I enjoyed reading this candid conversation among left-leaning columnists at the Washington Post about Biden’s candidacy. The conversation was moderated by Chris Suellentrip, the politics opinion editor of the Post.
What do you think?
President Biden is 80 years old and is running for a second term, more or less unopposed, in the Democratic primary. So I gathered a group of our left-leaning columnists for a conversation over email and asked: How do you feel about that?
Has Biden failed to be a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders, as he pledged to be in 2020? Should he have declared himself “one (term) and done,” like a college basketball star? Should the party have held a competitive primary instead of clearing the field, as is traditional for an incumbent president? Is the fascination with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s not-gonna-happen campaign a sign of nervousness about Biden 2024 in some portion of the Democratic primary electorate? And will you change your mind about any of these things if someone other than Donald Trump is the 2024 Republican nominee?
Dana Milbank: If hand-wringing translated into votes, Democrats would never lose an election. I find their fretting over Biden’s age tedious — and probably exaggerated by the disinformation from the right portraying him as drooling and senile. The wandering speeches, the gaffes and the other traits people now assign to his advanced age are the same traits I observed when covering him in the 1990s.
As a Gen Xer, sure, I would have preferred if Biden had offered himself as a one-term anti-Trump savior and cleared the way for a new generation. But a competitive primary would only have turned him into Carter ’80. It’s also just as likely that a decision not to run for reelection would have had the effect of anointing Kamala D. Harris, who by virtue of being a woman of color would make it easier for Trump to foment a 2016-style backlash of racism and misogyny.
Would all this change if Trump (or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) isn’t the GOP nominee? Well, sure. I suppose if Asa Hutchinson were the nominee it wouldn’t matter as much whom the Democrats put up, because he wouldn’t pose the same existential threat to American democracy. But I’m not yet declaring victory for Hutchinson.
Jennifer Rubin: So Biden is 80. Live with it. He’s certainly sharp enough to have solidified and expanded NATO, snookered Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in the debt ceiling negotiations and racked up as impressive a first-term domestic record as any incumbent in memory. If inflation is less than 3 percent and job growth is still strong on Election Day, Biden will have pulled off the near-impossible soft-landing (with Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell as his co-pilot).
Paul Waldman: Of course Biden’s age is a concern, even if at the moment it’s only a theoretical one. The presidency is an extraordinarily demanding job, and it would have to be a pretty unusual 86-year-old (the age Biden would be at the end of a second term) who could handle it. But we haven’t yet seen any evidence of age having an effect on Biden’s decision-making or his energy. There are occasions when he appears old in public — a shuffling gait, a momentary inability to find the word he’s looking for — but that’s not the same as him not being able to perform the job.
For all the talk of building a bridge to the next generation, Biden was never going to serve one term and step down. He spent half a century trying to get to the Oval Office, and he won’t leave it voluntarily.
Perry Bacon Jr.: I am not thrilled that Joe Biden is running for a second term.
His approval ratings are significantly lower than Bill Clinton’s, George W. Bush’s or Barack Obama’s were at this stage of their presidencies, midway through their third years in office.
They are very similar to Trump’s numbers. In polls of a potential 2024 matchup, Biden is effectively tied with Trump. Biden would be the favorite against Trump (and probably DeSantis). But that’s because of how unpopular those two Republicans are, not Biden’s political strength.
I think the driving factor here is Biden’s age. People just feel like he is too old. I personally don’t see any evidence that Americans shouldbe worried about his health or mental capacity. But I hear concerns about his age all the time from people in my life who aren’t partisan Democrats. This concern about age shows up in basically every poll.
I think an incumbent Democratic president with Biden’s record who wasn’t 80 years old would be more popular and therefore have a better chance in next year’s election. And while I don’t think just any Democrat under age 80 (or 70) who was the party’s presumptive nominee would be polling better than Biden is against Trump, I think many younger Democrats would be stronger candidates in a 2024 general election.
For example, it seems pretty clear that if Democrats could agree, without a primary, that the party’s 2024 ticket would be Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (Mich.) as president and Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (Ga.) as vice president, that would be stronger electorally than Biden-Harris. Or say, Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.). What I mean is a ticket with a White person and a person of color, a man and a woman, two people who are generally in the mainstream of the party ideologically — and no one over age 70.
But there is no magic way to skip a primary, of course!
Ruth Marcus: Riffing off of how Perry phrased it, I wish Biden did not have to run for a second term. He is too old. No, he is not the drooler of overheated GOP imaginings, but he has slowed down, obviously and measurably. And 80 is too old, period, for the demanding job of the presidency. Let the torch be passed, etc.
