Democrats' Biden problem is really a party coalition problem
Democrats have long been a risk-averse party. But that's starting to change...slowly.
A recent poll with bad news for Biden - and Trump leading in key swing states, has led to another round of Democratic recrimination – or maybe, in this case, we should call it pre-crimination, as Democrats try to explain a loss that hasn’t even happened yet.
At the Washington Post, Perry Bacon points to the Democratic Party as the source of this concern, noting that they could have held a competitive primary and nominated a stronger candidate. Bacon is absolutely right that party dynamics – and party weakness – are part of this story. Democrats are better at coordinating than Republicans, and have a stronger and less distrusted party “establishment.” But they don’t really a set of informal norms allowing the party to replace an incumbent president, even though they have the formal means to hold a primary.
But what exactly is the situation we’re now in? Biden, the candidate who was nominated entirely because of his “electability,” is now seen as a liability. I see Biden’s defects as a candidate coming down to 3 major factors. The first was inevitable: governing is hard and puts strain on the coalition that elected a president. The second two were apparent back in 2019 when Biden first released his campaign announcement: he’s old, and he’s never been an especially inspiring speaker. However, implicit at every stage of the nomination was Biden’s safety as a candidate. Seth Masket has connected this to how local party leaders interpreted the 2016 election – as a campaign that overemphasized identity politics, as a sign that the electorate might not be ready for a woman in the White House.
The overinterpretation of the 2016 election is certainly apparent. But I also see this as long-term feature of the Democratic Party: risk aversion. Politics is a risk averse game, especially in a system that requires building complicated coalitions to win national majorities (or at least, Electoral College majorities). And this has been especially true where race is concerned. There have been many examples of presidential risk aversion on race, dating back decades if not centuries, but Democrats after 1980 have been especially wary of presenting themselves as the party of non-white interests (this literature emphasizes the Black-white divide especially). We saw this reticence a bit in the lead-up to Obama’s nomination in 2008, and it came back again in force after the unexpected loss to Trump in 2016.
And it’s those forces that propelled Biden to the nomination. But the other dynamic behind Biden’s nomination also shows where the Democrats have an increasingly intractable dilemma: they actually are the party of non-white voters, and African American leaders and voters play a crucial role in presidential nominations. Biden was the candidate of many of those voters and leaders in 2020.
A contributing factor to Biden’s national prominence at that stage was his service as vice president to the nation’s first Black commander-in-chief. And this, I think, is where the Democrats’ long-term dilemma gets sharper. Obama’s decisive 2008 victory, quick political rise, and broad political appeal inspired the cultivation of similar candidates. These included younger candidates, candidates of color, and some leading Democrats who identify as LGBTQ (Pete Buttigieg, Jared Polis, Tammy Baldwin). Candidates from diverse backgrounds have been fighting for political representation for a long time, but after the 2008 election it seemed like the nation had turned a corner. A much wider range of candidates could be considered for prominent offices, including the presidency. To the extent the Democrats cultivated a bench, it’s a young and diverse bench of rising stars like Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Buttigieg, and AOC. These politicians represent a change in thinking about what’s politically possible, and they also reflect an increasingly diverse country and Democratic Party.
A final piece of this problem is not demographic but ideological. These factors aren’t perfectly correlated within the Democratic coalition. But the risk-averse faction tends to be the one that saw political promise in the Clintonian “New Democrat” approach and remains scarred by the party’s losses in the 1980s. Seeming too liberal – too soft on crime, too liberal on economics, too weak on foreign policy – was a serious liability. For voters and politicians whose main reference point is the financial crisis of 2008, or the COVID-19 pandemic, or the Black Lives Matter movement, or just any number of realities of contemporary life, the costs of that caution are very real.
None of this is to say that the picture for Biden going into 2024 is as dire as the NYT poll predicts. Nor is it to say that the Democrats’ internal problems are the same or as bad as the Republicans’. But the party is going into 2024 with a candidate whose weaknesses were evident, and touted as strengths, four years ago. And the party has an unusual coalition of factions that share general policy preferences but operate according to different logics and have different assumptions about politics. Biden might turn out to be a much stronger candidate in 2024 than he looks like now - the difference among Democrats will still be there. A stronger, healthier party might be able to address these challenges in a more direct and transparent way.