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.

New Interview at The Signal on Biden's Polling Problems Amid a Changing and Disorienting World

I recently spoke with Michael Bluhm of The Signal about Joe Biden's lagging poll numbers, the nation's long psychological pandemic hangover, and why the United States isn't as politically unique as Americans often think. Members of The Signal website can read our conversation here.

Honest Graft has been on temporary hiatus due to a new and exciting book project, but will return in January 2024 to keep an eye on the upcoming presidential election and the rest of an eventful political scene. Stay tuned...we'll be back very soon!

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: The Debt Ceiling Crisis Can Be Averted Only by Muddling Through

As the federal government draws closer every day to an unprecedented crisis over the debt ceiling, it's become apparent that averting default will require Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy to choose a messy solution over the allure of a symbolic partisan victory, as I argue today in my latest piece for Bloomberg Opinion. (The article is also available via the Washington Post.)

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: The Parties Are Still Polarized on Economics Even Though the Class Divide Is Fading

 It used to be easy to explain the relationship between the voting constituency of each party and the positions its politicians took in policy debates: Democrats are the party of the poor and favor big, redistributive government, while Republicans are the party of the rich and favor small, business-friendly government. But even though economic class is no longer a reliable guide to how Americans vote, party leaders remain committed to very different policy goals and visions—foreshadowing a bitter debate over the federal budget this year, as I explain today in Bloomberg Opinion. (The piece is also available via the Washington Post.)

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Biden's Had Success with Congress, But He's No LBJ

Some Democrats, justifiably happy with the legislative productivity of the 2021–2022 session of Congress, have gotten a little carried away lately when describing its supposed transformational importance. In today's column for Bloomberg Opinion, I draw on data showing that the last Congress was not historically exceptional in its lawmaking acoomplishments, and suggest that Biden's perceived achievements were made possible by the previous success of Barack Obama in enacting major health care reform in 2010. The piece is also available on the Washington Post site.

As Biden's New Drug Policy Shows, When It Comes to Legalization It's the Political Leaders Who Are Being Led

President Biden announced on Thursday that he would issue pardons to Americans with federal marijuana possession convictions, while encouraging governors to do the same for the much greater number of citizens convicted of similar offenses at the state level. Biden also revealed that his administration would begin the process of reviewing whether marijuana should be classified by the federal government as a dangerous Schedule I drug. While the president cannot fully legalize marijuana possession or sale without congressional approval, Biden’s actions represent a clear gesture of support for ending the enforcement of laws prohibiting its use.

For anyone who is old enough to remember the aggressiveness of the government’s anti-drug campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s, the prospect of federal marijuana decriminalization is a notable milestone. And the fact that Biden is the president overseeing this policy change seems even more remarkable. Although he was a young left-of-center adult during the 1960s, the teetotaling Biden has never exhibited any whiff of the counterculture, and his record in the Senate—especially while chairing the Judiciary Committee between 1987 and 1995—was marked by repeated support for toughening federal penalties for drug-related crimes.
 
But by changing his mind about cannabis policy, Biden is merely following a path already traveled by many of his fellow Americans. In 1990, only 16 percent of respondents to the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey favored the legalization of marijuana. By 2018, the most recent year with available data, the share of supporters had risen to 61 percent. The rate of increase was even higher among Democrats: from 17 percent in 1990 to 69 percent just 28 years later.
 
It’s rare for public opinion to swing so dramatically on any political issue. But drug legalization is an especially unusual case because American citizens started rethinking their beliefs well before their elected representatives did. Even today, political leaders still seem to be lagging behind the rapidly shifting attitudes of their constituents.
 
Political scientists have traditionally emphasized the role of political elites in shaping the views of ordinary citizens. On many issues, most Democrats and Republicans in the mass public accept the positions advocated by the leaders of their favored party. For example, the share of Republican voters who saw free trade agreements as a “good thing for the U.S.” dropped from 56 percent in 2015 to 36 percent two years later, according to the Pew Research Center, reflecting the sudden shift in messaging from the top of their party once Donald Trump, a vocal critic of free trade, assumed leadership of the GOP.
 
