Joe Biden Can Win. It Won't Get Better.

Facing facts for 2025

Despite my best efforts, I try to avoid the Joe Biden discourse. I said most of what I had to say in 2022, when I argued in New York Magazine Biden was an accomplished president who should quit while he was ahead and not seek another term. Biden, then, was 79, and there was time for an open primary that would have been a genuine contest for the future. Democrats now have a real bench. Gretchen Whitmer, Raphael Warnock, Catherine Cortez Masto, Wes Moore, J.B. Pritzker, Phil Murphy, Gavin Newsom, Andy Beshear, and Josh Shapiro could have argued it out over the course of a year and a half. Kamala Harris, of course, would have been the frontrunner, but a primary would have been the perfect test for her, a chance to refute critics who have said repeatedly she lacks the political mettle to be the Democratic nominee. Survive that primary and you earn it, the way Barack Obama did in 2008 when he beat back Hillary Clinton in what was, still, the nastiest Democratic primary of the last 20 years. Primaries are healthy and should be embraced, particularly when they are incumbent-free.

Since then, Biden has announced his run for re-election and forestalled any chance of such a primary occurring. No one wants to be Ted Kennedy in 1980 because Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan. It’s quite plausible Carter loses to Reagan no matter what—Reagan was a singular talent who fit the mood of that year far more than Carter—but the distant past has a way of clinging to national affairs. An 81-year-old president who barely interacts with the press or the public would, in a different context, invite a robust challenge, but no one wants to risk career suicide—getting frozen out by donors and endorsers—by making a run at Biden and probably losing.

Ezra Klein is the latest prestige pundit to sound the alarm bells. Klein’s idea, which is valid, is that Biden should just be replaced at the Democratic convention in the summer. This was how, for 150 years or so, the nominees of major parties were determined. Party bosses, smoke-filled backrooms, delegates haggling, drama on the convention floor, if it came to that. Reformers naturally hated this because actual voters weren’t choosing the nominee. But there was logic to the old system, which precluded someone like Donald Trump from seizing control of a major party. (It would have, of course, precluded Barack Obama too.) If there ever were unique circumstances to temporarily revive 1920s-style politicking, it would probably be now. Franklin Roosevelt was picked at a convention, after all.

The convention revival is a fantasy. Biden, barring a health catastrophe, is going to run for president through the fall. Matt Yglesias, another liberal pundit and Klein’s old colleague, thinks Biden needs to get out there more—start holding interviews and behaving, as the polls suggest, he’s running behind, not ahead. That’s logical. But Biden’s aides suspect, for good reason, Biden can’t handle that. He is very old, holding the toughest job in America at an age when the vast majority of us are retired. My late father, at 83, thought it was patently insane Biden was running for a second term. He couldn’t believe it when I told him it was definitely happening. Trump is a serial liar, unhinged, and elderly to boot—neither man is popular or much wanted by the electorate—but Biden comes off as frailer and more doddering. This is not a scintillating take. I’ve lost track of the number of times Biden has said his son Beau, who died of brain cancer, was actually killed in Iraq. Was Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents, actually wrong about Biden? Not about judging Biden’s cognition in a legal document, but his actual, literal conclusions. How refutable are they, really?

Sit and watch Joe Biden, then vice president, debate Paul Ryan in 2012. This was the debate performance that was credited with saving Obama’s re-election. Do you think the Joe Biden of 2024 resembles the Joe Biden of 2012? I am not being ageist; entropy comes for all of us, and I will be very lucky to be alive at 81. We don’t do enough for our elders in this society. But the facts can’t be ignored any longer.

Unlike some others, I do think Biden can win in November. I think the DNC’s fundamental strategy, if uninspired and laden with risk, makes sense. Trump is uniquely noxious. He’ll probably get convicted of something. Make the race about him. Go to the American people and ask them, really, do they want to deal with Donald J. Trump for another four years? Doesn’t he exhaust you? The polls will narrow, Democrats and independents will come home, and Trump will lose his lead. I find, oddly enough, Trump is getting treated like Hillary Clinton in 2016: a frontrunner for a party nomination who is viewed as a clear favorite in the fall, even as evidence piles up of obvious vulnerabilities. It’s not a bad thing to run behind in February when an election is in November. Trump’s acolytes should probably stop boasting about the polls.

Biden, obviously, can lose. If I pressed, I’d give him slightly better than 50 percent odds to win the Electoral College. That’s not great. It does not help that his campaign and the DNC can’t fathom telling voters what Biden wants to do for the next four years. What kind of president will he be in 2025, 2026, 2027, and 2028? I have no idea and I write about politics for a living. I don’t know what wonderful pieces of legislation he’d like to see passed, how he’d use his executive powers, what he’d want to do for healthcare, the environment, or the economy next. I don’t know what his vision for the future is and you don’t know either. Biden’s campaign hasn’t dreamed anything up. And unlike Obama, Biden lacks the charisma and relative youth to sell such a vision. Obama’s party got annihilated in the 2010 midterms and he was able to storm the country in 2012 and get re-elected somewhat comfortably. Mitt Romney was a weak opponent, in retrospect, veering far too rightward on fiscal matters, but Obama must be given his due. He went out and sold himself again.

Can Biden actually do this?

Beyond the election, what is the actual endgame? Perhaps Democratic elites aren’t quite thinking about this hard enough. If Biden wins, he is going to be president when he is 84, 85, and 86, assuming he lives that long. He is going to be expected to do a job that has worn down, psychologically and emotionally, far younger men. His cognition isn’t what it used to be. There is literally no chance it can improve. Time wounds all of us.

It gets grimmer for Democrats when the Senate is considered. Trump is going to win Ohio and Montana. Can Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester run far enough ahead of the Trump vote to save their Senate seats? I’m skeptical. Joe Manchin has already given up in West Virginia, recognizing a state that hands Trump 70 percent of the vote won’t send him back to Washington. Steve Bullock was a popular Democratic governor of Montana who ran for the Senate in 2020. He was a dream recruit. He still lost because Trump carried Montana.

An 82-year-old Democratic president and a Republican-run Senate is a recipe, at the minimum, for stagnation. Obama himself could do little legislatively once Republicans took control of the House. He was able to sign a flurry of executive orders, many overturned by Trump, and negotiate the Iran nuclear agreement which was also damaged by Trump. Once Republicans took the Senate, he was unable to appoint any Supreme Court Justices. Mitch McConnell blocked Merrick Garland and the rest was history. A Republican Senate majority is not letting Biden appoint a Supreme Court justice if Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito drop dead. The next majority leader, assuming soon-to-be 82-year-old McConnell doesn’t hold on, is going to be more Trump-aligned, not less. That’s what J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, and the younger faction want. Eight years of Biden won’t do Democrats any favors in 2028, either. By then, the yearning for change will be far too hard to ignore.