in 2022 to 16 percent in 2024—the lowest proportion of women nominated by the party since 2016:

The 2024 election has exhibited especially overt "gendered" elements that are hard to ignore. Trump, facing a female opponent for the second time in his political career, made his entrance to the Republican National Convention this summer to the accompaniment of James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," while Harris prefers a soundtrack of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift—both of whom have endorsed her campaign. Commentators and analysts discuss the possibility of a record gender gap and the possibly central role of abortion and trans rights in shaping voters' preferences. Even the candidates' media outreach strategies reflect gender differences, with Harris appearing on podcasts hosted by Alex Cooper and Brene Brown that are especially popular with women while Trump targets the mostly male audiences of Joe Rogan and Logan Paul.

But even a historically unprecedented partisan divide between male and female voters in 2024 is unlikely to match the dramatic contemporary gap in gender representation separating Democratic from Republican politicians. For the Democratic Party, a future of relative gender parity among its elected leadership is realistically within sight. But for Republican politicians, it's still very much a man's world.

Post-Debate Wrap Up: Not Much to Learn, But a Clear Story Forms

 1. Most debates, whatever their other (dubious) merits, are not good vehicles for determining how candidates differ on substantive policy questions. This debate was no different. The policy discussions, when they occurred, often stayed at a superficial level or departed from reality, and the moderators did not consistently follow up when candidates dodged their questions (which both Trump and Harris did repeatedly). The assumption that these events are essential elements of the democratic process continues to be thoroughly unconvincing.

2. Harris is often compared to Barack Obama for obvious reasons, but her debate style is actually much closer to that of Joe Biden (at least, the pre-2024 Biden). She's not really a facts-and-figures memorizer or someone who shows off command of policy detail; she prefers to state more general themes and present her personal biography as an adequate answer to questions about what she would do to solve this or that specific problem. In another context, an opposing candidate would be able to repeatedly push her out of this comfort zone.

3. Luckily for Harris, (a) she's not running against another candidate, and (b) there's nothing the political media appreciates more than strategic cleverness. Harris's transparently intentional attempts to distract and infuriate Trump by talking about people leaving his rallies in boredom or Wharton School economists trashing his economic plan will be widely hailed as a stroke of political genius, ensuring—in combination with Trump's behavior—that the press will declare her the winner by a wide margin. Add "they're eating the dogs" to the mix, and you have the formula for a solidified conventional wisdom that the debate was disastrous for Trump. But we'll see if it actually registers in the polls.

4. We can also expect considerable media coverage of Taylor Swift's post-debate endorsement of Harris. That's surely welcomed by the Harris campaign, and any positive story is valuable in a very close election. But if high-wattage celebrity support actually moved millions of votes, the Democrats would never lose.

5. A very confident Harris campaign immediately challenged Trump to another debate, and Trump may well accept the offer in order to try for a comeback in Round 2. But, really, what's the point of having another one of these?

Democratic Convention Wrap-Up: 16 Years Later, It's Still Obama's Party

A few notes on the week the Democrats just had in Chicago:

1. 20 years after his national emergence as a keynote speaker at the 2004 convention, and 16 years after he won his first presidential nomination, Barack Obama remains the defining face of the contemporary Democratic Party. The 2024 convention demonstrated the potency of Obama's legacy in three major respects.

• On policy: the convention presented Harris as a center-left candidate in the Obama mold, consistently liberal on both economic and cultural issues but not doctrinaire in manner and maintaining a quiet distance from the Sanders/Warren "progressive revolution" platform that some observers have viewed as a harbinger of the party's future. The convention programming consistently emphasized practical incrementalism over ideological transformation. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's speech on Monday night did not take a distinct ideological tack from the rest of the party, and nobody was in the mood to stir up factional conflict.

• On representation: Obama's demonstration that white voters in swing states could support a person of another race for high political office (not at all an obvious assumption when he first ran for president in 2008) has, in the years since his election, unlocked the door to a steadily widening stream of non-white candidates who have sharply increased the demographic diversity of the Democratic Party's, and the nation's, leadership. Harris is, of course, a beneficiary of this trailblazing, but the convention stage this week was occupied at various points by many other Obama legatees: Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, Wes Moore, Angela Alsobrooks, Ruben Gallego, Hakeem Jeffries, Catherine Cortez Masto, Andy Kim, and so on. But like Obama, Harris prefers not to invoke her race (and gender) explicitly in a cry for historical justice, but instead assumes that voters will notice it anyway and hopes that they view it as a symbol of positive change.