But the rise in support for legal marijuana can’t be explained that way. It began in the 1990s, well before gaining the endorsement of prominent politicians in either party. Advocates of legalization initially found much more success in enacting state-level reforms using the citizen initiative process, which put their proposals directly before voters, than they did by persuading their elected representatives to approve changes in state law. Seven of the first eight states to legalize cannabis for medical purposes (starting with California in 1996), and 12 of the first 14 states to approve recreational use (starting with Colorado and Washington in 2012), did so via ballot proposition.
 
On this issue, Americans didn’t simply listen to their party’s most prominent figures. Decreased national crime rates since the 1980s, newfound skepticism of the theory that marijuana acts as a “gateway drug” to more dangerous substances, and growing media promotion of its medical benefits have convinced voters to support legalization over the reluctance or outright opposition of most political leaders. International trade and other complicated, remote topics might ordinarily prompt citizens to exercise deference to the judgment of professional politicians. But drug legalization seems like an easy issue to understand and relate to personal experience, which makes voters more secure in making up their own minds.
 
Biden is clearly hoping to increase voter enthusiasm among young Democrats and liberal independents by announcing his policy change a month before the midterm elections. But after waiting as long as he did, Biden’s timing risks becoming anti-climactic. Most supporters already live in states where marijuana is either fully legal or permitted in practice, and even the Republican opposition doesn’t seem motivated to put up much of a public fight over an issue on which popular sentiment has steadily moved leftward. Sometimes in politics, our so-called leaders discover that they’re the ones who are being led to someplace new.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Why the Democrats' Policy Accomplishments Don't Necessarily Help Them Win This Year

In my newest piece for Bloomberg Opinion, I explain that Democrats should not expect to be rewarded by voters for their recent policy accomplishments this fall, as voters have historically turned against the ruling party in midterm elections regardless of—and sometimes because of—its legislative productivity. For Joe Biden, the political payoff from policy changes like the climate change bill and the student debt forgiveness plan is more likely to arrive when he asks his fellow Democrats to nominate him a second time in 2024.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Why Moderates Still Control Congressional Policymaking

I have a new piece in Bloomberg Opinion today that explains why moderate members of Congress continue to exert strong influence over federal policy—such as the recently-enacted Inflation Reduction Act, a bill shaped much more by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia than by the president or congressional leaders—even in an age of polarization when the number of moderates in office continues to dwindle.

New Interview at The Signal on the Biden Presidency

I recently spoke with Graham Vyse of The Signal about the state of Joe Biden's presidency in the spring of its second year. We covered Biden's depressed approval ratings, the political implications of the continued COVID-related economic disruptions, what makes Biden different from Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and why his presidency so far has disappointed some of the people who voted for him in 2020. You can read a summary of our conversation here.

State of the Union Address Review: Biden Tries to Cheer Up the Country—and His Party

In the early weeks of Joe Biden's second year in the presidency, the nation he governs is by some important measures moving in the right direction. Job, wage, and economic growth are all positive; the prevalence and deadliness of COVID-19 is (at least for now) fading rapidly; and there are no ongoing domestic crises or major scandals. But the national mood has become increasingly sour over the past year, a pessimism reflected in Biden's declining job approval ratings and an emerging Republican advantage in midterm election polls.

Biden's State of the Union address contained a familiar sequence of policy proposals and details—the "laundry list" approach to speechmaking that is especially beloved of leaders in the Democratic Party, where many different constituencies all demand recognition. (And it won't be hard to find complaints that he didn't say enough about this or that pet liberal priority, as if these speeches are capable of exerting transformative effects on the policy agenda of the American public.) Biden's own communication instincts were reflected in his emphasis on economic issues over cultural matters; his aversion to overly abstract or metaphorical oratory; and his regular claims to stand for bipartisanship, pragmatism, and common sense. 

Biden's State of the Union address did not "make news" in the sense of revealing a major new initiative or governing approach; even the planted media hints from earlier in the day that he would be signaling a redoubled focus on deficit reduction or inflation-taming seemed to oversell the novelty of the speech. What the address seemed to represent, most of all, was something like a national halftime pep talk. "I want you to know that we are going to be okay," Biden said while discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, though this sentiment seemed to apply to his message on the economy, COVID, and domestic policy as well. Rather than invoke the constitutional purpose of the annual address near the beginning of his remarks, as most presidents do, Biden saved his "report . . . that the State of the Union is strong because you, the American people, are strong" for his conclusion of his speech, adding, "we are stronger today than we were a year ago and we will be stronger a year from now than we are today."