Except for this: Biden needs to run. He (and Democrats) are correct about that assessment. If he were to have announced that he was stepping aside, the internecine warfare that would have erupted over Harris, the heiress apparent, versus everyone else, would have torn the party apart, or risked doing so, and opened the door too wide to risk a Republican president being elected.
And not just Trump. He is the biggest, most existential risk, and the primary driver of my “Biden must run” mentality. I used to believe Trump was a singular threat, and that there would not be Trumpism without Trump. But that was wrong. The forces he has unleashed are powerful and dangerous, and exist even in his absence from the scene. From my point of view, the risk to the Supreme Court alone is enough to justify doing whatever it takes to maximize the chance of a Democrat being elected (which means: Biden, Biden, Biden).
Eugene Robinson: Look, we all wish that Biden were, say, 60 instead of 80. But is there a younger Democrat who could have beaten Donald Trump in 2020? I doubt it. And is there a younger Democrat who could beat Trump in 2024? Maybe. I like Perry’s ticket of Whitmer and Warnock. But I don’t like the idea of taking another existential gamble with our democracy. If Trump is the GOP nominee, which seems likely, this will almost surely be another close election. We don’t have landslides anymore; and no matter how queasy Republican voters might be about four more years of Trump’s insanity, we should expect most of them to support their party’s nominee. It is unwise to count on the justice system to bail the nation out. On Election Day, Biden will be 82 and Trump will be 78. The “age issue” should be de minimus.
And, not incidentally, Biden has been a highly effective president who has instituted policies, at home and abroad, that I support. A president with his record deserves a second term — and congressional majorities to go along with it.
Greg Sargent: Improbably, Biden has been the guy with enough appeal to the middle needed to both beat Trump and to pass (parts of) a historically progressive agenda (bringing Bernie Sanders into the tent) while recasting it to the electorate (including affluent suburbanites who supposedly lean right economically) as sensible moderation. Biden seems uniquely well-positioned to not just beat Trump again but also to cement a broad, center-left ideological consensus with paradigm-shifting durability.
As for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., historically there have always been candidates who tap into disaffected pro-insurgent constituencies in the Democratic Party (Bill Bradley, Howard Dean, etc.). Kennedy represents a particularly ideologically heterodox and unbalanced version of this. It’s hard to imagine his support, such as it is, says anything meaningful or predictive about eventual support for Biden.
E.J. Dionne Jr.: Early in the administration, I thought Biden wouldn’t seek a second term. He would find it appealing, I thought, to declare that he had achieved what he promised when he decided to run in the first place. He saved the country from a Trump second term, defended democracy, solved a bunch of big problems, restored the country’s standing abroad, notched a number of bipartisan victories and created an opening for a better kind of politics. Call it the Cincinnatus Option. He would spend the rest of his term being more praised than damned, the Republicans would have less interest in attacking him, and his popularity would go up because a lot of Americans (with their instinctive mistrust of politicians) would admire someone who could walk away from power.
That still sounds pretty good to me, but it’s not what happened. The reason it didn’t is, as Greg suggested, that Biden might be the only Democrat who can sit atop the various factions of the Democratic Party and bring them together.
If you ask yourself why Democrats are united behind Biden, why only cranks are running against him, it’s because Democrats across their various divisions agree that now is not the time for ideological Armageddon, which is what would happen if Biden stepped aside. And anyone who claims that a tough primary would be good for Biden should consider history. When they were incumbents, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were all weakened by primary fights (against Ronald Reagan, Ted Kennedy and Pat Buchanan, respectively), and they all lost in the general election.
Does Biden’s age create challenges? Of course. Especially against anyone other than Trump. At the margins, Biden’s age could cost him votes, and the margins matter. My hunch is that Biden’s camp will try to find subtle ways of making his age at least a partial asset by stressing his seasoning, wisdom, experience, etc. It won’t be easy, but they have to do some of this. His camp also made a mistake by not lifting up Harris early on and trying to turn her into an asset. They have realized this and are working on doing that now. Biden’s age means more voters will be looking at her as a possible successor, and her favorability ratings need to go up.
Rubin: It’s a relief to have an empathetic, decent human being in the White House. While it is fashionable to pine for someone new and young, with our democracy still frightfully fragile and with war raging in Europe, I don’t think a younger governor or senator would be a better choice. Biden can pass the baton in 2028. Maybe with age comes some old-fashioned sense of propriety, civic virtue, common courtesy and, dare we say, dignity. I’ll take it.
