The disorganisation of the Democratic rebels against Joe Biden
Many baby-boom Democrats trace their political roots to the rebellious 1960s. Young progressives led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the Squad” embed protest in their politics. Yet amid panic and crisis over the teetering re-election campaign of Joe Biden, the party has apparently lost its nerve to act up. On July 12th Democrats entered their third week since the president’s shockingly impaired debate performance elicited widespread calls for him to yield to a younger candidate who can defeat Donald Trump in November. In private, many elected Democrats still say Mr Biden should stand aside. And yet in public, among office-holders, the rebellion looks anaemic.
True, the number of congressional Democrats openly calling for Mr Biden to withdraw has been growing day by day. Yet the pace is glacial, given the short time remaining until the president is formally renominated as the party’s standard-bearer. By July 12th the ranks of declared dissenters numbered 19 in the House—just under a tenth of Democratic membership—and they included but a single senator, Peter Welch, a first-termer from Vermont.
There are some discernible patterns in this muddle. One is that vulnerable House candidates —sensing an existential threat to their careers—are proving more willing than others to declare that the emperor in the White House has no clothes. A disproportionate number of the House members calling on Mr Biden to stand aside are running in races ranked as competitive by the Cook Report, a nonpartisan research group. They include Marie Glusenkamp Perez, a newcomer from Washington state, who won a previously Republican seat in 2022 by fewer than 3,000 votes. Declaring for the rebellion on July 11th, she did not prevaricate: “I doubt the president’s judgment about his own health, his fitness to do the job, and whether he is the one making important decisions about our country.”
In some respects, the persistence of support for Mr Biden among core groups such as progressives and the congressional Black Caucus is more mystifying than the calculations of the open rebels. Some Squad members describe their backing for Mr Biden as a kind of visceral loyalty. A cynic might also ask if the party’s most active leftists might be resigning themselves to defeat in November because they believe Donald Trump’s return to office would empower and energise their wing of the party.
Democrats who don’t answer to voters face less fraught calculations. Last week, members of two overlapping party caucuses—big-money donors and Hollywood liberals—continued to move away from the president. In an opinion essay in the New York Times, George Clooney struck at Mr Biden’s fitness to lead as well as the Democratic elders who enable his denialism: “Our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51m people didn’t see what we just saw.” Other bold-faced names—Barry Diller, Abigail Disney, Netflix’s co-founder Reed Hastings—have indicated they will freeze donations until Mr Biden stands aside. Writing for The Economist Ari Emanuel, a famous agent and brother of Rahm Emanuel, a former mayor of Chicago and now ambassador to Japan, called the president’s decision to stay in the race a “self-aggrandising delusion on a Trumpian scale”.
His clarity was as bracing as it was unusual. Many other dissenters focus squarely on the tactical challenge of finding a candidate who can defeat Mr Trump, rather than acknowledging Mr Biden’s declining ability to manage a nuclear-armed superpower. That approach may be the best way to bring Mr Biden around, if that remains possible. In an otherwise defiant press conference at the end of last week’s NATO summit in Washington, the president suggested he could be persuaded to withdraw only if he were convinced he could not win. Yet the prolonged chorale of cautious and supportive remarks by party leaders in public has created an indelible impression of weakness and indecision.
Ironically, Mr Biden has got the better of his Democratic opponents since the debate by speaking more clearly and coherently about what he intends than they do. The president’s advisers have distilled their boss’s bull-headedness and vanity into a forceful script that their candidate delivers with evident relish: He won’t quit; only he can defeat Mr Trump; the polls showing that he’s doomed in November are wrong.
As the Republicans gather in Milwaukee for their convention—a week when Mr Trump will return to the limelight and dominate news cycles by introducing his vice-presidential running-mate—Mr Biden’s team has scheduled more rallies and interviews, signalling business as usual. Their transparent strategy is to run out the clock, to see Mr Biden through to a formal nomination in August before rebels can act decisively. At a stop in Detroit on the evening of July 12th Mr Biden borrowed a page from Mr Trump’s rally script by pointing at the press bullpen. “They’ve been hammering me,” he said, and the crowd booed on cue. “I’m the nominee,” Mr Biden continued. “I’m not going anywhere.” ■