While the White House would be happy to convince anyone of this view, there's little doubt that a particularly important audience for Biden's words are the members of his own party, who are less enthusiastic about the Biden presidency than they once were and whose energetic mobilization will be necessary to avoid a national Republican sweep in the fall midterm elections. Biden cannot count on the personal devotion or symbolic importance that his immediate predecessor enjoyed. His voters will not reward him for merely picking a fight on camera with a reporter or mocking an opponent at a rally; they expect much more tangible returns on their support. 

And so even the opening language in tonight's speech that detailed the Biden administration's efforts to assist Ukraine and punish Russia, for all its appeal to national and political unity, had a clear second meaning that extended to later passages on infrastructure and COVID. You can be proud of your president, they said; all things considered, he's doing okay. So cheer up a little, America—and cheer up a lot, Democrats.

Voters Don't Often Reward What They Like...But They Do Punish What They Don't Like

Joe Biden finally signed the infrastructure bill into law this past Monday after a three-month delay separating its approval by the Senate from its passage in the House of Representatives—a delay insisted upon by House liberals who attempted to use it as leverage to guarantee the simultaneous enactment of the larger and more ambitious reconciliation bill. But the reconciliation bill, named the Build Back Better Act after a campaign slogan of Biden's, still remains in legislative limbo, as a few pivotal moderates in the Senate have remained coy about exactly what they will support and when they will support it. The House leadership plans to move forward on the bill as early as this week, but the Senate's timeline for action will remain unclear until the entire Democratic caucus signals that it's ready to proceed. At the moment, final passage of the bill shortly before the Christmas recess seems like the most optimistic plausible scenario for Democrats, and it's still possible that nothing will end up passing at all.

It might seem logical to draw a connection between the slowing momentum of the Biden legislative agenda and the simultaneous fade in the president's job approval ratings over the course of the late summer and fall. Perhaps, one could imagine, voters who are dissatisfied by the pace of national policy change are taking out their frustrations on the president. If this were true, both the recent enactment of the infrastructure bill and the potential forthcoming passage of Build Back Better—both popular measures according to opinion surveys—would hold the promise of giving Biden and his fellow Democrats a popularity boost heading into the midterm elections next year.

One problem with this assumption is that there are other, more convincing explanations for Biden's declining approval. The resurgence of COVID-19 infections caused by the delta variant, combined with the continued disruption of the job market and rising inflation, seems quite sufficient to account for increased public discontent since the spring. Even Biden's imposition of mandates for vaccination or frequent COVID testing as a condition of employment, though favored by a narrow majority of Americans, may have cost him some support among certain segments of the population.

But we also don't have many historical examples of voters rewarding presidents and governing parties for legislative productivity. Even when the bills being passed are popular or transformative, they don't seem to attract new supporters to the president's side or protect him from criticism on other grounds. The congressional sessions of 1965–66, 1981–82, and 2009–10 were all marked by unusually prolific policy-making innovation, enacting laws that continue even today to shape national politics and federal governance. In all three cases, the president's party suffered a significant loss of congressional seats in the subsequent midterm election.

Voters are tough to satisfy and have short memories, especially for success. (In May 1945, Winston Churchill and the other Allied leaders declared victory in the European theater of World War II; two months later, Churchill's party lost 189 seats and control of Parliament to the opposition.) Americans happily accepted the economic stimulus payments included in the American Rescue Plan earlier this year, passed through Congress on a party-line vote, but did not respond to this provision of benefits by showering the ruling Democrats with their enduring affection. But when the party in power does something unpopular, or even fails to effectively ameliorate the day's crisis or economic hardship, we can almost always foresee a public backlash. In politics, grievance is a far more predictable response than gratitude.

