Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram Live to lay out the case for why she is so steadfast in her support for Joe Biden remaining at the top of the Democratic ticket. She made the strongest case for Biden I’ve seen, by far.
Now, I should single out one thing she said that is paramount for me. At one point in her talk, AOC said (paraphrase) “If you’re 10,000% sure that the President can’t win, then do what you think is right.”
I have been a critic not only of Joe Biden but of the way the Democratic Party has managed its nominations for the past decade. In the 2020 race, I believed that Biden was far from the strongest candidate to go up against Trump, but the Orange Mussolini had screwed up the country’s response to the COVID pandemic so badly, I still thought he could win. I opposed his nomination because I don’t share his conservative politics and because I believed it was imperative to get the candidate who didn’t just have a decent shot against Trump but was a very strong contender.
In 2020, I did not believe that described Joe Biden and nothing about that election provided any evidence to change my view. Biden barely defeated a narcissist incumbent who routinely made a fool of himself in public, was a known criminal, and damn near crashed the whole country when faced with a crisis. Less than 45,000 votes in three states were all that stood between us and a second Trump term.
There have been concerns about Biden since before the campaign. Historically low approval ratings and poor polling, have been presenting problems that the President hadn’t shown an ability to overcome, even before the debate debacle brought the issues with him front and center.
Polls taken months, even years, ago showed that many or most Democrats didn’t want Biden to run for a second term, but the party, in its infinite venality, pushed him on the voters anyway. So I’ve been arguing for years that he was a terrible 2024 candidate who is unlikely to beat Trump. Now, with the clear and obvious evidence of his mental decline and, most of all, his inability to manage the rigors of the campaign trail while also doing his job, he has very little chance of beating Trump, and that slim chance is only there because nothing is impossible.
That said, AOC raised some significant points, and they need to addressed.
AOC says an open convention is a terrible idea. I couldn’t agree more, and AOC is absolutely right that it is a real concern that people are trying to move past Kamala Harris using this dangerous tactic. There simply isn’t time for this. I wasn’t the only one complaining for more than a year that the Democratic party had basically eliminated the 2024 primary. Had they not done that, we could have made this decision about Biden long ago, considering not only his diminished faculties, but also the anger his policy toward Israel’s genocide in Gaza has generated. But people didn’t listen to those of us who were warning about this, and now here we are.
Concerns that simply moving on to Harris is a less than democratic process are not wrong, but they’re mooted by the reality that an open convention would lead to anger, more divisions in the party, more political despair, and would still be undemocratic, limiting the vote to a handful of party members.
I am no fan of Kamala Harris for many reasons. But we are already facing an election where the Democrats are going to be distinct underdogs, regardless of who the nominee is. Stacking even more weight on that nominee by blocking their access to the Biden war chest—which only Harris can use—and alienating people of color, especially women of color, by passing over the Vice President when the President steps aside makes an already difficult campaign that much closer to unwinnable.
AOC says Democratic Congressmembers who are talking about surrender should quit their seats. Once again, I couldn’t agree more. Those of us in the “Joe Must Go” camp are here because we see the imperative of defeating Donald Trump and JD Vance. Most of the people in the “Run With Joe” camp, in my experience, feel the same way. Most of us out here, whether we want Biden out or in, are focused on beating Trump. We may disagree on the best way to achieve that, but the goal is a shared one. If sitting members of Congress are ready to give up in July, they need to find another line of work, and we need to make sure they are out of their jobs in the next primary.
AOC is concerned that the Republicans are already gearing up to challenge the Democratic nomination process in court—and that means the radical, ultra-right wing Supreme Court could once again decide the election. This is the most powerful point AOC made. It’s even more alarming because she said that, to her knowledge, none of her colleagues had thought through how to counter this strategy. That’s just shocking and appalling.
It’s not like the GOP is keeping this secret. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson clearly implied that they were looking into legal challenges. How can there be no plan in development to counter this? Are they just waiting for the lawsuit to drop and then they’ll assemble their constitutional lawyers to rebut it? That’s insane, given the slanted playing field they’ll be on. This is another point that all of us, whether we want Biden in or out, can and should unite around. Democrats absolutely must work on a counter-strategy here.
Now, this obviously suggests to some—and certainly does to AOC—that the safest route is to keep Biden as the nominee. But I differ. It’s clear that the GOP wants Biden to stay in the race. They believe, as I do, that he’s their weakest potential opponent.
Once we understand that point, the logical move is to unite around Harris. This is just one more way in which she is the only sensible choice if Biden can be convinced to step off. If Biden simply says his health doesn’t allow him to campaign to the fullest (which, let’s be honest, would be no lie), it’s almost as difficult to mount a challenge to the VP and his current running mate as the replacement as it would be if Biden stayed (in which case, I would not be surprised if the Republicans found a way to challenge even that, if need be). Nominating Harris is the only sensible choice if Biden stands aside, and this point AOC raises is one more reason why.