• On tone: Obama has made it unmistakably clear over the years that he doesn't like self-righteous, scolding, negative-affect political rhetoric, and he thinks it's politically counterproductive when it comes from the left. His address on Tuesday night echoed this point, albeit indirectly enough to ensure that "Obama trashes wokeness" wouldn't be the big media story of the evening. Harris obviously agrees. Her acceptance speech last night, as well as the bulk of the speeches over the four nights of the convention, were welcoming to non-progressives and explicitly presented a positive and patriotic view of the country, complete with repeated "USA" chants and signs in the crowd. This is not "1619 Project" progressivism, portraying the country as enduringly shamed by its history of injustice; this is instead a reaffirmation of Obama's preferred framing of the United States as a nation that can be proud of the racial progress that it has made and of the example that its multicultural democracy can now offer the world.

2. Harris is clearly a fan of short speeches. Since starting her campaign, she's tended to speak at her public rallies for only about 20 minutes ot so. Last night's speech was 37 minutes long, which turns out to be the shortest acceptance address since Walter Mondale's in 1984 (not counting Biden's in 2020, which had no in-person audience due to the pandemic and hence no breaks for applause). This offers a contrast with her opponent, who has delivered the three longest acceptance speeches in history. In a digital age of shrinking attention spans, perhaps Harris sees strategic value in relative brevity.

3. Of course, a shorter speech means leaving some things out. Harris's autobiographical narrative emphasized her experience as a prosecutor and attorney general but skipped over her tenure as vice president almost entirely. The reason is clear—with Biden's approval ratings hovering around 40 percent, she needs to win over some Biden critics and has decided to present herself as a new face in politics, unburdened by what has been. But this isn't a risk-free strategy. She also needs voters to view her as qualified for the presidency, and discussing her vice presidential experience could be helpful in passing that test.

4. In general, journalists don't like conventions all that much. For them, being stuck in a crowded arena while a parade of politicians deliver partisan boilerplate for hour after hour is boring and annoying; the excitement among the press corps provoked by the (false) rumor that Beyonce might made a surprise appearance at last night's session partially reflected media members' lack of interest in the people who were actually on the schedule. But for citizens who aren't already saturated in politics every day, the conventions can serve as a useful window into the political world. A non-expert who spends an hour or so watching both parties' conventions will usually get a pretty good picture of each side's main messages and how they differ. Conventions are also important for the internal operations of the parties as complex political organizations—a quadrennial national gathering of top leaders and activists where information can be shared, relationships can be built, and party business can be settled. Conventions, much more than debates, are truly essential milestone events during every presidential campaign, and they shouldn't be judged only by the superficial entertainment value of every speaker at the podium.

What the Tim Walz Pick Tells Us About Kamala Harris

Every four years, public speculation about the identity of the vice presidential nominees tends to focus on governors or senators from competitive states that may hold a pivotal position in the electoral college. But almost every time, presidential candidates wind up choosing running mates who don’t come from electoral battlegrounds. This should be a clue that presidential candidates don’t place as much emphasis on the potential ability to deliver a home state as conventional wisdom assumes. But that raises the question of what they do value in a VP, and why.

The 2024 Democratic veepstakes threw this puzzle into especially sharp relief. An unusual number of the party’s supposed current rising stars represent presidential swing states, including Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Arizona senator Mark Kelly, and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. With an extremely narrow margin in the national polls and a uniquely truncated timeline for settling on a running mate, it seemed natural to many in Washington that Kamala Harris would turn to one of these prominent figures to enhance her chances of building an electoral vote majority. But she opted instead for Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who was not nationally well-known before his selection and who comes from a state that Democrats were already favored to win. Once again, a presidential candidate passed over the battleground states when selecting a VP.

There are four main reasons why this pattern tends to happen.

1. Running mates can’t be counted on to deliver their home states. It’s unclear from the evidence exactly how much of an electoral bonus a party can expect to receive from selecting a home-state VP, but it’s likely to be no more than a couple of percentage points under the most favorable circumstances. The idea that a swing state can be “locked up” by putting its governor or senator on the ticket is simply a myth. Some advocates of Shapiro’s selection argued that there is a non-minimal probability that this year’s election could come down to a few thousand ballots in Pennsylvania, and that even a modest “friends and neighbors” vote for him might therefore decide the entire election. There’s logic to this argument, but it’s still hard for campaigns to game out the probabilities; if running mates could guarantee a 5-point bounce in their home states, presidential candidates’ calculations would undoubtedly be different. According to CNN reporting, the Harris campaign decided from its own polling that putting Shapiro on the ticket would not provide enough of an advantage to justify his selection.