Anyone who would wish electoral outcomes to serve as a reliable means of rewarding legislative achievement and punishing legislative inertia will find this pattern endlessly infuriating. But it's a good reason why the importance of new policy shouldn't be judged only through the lens of its potential short-term electoral consequences, which may be nonexistent or even negative. Democrats paid a heavy political cost for passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which contributed to their loss of the House for what turned out to be the following 8 years. But when Republicans sought to capitalize on public dissatisfaction with the ACA by attempting to repeal it in the first year of the Trump presidency, the direction of popular sentiment immediately swung in the other direction—and House Democrats soon found themselves back in the majority. A party expecting an electoral reward for enacting new laws may just need a lot of patience; the political payoff, if it comes at all, may not be realized until the opposition comes to power and tries to undo the accomplishments of its predecessors.

Biden's Declining Popularity: An Interview with The Signal

I spoke recently with Michael Bluhm of The Signal about the recent decline in Joe Biden's job approval ratings. We covered the likely causes of this trend, their political implications, and the contributing role of America's broader climate of partisan polarization. Excerpts of the interview are posted here, and a more complete version is available to subscribers.

How Should We Judge the Harris Vice Presidency?

More than 200 years after its creation, the vice presidency remains the least defined, and outright oddest, major political office in the United States. With almost no formal powers but the critical responsibility of needing to be prepared to assume the leadership of the nation at any moment, vice presidents occupy a position that, like the electoral college that selects them, was a clumsy 1787 solution to a practical problem of constitutional mechanics.

Like the presidency, the vice presidency has evolved over time, and no longer resembles the description of its first historical occupant as "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." But it can still be an awkward position to hold and a difficult one to evaluate from the outside. How can we judge whether the vice president is doing a good job without a shared set of expectations about what the job actually is?

Joe Biden has explained repeatedly that he wants Kamala Harris to be the "last voice in the room" when major decisions are made. In the early months of the current presidential administration, it wasn't hard to find sympathetic press stories emphasizing the "large role" or "central role" or "integral role" that Harris was expected to play in the Biden White House. The model for her vice presidency, Biden and his aides often said, was Biden's own experience serving under Barack Obama, when he was considered to be an unusually successful and influential vice president by historical standards.

But it's impossible for Biden and Harris to replicate the relationship that existed between Obama and Biden. Harris is simply not situated in the same place that Biden was as VP, and the implications of this difference have already begun to emerge only five months into her term. For one thing, the unique governing contribution that Biden could make was clear from the moment that he was chosen as Obama's running mate. As a six-term senator who had chaired the Foreign Relations and Judiciary committees, he brought extensive national policy-making experience and a collection of valuable personal relationships, both on Capitol Hill and around the world, to an administration whose leader had served only briefly in federal office. 

Moreover, Biden was also widely (and, as it turned out, incorrectly) believed to have abandoned his own presidential ambitions after 2008, which was another important asset to his vice presidency. He benefited from the presumption that his judgments and actions were motivated by sincerity and loyalty, rather than by angling to benefit his own future political prospects. And nobody would have thought to argue that Biden as vice president should intentionally distance himself from involvement in this or that thorny issue or crisis in order to protect himself politically for a future campaign.

In contrast, Harris is widely viewed by party leaders and media figures as highly likely to run for president as Biden's heir apparent in 2024 or 2028, but as lacking a clear domain of unique authority to bring to the current administration. She isn't an old Washington hand like Biden, Dick Cheney, or George H. W. Bush; she doesn't have a signature set of policy priorities like Al Gore; she doesn't provide close long-standing personal ties to a key party constituency like Mike Pence. So any substantive responsibility that Harris takes on will inevitably be viewed by other political elites in terms of its strategic implications for her presumed future presidential candidacy, rather than as a reflection of sincere dedication, interest, or expertise.

We're already seeing this happen with Harris's role as the Biden administration's point person on Latin American migration, the subject of her first trip abroad earlier this month. Conventional wisdom in Washington agrees that the situation at the southern border is indeed a serious national problem that deserves urgent attention from the top levels of the executive branch. Conventional wisdom in Washington also seems equally certain that Harris is making a big mistake by getting anywhere near it. I recently spoke with one national reporter who suggested to me that, because of its potentially risky politics, the migration issue must have been assigned to Harris involuntarily. That doesn't seem to me like an act that would be in character for Joe Biden, and at least one media report suggests that Biden and Harris thought taking the lead on addressing the regional conditions causing migration would be an opportunity for her to shoulder an important responsibility and gain international experience. But some of Harris's own sympathizers are openly worried that she is being "set up to fail" by the president, walking into a political "trap" consisting of "the most difficult policy challenges in 21st-century America."