AOC says the polls have underestimated Biden before and are doing so again. There’s no way to sugar coat this one: she is plain wrong. This has become a mantra among Biden defenders, but it’s just not true. In 2020, Biden never trailed Trump, not even close. His narrow victory in the swing states was actually an underperformance compared to the polls. Polls significantly overestimated Biden’s performance, in fact. Polls are not precise measures, and they are not necessarily predictive. The public’s views can change in weeks or months, though polls are more dependable over time, as trends can be seen.
Biden’s numbers are significantly worse than they ever were in 2020 and have been for most of the past two years. The larger the sample size, the better the accuracy, so this doesn’t bode at all well for Biden. In any case, AOC needs a fact check on this point.
AOC says Biden is strong with older voters. She’s right about this, but she’s misinterpreting, or possibly misrepresenting what it means. AOC is concerned that older voters will be alienated by abandoning Biden, but older voters tend much more strongly to vote in all elections. Older voters are far more likely to continue to vote against Trump if they are Democrats or Democrat-leaning, simply because they tend much more strongly to come out to vote, whether they feel enthusiastic about a candidate or not. The variable for Democrats is younger voters, who are far more likely to not vote at all. It is a cliché, but it’s a true one: turnout is victory for Democrats. Older voters vote; younger voters don’t vote with nearly the same consistency. That’s where the focus needs to be if we are to defeat Trump.
The process is being driven by donors, not voters. While I agree the process has been terrible, this is simplistic and reductionist. As a result, it misses the mark. Yes, the donors are panicking, and in the end, it has been their withholding of cash and the pressure from the party’s political movers and shakers that have made Biden at least consider stepping aside. But that isn’t coming out of nowhere. Those donors and party insiders are seeing the rank and file voters despairing, discouraged, and deeply questioning Biden’s fitness for office. This is on top of the fact that, whatever Democrats say about the job Biden has done, many people don’t think he’s done at all well as President. His approval ratings have been awful for an exceptionally long time, and after the debate and the attention to his every misstep (and there have been many) Biden has little hope of changing their minds. That’s even more true given his own admitted limitations, of needing more rest and needing to schedule most of his public appearances earlier in the day. These limitations are severe handicaps given that the presidency is a 24/7 job and is even more intense in campaign season.
So, yes, it’s been donors, elected officials, and party insiders that have moved this process, but they’ve done so because they are scared that voters are turned off by Biden. And they have strong justifications for that fear.
That’s not the only concern about this process. Frankly, it’s been driven mostly by white people, and at that, mostly white men. Communities of color, people who look like AOC, have been more supportive of Biden, although a significant segment of those communities are also questioning. To my mind (and I say this recognizing that I am writing as a white man), that also strengthens the case for Harris as the replacement for Biden. I don’t suggest that as mere tokenism. What I’ve heard from communities of color who are supporting Biden staying in the race is that they have advocated for Biden’s agenda, and they voted for his second term run. Harris carries that same agenda forward, and she shared in that support. She might not be exactly like Biden in terms of policy, but Harris isn’t likely to depart radically from Biden’s policies either. And she was on the ticket people already voted for, the sham that was the primary race notwithstanding.
Conclusion. AOC made a good argument, although some of her points were flawed. I don’t think she was necessarily trying to convince people like me to reverse course and support Biden. As I’ve laid out, her argument isn’t convincing in that way. But she is absolutely right about the need to move forward in a much more sensible way than we have so far.
We absolutely need a strategy to address Republican legal challenges. Her warning about a far-right Supreme Court deciding our election is absolutely valid and terrifying. She is also right about avoiding an open convention. It is too late in the calendar for that, and there is every reason—both strategically and politically—to let Harris take the reins, armed with the argument that she was already on the ticket that people voted for in the Democratic primary, so if Biden steps aside, she has legitimacy in stepping in.
But AOC’s insistence on Biden staying in the race is misplaced. She makes a far stronger argument than Bernie Sanders did for Biden in his NY Times op-ed, but she is still misreading the political landscape. This disillusionment with Biden didn’t start with the debate. It’s been there for years, as his consistently poor approval ratings reflect. Contrary to Democratic mythology, Biden has underperformed his poll numbers and there is no reason to think that is going to change now.
Trump is too big a threat this time around. The Republicans have laid out ambitious plans to replace the shreds of democracy that exist in the United States with authoritarianism. This is not going to be anything like Trump’s first term. If the Republicans win the White House, they are highly likely to take the Senate, and have a neck-and-neck battle brewing for the House. They already own the Supreme Court.
No one can know the future. Maybe Biden can defy the massive odds and win. But the factors are all stacked extremely high against him. Harris will face an uphill battle too, but she stands a much better chance than Biden because she has the physical ability to campaign without limits, and much of the public hasn’t necessarily made up their minds about her yet. She has the potential to grow her base of support, which Biden—as known a quantity as you can get—does not.
Biden must step aside, and the Democrats need to get serious about organizing a strategy to confront the GOP and unite around Kamala Harris, because she is the person who has the best chance to beat Trump. Time is growing short.