President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race, and then to endorse his vice president, Kamala Harris, to take his place, is a historic event that, for good or ill, will be remembered in the history books.
It also recalls another event: the collective decision by a whole host of senior Democratic Party leaders to support Biden in 2020, leading to his victory in South Carolina, his nomination and eventually his election as president. Many people have forgotten that, by February of 2020, the Biden candidacy seemed dead in the water. Despite being a former vice president, he’d finished an embarrassing fourth in the Iowa caucuses, behind Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, all of whom appeared to be significantly weaker candidates than Biden.
And in New Hampshire, he’d finished an even more embarrassing fifth, adding Amy Klobuchar to the list of people who beat him. But after a huge comeback in South Carolina, fueled by the endorsement of House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, things fell into place for Biden almost immediately.
Klobuchar and Buttigieg endorsed Biden right before the critical “Super Tuesday” primaries and caucuses. A host of other current and former party officials also did so. Former President Barack Obama didn’t endorse Biden immediately, but worked behind the scenes to make his nomination possible. One campaign professional aptly deemed it a “chain reaction.” Biden rolled to the nomination.
All of this probably sounds familiar. That’s because it’s eerily similar to what has happened this past week. Only, instead of the stars aligning to put Biden in office, they aligned to take him out of the race. It started with backbencher Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, calling on him to exit the race, but escalated quickly when major fundraiser and movie star George Clooney called on him to step aside, saying the man he saw at a recent fundraiser was a shadow of his former self. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama worked behind the scenes for the same goal. In less than two weeks, it was all over.
The reason for all of this, both in 2020 and 2024, is simple: Democrats wanted to win.
Rather than treat Biden as their totem, they treated him like a representative of their party. When Biden’s interests and ambitions coincided with that of the party, they backed him. When his interests and ambitions did not, they found someone new. This might sound cynical, and in a sense, it is. One might rightly ask if the odds of winning the next election is the only reason to want to sideline a president who, sadly, seems to have significantly cognitively declined.
Biden’s diminished capacity to serve is important. Too few are talking about that outside of conservatives on cable TV and social media, and Democrats deserve criticism for seemingly not taking that seriously.
But parties serve a purpose. Any well-functioning political party will seek to filter and to advance the ideas, opinions, interests and priorities of its members, and to put the best version of those ideas forward.
If one person becomes an obstacle to the advancement of that cause, they should be sidelined. No person is indispensable, but the values, opinions and interests of the country, as embodied by its parties, endure. A party that ignores this is not doing its job. Our political parties, however, have been doing a poor job of remembering this in recent years. Far too many decisions are being made by narrowly focused groups with no real interest in the long-term health of the party.
Ironically, things have been both too elite (in terms of influential mega-donors) and too populist (following passionate minorities, rather than the more sober general public). This has been due, in large part, to a decadeslong and systematic weakening of the role of parties and party officials that previously had significant sway. Their influence could be abused, to be sure — prioritizing insiders over better-equipped insurgent candidates, for example. But the system did tend to filter out candidates who were too inexperienced or too unfit in other ways to serve, and it provided a filtering system against demagogues and cranks.
Put another way: It is not an accident that former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke reached the pinnacle of his political career in the state with what is arguably the weakest party structure in the nation. A former governor had created the system to avoid being held accountable by his own party.
A truly healthy political party would have long ago gently escorted Biden out the door with a nice gold watch. Ideally, he would have announced he was not seeking reelection after his party beat the spread in the 2022 midterm elections.
But late is better than never, and messy is preferable to the job not being done at all. And twice in two cycles — first by sidelining Warren and Sanders in favor of Biden, and then by sidelining Biden in favor of Harris — the Democrats seem to have put themselves in a better position to win.
This does not mean that Democrats will win, or that they deserve to. Harris has, at best, a mixed record in hotly contested races. She won her first race as California attorney general by less than 1% when her Democratic ticket-mates were winning by double-digits, and she flamed out before Iowa when she ran for president in 2020. Her approval ratings have usually been underwater. Harris will be saddled with much of the baggage of the Biden administration. There’s a lot of game left to play. But all available evidence showed that that Biden was a goner, and replacing Biden with Harris gives Democrats a better chance of winning.
America is at its best when its political parties act like parties, not like appendages to one person or small group of people. And in the long run, Americans are best served when our political parties put their best foot forward. Democrats, belatedly, after far too much gaslighting, have done that. It’s a small step forward. Now, let the real game begin.
Cliff Smith is a lawyer and a former congressional staffer. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he works on national security related issues. His views are his own.