2. Presidential candidates think in terms of voting groups, not individual states. Presidential candidates need to win multiple swing states, not just one. This encourages them to focus on the potential ability of a running mate to attract specific subgroups of voters located across the entire electoral battleground. Donald Trump selected the pious Mike Pence not to win over people from Indiana (he was already assured of carrying the state) but instead to motivate conservative evangelicals whether they lived in Florida or Pennsylvania or Iowa; Barack Obama picked the experienced Joe Biden to reassure persuadable voters across every geographic region that he would be well-equipped to govern if elected. This year, the Harris campaign clearly hopes that Walz’s plain-spoken, regular-guy persona will help them limit the desertion of working-class whites that has endangered the Democratic Party’s competitiveness in exurbs and small towns from coast to coast over the past two decades.

3. The party has its say too. The last thing that presidential nominees want in the heat of an electoral campaign is an internal fight within their party. To this end, they aim to select a running mate that will inspire unity and enthusiasm across all major party factions. In addition, they seek insider intelligence about various potential choices that will help them avoid choosing someone who turns out to have a major political or personal fault. Extensive consultation with other key party actors helps them achieve these goals. As I argued in my piece four years ago about Biden’s selection of Harris, Biden’s lifelong instinct to act as a loyal creature of the Democratic Party mainstream made him very sensitive to pressure from other Democrats to add a woman of color to his ticket—and convinced him that Harris in particular was the best choice. This year, it seems clear that Walz had an active chorus of internal proponents, especially among House Democrats who knew him well from his six terms of congressional service between 2007 and 2018, that Shapiro couldn’t match. Like Biden, Harris appears to solicit and value input from peers in pursuit of a unified party, and it’s likely that these voices in her ear helped convince her to settle on Walz.

4. Presidential candidates want governing partners, not just campaigning partners. Our perpetually election-obsessed political world may only be thinking about the VP selection in terms of its potential effect on the outcome in November, but presidential candidates are also envisioning what life might look like after they win. It’s only natural that a nominee with vice presidential experience of her own will have especially strong preferences about what kind of vice president she would like to have. And personal chemistry is a legitimate consideration; tension between the president and vice president is in nobody’s interest. Multiple news reportssuggest that Walz won out over Shapiro and Kelly in part because he clicked better with Harris and her staff, and because he struck her as someone who would be a more loyal member of her administration (Walz apparently said that he held no ambitions of his own to become president).

So what picture of Kamala Harris emerges from the VP selection process? In general, she acted like a typical presidential nominee—who cared more about appealing to an electoral subgroup than trying to target a particular battleground state, who was responsive to feedback from other members of her party, and who prized personal compatibility as well as electoral strategy. But that doesn’t mean that she made the right choice. The historical record of success in vice presidential selection is rather mixed, and she was denied the usual benefit of having several months after locking up the nomination to gather information and weigh alternatives. But even well-chosen running mates are valuable less for the modest number of voters they might attract than for their ability to share the heavy burden of governing if victory is achieved.

Did Dumping Biden Make the Democrats Un-Democratic? Yes...and No

For the first time since the current presidential nomination system was created in 1972, a candidate who accrued the majority of pledged delegates will not be the nominee of his party. Instead, Democrats will deliver their nomination to a different candidate who entered no primaries and won no delegates.

Some prominent figures have accused the Democratic Party of violating the standards of democracy by jettisoning its presumptive nominee after the end of the primary season. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas charged party leaders with “ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes.” Former ambassador and acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell argued that “undermining democracy should never be condoned.” Tech mogul Elon Musk asked, “Shouldn’t the nominee be decided by a party vote? Democracy etc.” Several critics, including Arizona congressman Paul Gosar, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and venture capitalist David Sacks, referred to Biden as the victim of a successful “coup,” while House speaker Mike Johnson even suggested that Democrats might not be able to legally replace Biden’s name on state general election ballots this fall.

Of course, these dissenters are all Trump supporters, not neutral observers. They are undoubtedly frustrated to watch Biden withdraw from the race just as Republicans had become increasingly confident of defeating him, and have clear partisan motivations for depicting Democrats as acting unfairly or hypocritically.