This prevailing sentiment may be right about the strategic calculations here. And it may also be right about Harris's political acumen, which seems to be suffering a declining reputation after her initially positive reception in Washington as a charismatic rising star in the Obama mold. (Note how many people think that someone who was just elected to national executive office could really use some good career advice.) 

But Harris's dilemma is not simply a product of her supposed naivete about her own political interests or Biden's supposed insensitivity to them. Rather, it is a natural consequence of her new position—where holding the status of potential president-in-waiting is often seen as more important than whatever the occupant might be expected to accomplish while waiting to be president. If it were otherwise, perhaps a vice president who tackled a difficult national issue would be praised, not second-guessed, for addressing the governing challenges of today rather than merely protecting her personal ambitions for tomorrow.

It seems unsatisfying to judge the success of a vice presidency solely on the grounds of whether the incumbent managed to use the position to elevate herself into a different one. But the lack of independent responsibilities or a consensus job description for the office has prevented the Washington political community, or the American electorate, from forming an alternative widely-accepted set of standards. Harris herself says, both publicly and (apparently) in private, that she views her vice presidential role as being a substantively engaged and personally loyal governing partner to Biden, not just a once-and-future presidential candidate in her own right. To consider how well she seems to be meeting her own stated vision for the office is not the only valid way to evaluate her performance. But it seems like a thoroughly fair one, regardless of whether her further aspirations are satisfied in the years to come.

The Biden Administration's Demographic Diversity Is Where the New Progressivism Meets the Old Democratic Party

History was made on Wednesday when the daily White House briefing was delivered by Karine Jean-Pierre, the chief deputy press secretary, filling for press secretary Jen Psaki. The briefing itself was not unusually newsworthy. But Jean-Pierre was the first openly gay or lesbian person ever to fill the role, and the first Black woman to do so in three decades. The Biden administration proudly publicized this milestone, which attracted significant media notice including a post-briefing televised interview with Jean-Pierre by MSNBC's Joy Reid.

The White House's enthusiastic promotion of Jean-Pierre's turn at the briefing podium fits a larger pattern. Biden and his team have been especially devoted to presenting themselves as commited to increasing demographic diversity in government. This theme dates back to the 2020 campaign; Biden promised to choose a female vice presidential nominee near the end of the Democratic primaries and ultimately signaled, prior to the selection of Kamala Harris, that he would probably name a woman of color as his running mate. Since then, Biden has claimed credit for unprecedented aggregate representation of women and racial minorities in senior administration positions, as well as a long list of individual history-making appointments: the first-ever female treasury secretary and director of national intelligence; the first-ever Black secretary of defense; the first-ever Native American and openly gay Cabinet members; the first-ever transgender sub-Cabinet appointee; the first-ever all-female White House communications team. (Biden has also promised to name the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court, but an opportunity has yet to arise.)

This emphasis can be seen as attempting to satisfy contemporary progressive activists' intense interest in categorizing individuals by social identity and judging the fitness of an organization by counting the members of historically disadvantaged groups within its ranks. But there's nothing new about a president, especially a Democratic president, working to ensure the visible representation of his party's major constituencies. Franklin Roosevelt was the first chief executive to appoint a woman to the Cabinet, and Lyndon Johnson the first to appoint a Black Cabinet secretary. Bill Clinton, hardly a left-wing purist, promised "a Cabinet that looks like America" during the 1992 campaign, and ultimately appointed the first-ever Asian-American secretary and the first women in history to serve as attorney general and secretary of state.

For Biden, attending to and publicizing the demographic composition of his administration can simultaneously accommodate the traditional organized interests of his party and appeal to ideological activists who increasingly prize social group diversity as a core political value. With narrow congressional majorities and the Senate filibuster presenting serious long-term obstacles to the administration's ambitious legislative agenda, Biden's appointment decisions may turn out to be an important way for him to satisfy the priorities of multiple blocs of supporters.

