The Return of the Smoke-Filled Room

There are three reasons to want Joe Biden off the Democratic ticket.

One is ethical. It’s now undeniable that whatever ability he still retains to govern will desert him before 2029. Asking Americans to hand him another term under the circumstances is irresponsible.

Another is electoral. As public faith in him collapses this summer and fall, so will his chances of defeating Donald Trump. The prospect of a proto-fascist returning to the presidency was frightening enough; classical liberals now face the possibility of a Democratic wipeout down ballot that would sweep Trump enablers into Congress.

The third reason is what we might call “deterrence.”

In his selfish desperation to retain control of his party, the president has resorted to political hostage-taking. His pitch to Democrats for sticking with him has nothing to do with sketching out a compelling plan to win or demonstrating his mental agility by holding numerous live events or even outlining a policy program for a second term. It’s simply this: The delegates he earned by winning this year’s primary (under false pretenses about his fitness) are pledged to him and he’s not giving them up.

Democratic voters are his captives. As far as Joe Biden is concerned, they can learn to live with that or they can boycott the race in November and learn to live with whatever insanity Trump visits upon them over the next four years.

For nine years, we’ve watched political hostage-taking on the American right turn the Republican Party into an authoritarian circus, one in which Marjorie Taylor Greene gets a speaking slot at the national convention and Nikki Haley doesn’t get an invite. Rather than punish their captor for that by foiling his bid for victory, pitiful conservatives at the top and bottom of the party have capitulated to Trump repeatedly.

It would be gratifying to see one of the major parties do what the other would not by declining to appease a hostage-taker. Standing up to Biden by resisting his grip on the nomination would serve notice to future Democratic leaders that liberals won’t tolerate political kidnapping, even if conservatives will. The best interests of the party and the people whom it serves take precedence over the leader’s narcissism.

The president is free to try to persuade his supporters that he’s still the best man for the job, but if he won’t—or can’t—then he’s politically dead. That’s how you deal with kidnappers.

Joe Biden’s fate remains uncertain as I write this, several hours before his press conference this evening, but I think Democrats stand a decent chance of foiling the hostage crisis he’s created. They’re a different kind of party than the GOP in important ways, both in their leadership class and among their rank and file.

They’re still capable of organizing a proverbial smoke-filled room. I think.

The lamentable weakness of the two parties is a hobby horse of Dispatch staffers, as you’d expect at a publication that disdains populism.

That weakness is partly due to structural factors like campaign finance reform and the mainstreaming of online political fundraising. Once wealthy donors realized they could fund their favorite politicians via super PACs, the parties’ role as political financial brokers shriveled. Once candidates realized they could bankroll a candidacy by pandering to a small niche of grassroots fanatics, their financial incentive to do their party’s bidding collapsed. 

The proliferation of political media online and otherwise over the last 20 years has also undermined the parties. The sort of person willing to watch political programming for hours on end is, almost by definition, a person who’s deeply aggrieved. Monetizing that sense of grievance by nurturing distrust for institutional actors has made a lot of terrible people terribly rich while weakening the parties’ ability to influence their own members.

Both parties have been affected by these changes—but not equally. Two core differences have developed. Democrats are committed to a much more robust policy agenda than Republicans are; and, unlike Republicans, Democrats still more or less respect their party’s leaders.

We could spitball endlessly about what caused those differences. The Democratic coalition is more demographically diverse than the GOP’s and diverse constituencies will require a more diverse policy program. Democrats are generally well served by the center-left mainstream media whereas Republicans have been radicalized by the populist right-wing alternative they created. Democrats have attracted more college graduates over time while Republicans have attracted more working-class voters, and the working class is more likely to distrust institutions like political parties than professionals are. Neoliberalism isn’t as exhausted as zombie Reaganism was circa 2016, leaving an ideological vacuum that was easily filled by a cult of personality.

Whatever explains the difference, the fact remains that Democratic voters admire numerous politicians in their leadership class and trust them to do the right thing. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, James Clyburn, Jamie Raskin, and many others each wield some influence over the Democratic rank and file. Among Republican voters, by contrast, there’s only one person who wields real influence. Most longstanding GOP officials, beginning with Mitch McConnell, are actively despised by their own base.