But self-interested arguments are not necessarily wrong, and in another time (specifically, 1968) it was liberal Democrats who claimed that the nomination of a candidate who didn’t compete in presidential primaries inherently lacked democratic legitimacy. The chaos that ensued in Chicago that year when Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the Democratic nominee over the angry objections of anti-Vietnam War activists was the catalyst for the creation of the current nomination system, in which most convention delegates are selected by primary electorates rather than state party leaders. Advocates of nomination reform, which soon spread to both parties, argued that they were replacing a process that was controlled by corrupt insiders and bosses acting in secret smoke-filled rooms with a fairer alternative that was open, egalitarian, and sensitive to the views and interests of regular Americans. More recent attacks by members of the political left on the hypothetical ability of superdelegates to influence Democratic nomination outcomes have similarly been premised on the argument that there’s something fundamentally unfair about party leaders using institutional power to counteract the “will of the people” as measured by the results of primary elections.

If practicing democracy is merely a matter of adopting decision-making procedures that allow for mass participation while constraining the influence of party elites, the post-1968 reformers and the critics of superdelegates could convincingly claim that they were acting to advance democratic values. But, then, so too can today’s conservative detractors who are complaining about the Biden-to-Harris switcheroo. After all, millions of Democratic voters in all 50 states expressed their preference for Biden to be their party’s nominee this year by a lopsided popular margin and an overwhelming landslide in the delegate count. When a coordinated pressure campaign organized by a network of powerful politicians, donors, and strategists succeeds in elbowing such a candidate aside in favor of an alternative nominee whom nobody voted for, an infringement of procedural democracy has indeed occurred. (Biden himself made exactly this argument in a letter to Democratic members of Congress several weeks ago, when the dump-Biden movement was first gaining steam.)

But in practice, Democrats don’t seem to agree that their voices have been unjustly silenced by a nefarious cabal of scheming insiders. According to last week’s New York Times poll, 91 percent of Democratic respondents approve of Biden’s decision to leave the race and 92 percent currently back Harris for president. There is far more evidence of excitement than disillusionment; the self-reported enthusiasm of Democratic supporters has suddenly spiked over the past week, producing parallel surges in financial donations, volunteer activity, and media consumption.

Harris is also a more popular candidate than Biden across the broader electorate, as measured by personal favorability ratings and head-to-head trial heats against Donald Trump. Rank-and-file Republicans and independents don’t share the dissatisfaction with Biden’s departure expressed by Cotton, Grenell, Musk, and company; as the Times recently noted, the view that Biden did the right thing by dropping out is the rare contemporary political belief that unites Americans of all partisan persuasions. The violation of a long-settled procedural norm first adopted in the name of bolstering democratic legitimacy—the deference that the modern nomination process is intended to show to the ballots of primary voters—has thus produced an outcome that has simultaneously energized party members and gained widespread approval in the public at large.

Democratic leaders proved responsive to the changing preferences of the citizenry, measured not just by months-old elections that Biden won without serious opposition but also by more recent polling that showed declining support for the president both inside and outside the Democratic tent. If a party’s decision to cast aside the results of its own primaries is so demonstrably popular—even among many voters who participated in them—while delivering the American electorate a more desirable choice of candidates for the White House, perhaps representative democracy has indeed been served after all.

One of the many lessons we can draw from these unprecedented developments—and, really, from the last decade of American politics—is that strict deference to ostensibly democratic internal party processes like primary elections does not necessarily bolster the health of the nation’s democracy in a larger sense. Our parties bear a responsibility to conduct their operations with a degree of fairness and openness, but they also have the duty to supply Americans with skilled, qualified, and appealing candidates for public office. As critics of the current nomination process have argued, primary voters are not always any better at selecting such leaders than party bosses were in the bygone era of the smoke-filled room. Violating normal procedural practices may sometimes produce substantive outcomes that more closely reflect the interests of citizens both inside and outside the party. Surely, that can also be viewed as a case of democracy in action.

Biden Decides to Drop Out: The View from Political Science

Honest Graft has been on a long hiatus since last year—for good reasons that will be further discussed soon!—and it’s great to be back. Before the last few weeks, it seemed like 2024 might wind up being one of the least eventful national campaigns in recent memory. But now…well, here we are once again in “making history” mode.