Of course, diversity in government can mean more than one thing. Biden's administration contains no top Republicans or independents, and the only member of his Cabinet whose educational credentials are limited to a single bachelor's degree is Marty Walsh, the secretary of labor. The dominant substantive ethos of the Biden presidency is a technocratic liberalism that appears to prevail across its senior personnel regardless of ethnic or gender identification. But this merely reflects the current state of the larger Democratic Party, where fundamental ideological divisions have eased over time even as the number of component social groups seeking representation only continues to grow.

Biden at 100 Days: An Interview with The Signal

Graham Vyse of the new online publication The Signal called me yesterday and we chatted about the record of the Biden presidency at the 100-day mark. Normally, my interviews with reporters yield a quotation of a sentence or two in a larger news story, but this time our discussion was turned into a more in-depth Q&A covering many different aspects of the current political moment. You can read an edited transcript of the interview here; the site requires an email address to sign up but access to the piece is free.

2020 Was as Geographically Polarized as 2016, But Biden Did Just a Little Better in the Right Places

The idea of Joe Biden as a depolarizing figure, someone who aimed to transcend rather than exacerbate the nation's political divisions, was both a dominant rhetorical theme of his campaign and a major strategic premise behind his nomination. In particular, Biden was supposed to be uniquely appealing to the type of white, older, modestly-educated, socially traditionalist voter who had wandered away from the Democratic Party sometime between Barack Obama's first victory and Hillary Clinton's last defeat. A candidate who won back a significant share of this electoral bloc while receiving the energized support of the groups alienated by Trumpism—cultural liberals, metropolitan professionals, young people—would be in excellent position to gain the kind of decisive national victory that many polls suggested Biden would achieve.

In the end, that didn't happen. Whatever demographic and stylistic differences distinguished Biden from Clinton or Obama failed to change enough votes to reorder the fundamental electoral constituencies of both major parties. The geographic polarization that has defined 21st century American politics remains fully intact—but a few incremental improvements in Democratic performance turned out to be just strong enough, and well-located enough, to eke out an electoral college majority.

Most states continue to be faithfully Democratic or Republican in presidential elections. By 2016, statewide popular margins had grown to differ with the national popular vote by an average of 20 percentage points, meaning that an election in which the candidates split the national vote 50-50 would produce a typical state margin that was a 60-40 landslide for one side or the other. Biden didn't succeed in healing this particular national divide, as the average state margin remained at 20 percent in 2020:

Below the state level, geographic polarization has been primarily fueled by a widening partisan gap between large metropolitan areas turning deeper blue and rural counties turning brighter red. This divide also remained virtually unchanged between 2016 and 2020. Biden very slightly outperformed Hillary Clinton in the nation's 20 largest metro areas, winning 62 percent of the two-party vote there—the best performance since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But he only improved on her 2016 showing in non-metropolitan counties by half a percentage point—33.7% to 33.2%—despite expectations that he would prove to be a much more appealing candidate among the whites without college degrees who dominate most rural electorates. Trump nearly matched his own record rural performance of four years before, winning a greater share of the non-metro vote than even Ronald Reagan had received in his 49-state landslide of 1984:

The main reason why Biden didn't do even better than he did within Top 20 metros was a pro-Trump national shift among non-white voters, especially Hispanics. His biggest single underperformance compared to Clinton in 2016 occurred in metro Miami, but he also lost ground in greater Los Angeles, San Jose/San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and Orlando. This trend helped to put Florida and Ohio out of reach for the Democratic ticket, but it was otherwise concentrated in non-competitive states where the party could well afford to lose votes.

In fact, a countervailing rise in Democratic support in 2020 among the voters of metro Atlanta, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and Detroit helped Biden narrowly carry four pivotal states that Clinton had lost, while improved Democratic performance in metro Washington, Denver, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Boston gave Biden more electoral breathing room than Clinton had had in Virginia, Colorado, Minnesota, and New Hampshire—all virtually must-wins for a Democratic presidential nominee. So while the overall Democratic vote share in top 20 metro areas only increased very slightly between 2016 and 2020, it was more fortuitously distributed from the perspective of electoral college strategy.