There’s no smoke-filled room of Republican leaders that could conceivably depose Donald Trump as nominee. If they presented their misgivings about him to the voters of their party, they’d be marked for political (and perhaps literal) death. They have no influence and they know it, which explains why so many of them surrendered meekly to him this year.

The leaders of the weak-but-not-as-weak-as-Republicans Democratic Party likely also would have struggled to depose Joe Biden as nominee earlier in the campaign. Rank-and-file Democrats might have resented the attempt to foist an anointed establishment alternative on them in lieu of holding a competitive primary that included the president.

But the weak party now finds itself with an even weaker standard bearer. His infirmity has grown distressing; his polling in battleground states is alarming; the ethical and electoral arguments for replacing him on the ticket have gathered tremendous strength over the last two weeks.

And so, bit by bit, a virtual smoke-filled room has begun to fill up.

Obama and Pelosi are key players in it, as you’d expect. The former speaker pointedly declined to vouch for Biden’s decision to stay in the race in a television interview on Wednesday. The former president has kept a lower profile but reportedly was in touch with actor George Clooney before Clooney published an op-ed calling on Biden to withdraw. Biden’s campaign reportedly believes Obama is working behind the scenes to encourage other party leaders to come out against him.

Slowly, more Democrats in Congress are also coming forward. On Wednesday, Peter Welch became the first member of the Senate to ask the president to step aside. At least 12 House members have done so as I write this—and reportedly another half-dozen or more are prepared to join them if the president’s news conference this evening goes badly.

Donors are retreating as well. Sources told NBC News yesterday that there’s been a “disastrous” slowdown in political contributions since the debate, with one insisting that “the money has absolutely shut off.” Some donors who joined Biden on a call were apparently frustrated by how “contrived” the experience was, involving no hard questions about his plan to right the ship.

That’s a pretty crowded smoke-filled room. But on Thursday, a new cohort appeared ready to squeeze through the door—Biden’s own campaign personnel.

“Overwhelmingly a majority of senior campaign staff are despondent and don’t see a path,” one Democratic strategist whispered to the Washington Post. An unidentified campaign official told NBC News frankly that Biden “needs to drop out. He will never recover from this.” Several aides have reportedly begun discussing ways to persuade the president to withdraw gracefully from the race, if such a thing remains possible at this point. The campaign has already begun polling whether Kamala Harris would fare better against Trump than Biden would.

Even some Democratic delegates who are nominally pledged to him are looking for seats in the smoke-filled room. Per Politico’s Jonathan Martin, “a few dozen delegates … are organizing a letter urging the DNC to change the rules to make the nomination vote a secret ballot and free delegates to vote their conscience.”

Maybe the grimmest sign for Biden, though, is the dog that didn’t bark. Normally a political leader in crisis would have cronies springing into action to drum up support for him in Congress. Not this time. “The silence is deafening,” a Democratic Senate aide told Semafor. “He has no allies organizing or whipping on his behalf. The Biden forces have fled the Capitol and it is falling.”

Has the president given up? Or is it simply that all of the people around him who don’t share his surname have joined the Obama-Pelosi faction? Judging by how highly placed the leakers about his condition have been in the last 24 hours, I’d say the answer is clear.

There’s only one catch with the analogy of the smoke-filled room that I’ve drawn. It has cause and effect backwards, no?

In a traditional political smoke-filled room, party power brokers huddle and bicker and horse-trade and then descend from the mountaintop with the nominee’s name engraved on tablets to rapturous cheers from the rank-and-file. It’s entirely top-down. The leaders lead, the followers follow.

Joe Biden’s looming political demise isn’t entirely top-down. If anything, it’s bottom-up.

The president has been at pains this week to insist that “the elites” are conspiring to deprive the Democratic hoi polloi of their choice in the primaries, but reality is closer to the opposite. Biden himself is as elite as political elites get, of course, having served in high office in Washington almost continuously since the early 1970s. But it’s not his fellow elites who have been chafing at nominating him. It’s the hoi polloi.