Joe Biden’s abrupt decision to leave the presidential race and the imminent choice of a replacement nominee are big topics that will undoubtedly hold our attention for the next few weeks. Unprecedented developments like these aren’t just important because they liven up a long campaign season and provide fascination for easily bored journalists and scholars. By giving us brand new case studies and data, they help us better understand how politics works. So here are a few initial lessons we students of American parties can draw so far from these events. There are surely many more to come.

1. Presidents don’t just exercise power over parties; parties also exercise power over presidents. This is a familiar view among political scientists, but it doesn’t always receive enough acknowledgment by journalists and citizens who often view the president as the center of gravity around which the rest of the political system orbits. We have just witnessed a coalition of congressional party leaders, financial donors, professional strategists, media figures, and party-aligned voters convince a sitting president to abandon a re-election bid in the midst of the campaign season. That’s a very impressive show of influence, and exactly how that influence was brought to bear on Biden will deserve extensive examination for what it tells us about who holds internal power within the party and how they use it. (We’ll discover, I suspect, that Nancy Pelosi continues to be a tremendously important figure in Democratic Party politics; she’ll almsot certainly go down in history as the most important single Democratic figure of the past 25 years—and possibly the last 50 years—who never served as president.)

2. Joe Biden was the first president we’ve had since George H. W. Bush who wasn’t a dominant, charismatic personality. At times, that quality served him well. He didn’t inspire the personal attention—and divisiveness—that each of the last four presidents did, which allowed Americans’ focus in the 2020 and 2022 elections to linger on the vulnerabilities of his Republican opponents. But it also meant that he couldn’t count on a large reservoir of sentimental devotion among Democrats that could protect him once he looked politically vulnerable. Democrats never fell in love with Biden, but they hired him in 2020 because they thought he could do the important job of defeating Trump. Once it looked like he wouldn’t be able to accomplish the same task again this year, it was time to find somebody else who might have a better shot. Joe Biden, as it turned out, would not given the chance to go down in romantically doomed defeat.

3. The perennial number-one fantasy of political media members is to have a contested national convention with genuine uncertainty about the choice of nominee. Coincidentally, that’s also most party leaders’ number-one nightmare. The rapid consolidation of multiple party officials’ and delegates’ support for Kamala Harris as Biden’s replacement over the course of the day, including key members of all major Democratic subgroups from progressives to labor champions to suburban moderates to the Black and Hispanic caucuses, doesn’t mean that these leaders have all suddenly decided that Harris is an amazingly strong candidate—however generous their public praise of her might be. Instead, it reflects the view that the party can’t afford more delay or infighting and that she’s the obvious, broadly acceptable heir apparent. It’s likely that most Democratic insiders privately concede that Harris begins as the underdog in the fight against Trump. But they had begun to worry that renominating Biden might lead to a thoroughly disastrous election in November that would not only cost them the White House but a slew of House and Senate seats as well. If Harris can at least motivate Democratic voters to turn out at high rates and keep the margin close at the top of the ticket, congressional Democrats will feel justified in their decision to push Biden aside in favor of her.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Trump's Critics Call Him Unelectable. Will Voters Listen?

The disappointing results of the 2022 midterms have awakened concerns among some Republicans about their party's occasional tendency to nominate weak candidates in key races. Some of these party leaders now fear that another Trump nomination in 2024 will drag down their party once again—but as I observe in Bloomberg Opinion today, Republican voters aren't nearly as accustomed as Democrats to accept that a tradeoff exists between electability and other party goals.

There Will Probably Be Presidential Debates in the Future...But It's OK If There Aren't

News broke on Thursday that the Republican National Committee was threatening to require its future presidential nominees to pledge to boycott general election debates organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has produced the debates every four years since it was formed by representatives of both major parties prior to the 1988 election. This threat, conveyed in a letter to the debate commission from RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, is being made amidst a set of demands for changes to the commission's membership and policies (the complete letter is available here). Republican dissatisfaction with the debate organizers has been apparent since at least 2016, and is in some ways a manifestation of the Trump-era party's larger suspicion of political institutions that are not under its direct control.

It's possible that this means there will be no fall debates in 2024 for the first time since the 1972 election. But we're still far from that point—despite some headlines suggesting otherwise—for a number of reasons.

First, the RNC is making demands that, in principle, the debate commission could find a way to satisfy, including an earlier start to the debate schedule, term limits on commission members, and public neutrality of commission members toward the candidates. The commission will be understandably reluctant to look like it's acquiescing to threats from one of the parties; on the other hand, in the end it would rather hold debates than not hold them. Nothing in McDaniel's letter looks like an ultimatum that would be impossible for the commission to address in some form.