As the second figure above reveals, the biggest aggregate movement toward the Democrats in 2020 occurred within metro areas outside the Top 20. These other 251 metro areas cast somewhat fewer collective votes (41% of the total two-party vote in 2020, compared to 45% for the Top 20 metros). But their lower levels of racial diversity meant that the ongoing pro-Democratic trend among college-educated whites was less likely to be numerically counteracted by racial minorities' movement towards Trump. 

Biden rarely exceeded Clinton's vote share by a dramatic amount in the smaller metros, but he consistently outperformed her by 1–3 percent across the nation (except for a few heavily Hispanic areas in Texas and California). His modest improvement in places like metro Pittsburgh and Harrisburg (Pennsylvania), Grand Rapids and Lansing (Michigan), and Milwaukee and Madison (Wisconsin) turned out to be critical elements of his precarious electoral college majority, and he was also able to carry the single Nebraska electoral vote from the metro Omaha-based 2nd congressional district that, under a plausible alternate scenario, might have given him exactly the number of electors needed to win the presidency.

It's possible that Trump had a unique appeal to certain small-town voters who might be more open to voting Democratic in future elections when he isn't on the ballot. But Democrats' retrospective interpretations of 2020 are more likely to focus on the apparent patterns of defection among urban minorities than the attrition of rural whites, which is a longer-term trend with fewer obvious implementable solutions. The continued decay among less-educated white citizens presents Democratic leaders with serious challenges in building a sustainable national electoral advantage, given this constituency's especially important geographic distribution. But if the culture wars have so alienated these voters that even Scranton Joe can't win them back, Democrats may conclude that, win or lose, the party's future inevitably lies in another direction.

Can Republicans Win Back Congress Next Year by Running Against "Cancel Culture"? Sure They Can

There's a popular view of the last few weeks of American politics that goes something like this: Under Joe Biden's leadership, the Democratic Party is not only easing the current national crisis by handing out $1400 checks and distributing COVID vaccines to American citizens, but has also already enacted some of the most ambitious liberal policy change since the Great Society, making Biden a potentially transformational president after just two months in office. And what are Republicans doing while all this historical achievement is going on? Ranting and raving about "cancel culture."

This account isn't necessarily wrong as a simple description of recent events, though it's really too soon to evaluate the long-term importance of a American Rescue Plan Act that has been law for less than a week. As I recently remarked to Jeff Stein of the Washington Post, the lack of a sustained conservative attack on the bill eased the political pressure on moderate Democratic members of Congress who might otherwise have worried about its $1.9 trillion cost: "the case against Democrats [right now] is being made on Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head, not the debt." Leading conservative media voices and prominent Republican politicians alike have rallied to the defense of these pop-culture figures and other symbols of traditional Americana supposedly in danger of permanent suppression by the censorious left; Rep. Jim Jordan argued last month that "cancel culture . . . is the number one issue for the country to address today."

But the cancel-culture preoccupation isn't necessarily a mistake for Republicans—at least if their main objective is electoral success, not substantive influence. Polls have consistently shown that Biden's COVID response efforts gain wider popular approval than any other major policy or presidential quality. Meanwhile, as Harry Enten of CNN recently pointed out, the assertion that political correctness has "gone too far" receives broader agreement from the American public than the Republican Party's positions on many other political issues. Rather than trying to convince voters that legislation containing immediate four-figure cash payments for everyone in their family is actually a bad idea, it's strategically easier to simply move the partisan battle to more favorable terrain.

Democrats are hoping that the Republican politicians who opposed the Rescue Plan will be punished at the polls next year. But history suggests that voting in favor of an unpopular bill is more likely to inspire a backlash than voting against a popular bill—especially one that passed anyway. Members of congressional majorities often hope to be rewarded by the public for enacting the policies they like, but anger tends to be a much stronger political motivator than gratitude. And the margins of control in the House and Senate are so narrow that even a mostly content electorate that was not particularly outraged by the supposed extermination of certain favorite childhood possessions could still easily hand power back to the GOP in 2022.

