Joe Biden is failing to silence calls that he step aside

Feel for Joe Biden. If you too had spent half a century coveting a job, you might be reluctant to give it up. When the octogenarian turned in the most disastrous debate performance in modern times on June 27th, alarmed fellow Democrats began agitating for him to gracefully withdraw from his re-election campaign. The confused guy who appeared on stage seemed in no state to defeat Donald Trump in November, let alone govern the country into 2029.

But Mr Biden is nothing if not stubborn. His campaign staff spent the week following the debacle trying to contain the fallout, urging elected Democrats not to go public with their calls for the president to stand aside. The Biden campaign then mounted a counteroffensive against those critics. “I’m not going anywhere,” the candidate announced.

These efforts have had an impact. By mid-week prediction markets were giving Mr Biden even odds of staying in the race—double his chance of survival the previous week. Even so, the trickle of Democratic lawmakers openly urging the president to abandon his campaign has not stopped: this week Michael Bennet of Colorado became the first Senate Democrat to say that Mr Biden could not defeat Mr Trump. Other Democrats may be merely holding their fire. Most ominously for Mr Biden, on July 10th even Nancy Pelosi, a former House speaker and close ally of the president, implied that he should think again about his candidacy, stressing in an interview on MSNBC that “time is running short”.

Even if Mr Biden faces down the rebels in his party, it would be a strange victory, achieved not by convincing his fellow Democrats that he has a good chance of beating Mr Trump, but by insisting he will not abandon power no matter how hard they push him. Because Mr Biden controls almost all of the delegates needed to secure the party’s formal nomination in August, little can be done to force him out.

And Mr Biden insists he will not budge. “I am firmly committed to staying in the race, to running this race to the end,” he wrote in a letter to congressional Democrats published on July 8th. In it he claimed that because he had won a competitive primary it would be anti-democratic for him not to be the party’s nominee. “How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our party?” he wrote. In truth, the party treated the primary as a coronation, even placing the president alone on the ballot in some states, and no serious candidates challenged him.

Although few elected Democrats privately express confidence in Mr Biden, many have settled into learned helplessness. “The matter is settled,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman, declared. Though seven Democrats in the House of Representatives have publicly called for the president to stand aside, and many more have made statements expressing concern, Mr Biden has decided that he has an almost divine right to remain president. “If the Lord Almighty came out and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I would get out of the race,” the president said in a closely watched interview on July 7th. But “the Lord Almighty is not coming down.”

To understand what is happening, the best guide is not speculation about what Jill Biden or Barack Obama might be thinking, but game theory. The objective function, or goal, of Democrats is to minimise the chance of Mr Trump returning to the White House. Mr Biden’s objective function is maximising his own chance of remaining there. Before the debate these two goals seemed compatible.

The payoff matrix

But now they are misaligned. And Democrats find themselves with a collective-action problem. If an individual comes out for Mr Biden to stand aside, but others do not, they will simply have harmed their party’s nominee, to Mr Trump’s benefit. This bind explains the indecision of the past weeks: the agonising private meetings that yield little consensus, the public statements of either feigned confidence or diplomatic concerns. If the old man is not for turning, then what is there to be done?

When confronted with irrationality from the top, rational actors in the party ranks can be forced to submit. That has been the story of the Republican Party under Mr Trump. And so it is fitting that Mr Biden has recently begun to ape his rival in other ways too. He has announced his disbelief in polls that show him losing; taken to bragging about the size of his crowds and his golf game; turned to family members for advice, including his son Hunter, who was recently convicted of several felonies; claimed that he alone can beat his rival; and called in to his favourite morning television programme to denounce the party elites conspiring against him.

He calculates that the party will be forced to get over itself after he secures the nomination, perhaps as soon as August 7th by virtual vote (nearly two weeks ahead of the convention). This is a complete reversal of what Mr Biden’s candidacy was supposed to be about: saving the soul of the nation from a self-aggrandising demagogue who puts himself before all others.

Mr Biden is the consummate Washington creature, first elected to the Senate before his 30th birthday more than 50 years ago. He has been part of the elite longer than most Americans have been alive. He owes his presidency to the same donors and columnists he now denounces. In 2020 they united around his flagging presidential candidacy to keep Bernie Sanders, a socialist-curious senator, from becoming the nominee. Mr Biden could force his party to stay with him the way marriages in places without no-fault divorce laws persist. But it will be a loveless arrangement.

Ignoring problems do not make them go away. Voters do not accept Mr Biden’s claim that his debate performance was simply one bad night. They have since swung noticeably towards Mr Trump. The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, a respected election handicapper, announced that it was downgrading the president’s chances in three swing states, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, all of which now lean Republican. And these headline polling changes mask serious problems.

Our poll with YouGov finds that Democrats are nearly evenly split: 42% say he should stand aside, compared with 45% who say he should stay. The American press feels lied to and is aggressively investigating the president’s health. Because ageing cannot be overcome by grit, Mr Biden could stumble again in the next four months, perhaps when it is too late to replace him on printed ballots. Asked last week how he would feel if he lost to Mr Trump, Mr Biden answered: “As long as I gave it my all, and I did the—good as job as I know I can do—that’s what this is about.” ■