Second, the parties lack control over the presidential nominees once they have been formally selected at the national conventions. Party organizations can require all kinds of signed pledges or commitments from candidates, but they lose the ability to enforce them once the nomination is granted. (If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination in 2024, and then decides he wants to attend the fall debates, would he let a previous pledge to the RNC stop him?) Responding to McDaniel, debate commission co-chair Frank Fahrenkopf—himself a former RNC chair—noted that the commission communicates and negotiates directly with the campaigns themselves, not the national parties: "we don't deal with the political parties [and] never have . . . we work only with those candidates for president and vice president who meet the criteria" for participation.

Finally, winning the presidency is the primary purpose of the national party committees, and has been since these committees were formed in the 1800s. Once the national ticket is selected, parties pursue this goal by becoming the loyal agents of their candidates. If participating in a debate boosts the campaign's chance of victory—perhaps the nominee is running behind in the polls and needs an opportunity to shake up the race—it would be entirely out of character, as well as an act of political malpractice, for the party to attempt to deny the candidate such a strategic option or to publicly criticize him or her for taking it.

This post is not intended to be an expression of reassurance. Honest Graft is a long-standing source of skepticism questioning the value of televised debates, swimming against an endless tide of debate-hyping voices in the news media who insist on treating as sacred civic rituals a series of events that have seldom proven edifying or substantively valuable in practice. If no debates occur in 2024 because the RNC, the debate commission, and the Republican nominee all choose inflexibility over compromise, American politics will not suffer. But—for better, or maybe for worse—we're still a long way from that point right now.

Of Course Biden Is Running for Re-Election

The Washington Post ran a story on Tuesday about Joe Biden's decision to house his political operation within the Democratic National Committee instead of creating a parallel organization as Barack Obama had done. Obama never had much affection for the DNC, which was not exactly a center of support for him when he ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008. But Obama's neglect of the party's institutional strength while president in favor of the personal vehicles Organizing for America and Organizing for Action ultimately neither provided major electoral payoffs nor won him appreciation among Democratic politicians and committee members. A party regular through and through, Biden has decided that his interests are best served by remaining integrated with the traditional Democratic organizational apparatus heading into the 2022 midterms, rather than siphoning staff members and donor money into a separate political structure.

The Post report mentions, almost as an aside, that while Biden will wait until after the midterms to build a formal re-election campaign and publicly declare his candidacy, his advisors are "working under the assumption that he will once again top the Democratic ticket in 2024." This might be shocking news to some; I have encountered multiple politically aware people since Biden first entered the 2020 race who presume that he would only seek to serve a single term. But it shouldn't be a surprise at all.

The idea of the self-declared single-term president has had a romantic appeal to editorial-page writers (and few others) since well before Biden became the oldest person in history elected to the job. Like many other ideas with romantic appeal, it is disconnected from political reality. Declaring oneself a lame duck from the early days of an administration is not an effective strategy for a president to build or maintain influence, both inside and outside the party. The perception that you might be there awhile is a much better way to attract talented subordinates, pursue ambitious goals, and pressure members of Congress for support, and the inability to seek re-election is one reason why modern presidents' second terms tend to be less focused and successful than their first.

The main point made by the Post article—that Biden is at heart a loyal party man—also applies to the re-election question. Unless an unforeseen governing disaster occurs, Democratic leaders will perceive that they are far better off with Biden running again, and presumably benefiting from the electoral advantage that incumbents normally hold, than with the risk of a damaging internal fight over the 2024 nomination. Even if Kamala Harris were able to quickly consolidate support within the party as Biden's heir apparent, she would still stand in the general election as both a less tested national figure and as a liberal woman of color seeking the presidency in a highly polarized era.

Leading Democrats who have their president's ear are thus very likely to encourage his intention to seek a second term—and to be terrified that a premature Biden retirement would only further increase the chances of a Trump comeback in 2024. Even if Biden were to have doubts about his ability to serve a full eight years, a successful re-election and subsequent mid-term handoff to Harris, setting her up as an incumbent in her own right before she had to face the voters, would be a much more desirable solution according to prevailing Democratic calculations. And Biden has already shown that he's the kind of president who cares a lot about what other people in his party think.

Yes, health considerations or other events may alter these plans. It's certainly possible that Joe Biden will not still be running for a second term when we get to 2024. But right now? Of course he's running. He's already started.