For more than a year, more Democrats than not have complained to pollsters that Biden is too old for another term. As time has passed, the share who have said so has soared: In February, fully 73 percent of Democratic respondents told ABC News that the president is too old. But as far back as July 2022, 75 percent of Democrats were hoping for a different nominee this year. After the party overperformed in the midterms that fall, just 37 percent of Biden’s base wanted to reward him with a second term.

As recently as February, with his nomination a fait accompli, a mere 40 percent of Democrats would say that they’re “extremely” or “very” confident in their candidate’s mental fitness for the presidency. And as you’d expect, that number has shrunk further since the debate: A new ABC News poll published Thursday found 81 percent of those who plan to vote for Biden in November now believe he’s too old for another term.

Of that group, 54 percent prefer that he steps aside. Among Democrats and left-leaning independents generally, 62 percent do. Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado told Semafor his office has received more than 3,000 calls and emails from constituents over the past week or so and they’re running roughly 90-10 against sticking with Biden.

Even the president’s vaunted support among black voters ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.

Democratic voters—and the wider public—have been screaming for a different nominee for the better part of two years. The hoi polloi don’t want him and haven’t for a long time. It was the president’s many “elite” friends in Washington who circled the wagons around him and kept him viable politically, perhaps out of foolish personal loyalty, perhaps because they underestimated Trump’s chances, or perhaps because they’re far more comfortable with a second Trump presidency than people like me would like to believe.

The so-called “followers” in the Democratic Party led in the matter of replacing Joe Biden and now their alleged “leaders” are belatedly following them after his catastrophic debate performance left them no alternative. As smoke-filled rooms go, this one’s not very impressive.

Of course, because Democratic voters respect rather than despise their own establishment, distinguishing cause and effect in this case is tricky. Many liberal commentators called for Biden to withdraw from the race immediately after the debate. Congressional Democrats were conspicuously lukewarm in their support for Biden too, typically resorting to comments along the lines of “it’s the president’s decision to make” rather than offering full-throated defenses of sticking with him.

That is to say, the momentum that’s building to replace him on the ballot may be less a matter of a smoke-filled room or a grassroots insurgency than the top and bottom of the party encouraging each other to do a hard but necessary thing to avert an electoral calamity. Democratic “elites” speak out tentatively against Biden; then Democratic voters digest that criticism, emboldening more of them to express their own doubts about the president to pollsters; then Democratic “elites” read those polls and feel emboldened to speak out more adamantly, and so on.

That’s the way normal political parties work, no? The base listens to the establishment and the establishment listens to the base—after, er, a determined effort to ignore them leads to the brink of calamity.

Ultimately, parties are as strong as their voters will allow them to be.

A base that prioritizes winning elections over glorifying its leader will produce an establishment with (somewhat) similar priorities. Democratic leaders are poised to foil Joe Biden’s hostage crisis only because their voters condone doing so.

For everyone’s sake, I hope it pays off. And not just because I desperately wish to avoid a second national experiment in finding out precisely what Donald Trump is capable of.

Consider the lesson that will be learned if Democrats succeed in pressuring Biden out of the race but his replacement ends up losing. Americans will compare that failure to Republicans’ success in 2016 in rallying around Trump after the Access Hollywood tape emerged. “You don’t punish your candidate for a major scandal in the thick of a campaign by pulling the plug on him,” observers will reason. “You go all-in on him. The less fit for office he becomes, the more ardent your apologias for him need to be to preserve your chances of winning.”

What a fine incentive for American political parties going forward.

And hopefully needless to say, we shouldn’t strain ourselves in patting Democrats on the back for coming to their senses at the eleventh hour when they were left with no other option realistically but to do so. I’m convinced that if Biden were en route to an easy victory over Trump—which he would be in a respectable country that doesn’t shrug at coup plots—there’d be no movement on the left to oust him from the ticket despite the glaring unfitness for office his debate debacle revealed.

A win is a win, Democrats would reason. If the ethical and electoral logic of nominating Biden were to collide, there’s no question which would yield to which.

But they don’t collide in reality, unfortunately, and the president’s party can no longer pretend otherwise. Even a weak party can be stirred to do the right thing, it seems, when the price of doing the wrong thing becomes exorbitant enough. Here’s hoping we have a new nominee by Monday, just in time to have him or her (probably her) render the big anti-Biden program playing out on the main stage in Milwaukee at least partly moot.