The Republican pivot to "cancel culture" outrage may not matter much for the party's immediate electoral fortunes, and might even be a better strategic option for a midterm message than the alternatives. But it's much more noteworthy as a marker of what GOP sees itself as standing for these days. Since Obama's second term, Republicans have increasingly retreated from offering specific alternatives to Democratic domestic policies, and have invested much more energy in emphasizing symbolic cultural differences between the left and the right. Whether or not this shift influences the outcome of any particular election, it has very significant implications for the manner in which both parties govern when it is their turn to lead the country.

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.

Biden's Early Moves Reflect the Declining Strength of the Center-Right

The predominant media storyline of the new Biden presidency so far is that it is surprisingly liberal and surprisingly partisan. A Washington community that has long viewed Biden as an instinctive ideological moderate who prides himself on his ability to work with members of the opposite party, and that interpreted his nomination as a decisive defeat for the purist left, has been forced to recalibrate its perceptions in the face of his early governing choices. Progressive observers have found much to cheer so far in Biden's policy and personnel decisions, with some even indulging the hope that his presidency might represent a historical turning point in American politics. Meanwhile, conservative critics have already begun to complain that the new chief executive is failing to live up to his own calls for political unity.

The "moderate" label was always a poor fit for Biden, used mostly as a facile shorthand to denote that his politics differed from those of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. As I observed after his selection of Kamala Harris last August, Biden's actual career-long persona is "regular Democrat," with issue positions and priorities that have evolved over the decades in parallel with the mainstream of his party. The appointment of progressives to multiple administration positions—especially at the sub-cabinet and agency levels—and the ambition of Biden's major proposals in a range of policy areas can be viewed as a simple reflection of a recent leftward shift within the Democratic Party as a whole.

But there's another change that's important here. Biden and his team aren't just being pulled by internal partisan dynamics toward a strengthening left wing. They are also much less motivated than previous Democratic administrations to court the approval of the ideological center-right.

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama appointed Republicans to their administrations and pursued bipartisan policy solutions in part to build reputations among political elites as mature statesmen capable of rising above mere partisan loyalties. Their primary audience for these decisions was an "official Washington" composed of media thought leaders, think tank staffers, executives and lobbyists, and other political actors who had become accustomed to view Republican rule of the executive branch as the natural order of things (Republicans held the presidency for all but 4 years between 1968 and 1992, and all but 12 between 1968 and 2008) and to venerate right-of-center figures like Colin Powell and Alan Greenspan as the ideal personifications of public service. Much of this official Washington applauded Clinton's and Obama's "responsibility" and "toughness" when they departed from traditional liberal doctrine to pursue deficit reduction at home or military intervention abroad, and sympathetically portrayed non-Democrats within their administrations like David Gergen, Bill Cohen, and Robert Gates as the adults in the room keeping a necessary check on liberal naïveté.

Expectations that the Biden presidency would follow a similar path had caused a certain anticipatory disaffection on the left. But Democratic veterans of the Clinton and early Obama eras see a very different Republican Party when they look across the aisle today. The last decade of American politics, marked by the Tea Party movement and ascendancy of Donald Trump, has convinced even "establishment" Democrats that making concessions outside their party doesn't provide them much benefit—for either producing major policy achievements or realizing significant political advantages. And official Washington has discarded the once-prevalent assumption that the Republican Party is a valuable source of expertise and experience upon which Democratic presidents should productively draw. After the last four years, which party has a better claim to be the adults in the room?

If Biden had defeated Trump by a landslide margin in November, it might have paradoxically tempted him to govern in a more cautious style as a way to keep a wave of new defectors from the GOP inside his coalitional tent. But the last two elections have demonstrated that the anti-Trump Republicans who populate high-status editorial pages and Beltway professional circles are not representative of a numerically populous mass constituency; their approval might make a positive impression within a limited peer group, but it simply doesn't sway many voters. As long as the Republican Party remains devoted to Trump's style of politics if not Trump himself, Democrats may calculate that moderates and conservatives who find Trumpism intolerable will have little choice but to root for Biden's success even if his record is more liberal than they'd like.

The new opportunities for influence granted to the American left by the decaying position of the center-right may turn out to be one of the most unexpected political legacies of the Trump years. Center-right elites used to see themselves as the natural leaders of a "center-right nation." But today they are increasingly abandoned by both partisan sides, facing the realization that they speak mostly for themselves.