Milbank: I think the Biden-is-too-old theme is itself a demonstration that we’re all forced to live in a world shaped by disinformation from the right. We’ve been hearing from Fox News since the 2020 campaign (when Biden was hidden in his “basement”) about Biden’s “cognitive decline” and his struggle to “string two sentences together.” He has been routinely described since then as “senile,” as a man with “obviously declining mental faculties” who is “a cognitive mess, and he has no idea that today is Wednesday.” During the debt ceiling fight, Kevin McCarthy offered to bring “soft food” to the White House for Biden. After the debt deal, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) marveled that “Republicans got outsmarted by a president who can’t find his pants.”
There’s every reason to believe this “senile” old coot will outwit his Republican opponent in ’24.
Sargent: Democrats have won or outperformed in the last three national elections. Yet we’re still constantly running down rabbit holes into debates about why Dems suck so much at politics and how Trump continues to outfox them among working-class voters.
Democratic struggles with some working-class constituencies are real, but some proportion is in order here. MAGA continues to alienate a majority of the country.
Robinson: I’ve had a couple of occasions to spend extended periods of time with Biden, including a long chat on Air Force One, and I can attest that whatever else anybody thinks about him, he’s not senile. And I’ve seen him turn a scheduled quick half-hour of meet-and-greet with supporters into an hour-plus marathon, at the end of a long day, that exhausted aides half his age.
Dionne: Without formally breaking with either Clinton or Obama, Biden has moved the party’s policymaking past the consensus that influenced those earlier administrations. His appointments have given the party’s progressive wing a strong voice in areas such as labor rights, civil rights, trade and antitrust, even as he has kept the party’s more middle-ground legislators and voters on his side — by, for example, refusing to challenge the Federal Reserve’s efforts to contain inflation (even if the administration devoutly hopes it lets up on rate increases).
And the president’s economic record turns out to be very good. Inflation has come down much faster than Biden’s critics expected, and the country has so far avoided the recession many of those detractors predicted. It’s a long way between now and November 2024, but at least for now, Biden has the better of the economic argument.
The age issue is obviously one of the right’s favorite talking points, but from my own encounters, I share Gene Robinson’s view that a picture of Biden as some sort of doddering old guy is flatly wrong. Biden is especially sharp when he turns to U.S. foreign policy and makes a persuasive case that the United States is now in a much stronger position in the world, partly because it is building alliances across Asia to contain China’s power. Foreign policy won’t decide the next election, but voters who have a sense of security are more likely to support the incumbent.
But realism requires coming to terms with the age issue anyway. Like it or not, Biden’s age will be brought into play whenever he makes a miscue or garbles a sentence or stumbles or looks less forceful — even if whatever is going wrong has nothing to do with his age. Beneath the surface, the Biden forces know it’s something they have to struggle with, not because of what Fox News commentators will say but because of conversations among not particularly ideological voters over back fences and in neighborhood cafes.
Bacon: If the Democrats’ only potential options for the 2024 ticket were: 1) Nominate Biden without a real primary; 2) Conduct a primary in which Harris would likely win without any serious challenge; 3) Conduct a primary in which Harris carried the Black primary vote overwhelmingly but lost to someone with a heavily White base (say Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg), I can see why the party kind of informally opted for No. 1. After all, Harris wasn’t a great candidate in 2019, few Black voters backed Buttigieg in that primary and Biden has the electoral advantages of being White, male and the incumbent president.
But I suspect there were two other potential outcomes, if Biden had announced in January that he was not seeking a second term: 4) Harris wins against a crowded primary field and in doing so demonstrates she is a strong candidate for a general election, like Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016; or 5) Harris runs but another candidate (say, Whitmer) builds a broad coalition and decisively defeats her in the primary.
So I am frustrated that Democrats are running a candidate who in my view is too conciliatory and centrist in the face of a radicalized Republican Party, but also a candidate whose centrism and conciliation isn’t being rewarded by centrist/independent/swing voters with more approval and support. Biden’s age makes his reelection really dicey — something voters keep saying in poll after poll but the Democratic Party has decided to ignore.
All that said, Biden has been fairly good on policy and would be much better than any of the Republicans running. So I will be voting for him next November without any hesitation. I think he has been a better president than Clinton or Obama. He has been less centrist and cautious than I expected. He has embraced the progressive thinking that emerged from 2013 to 2020, instead of being stuck in old ways. He has appointed some great judges, most notably Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. He has also been very pro-labor and more skeptical of big business than other modern presidents.
The Democratic Party has moved in a more liberal direction — and Biden moved with the party. Great.
Waldman: The good news for Democrats is that, at the moment at least, they have so much going for them heading into 2024: a strong economy, a broadly popular agenda, and an opposition committed to a hateful politics that their base seems to want, but that a majority of the electorate finds repugnant.
Finally, you have the likely nomination of Trump, who cost the GOP the elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022. Everything that made people choose Biden over Trump three years ago — that Biden is a decent human being with conciliatory impulses who would govern in a responsible way — is no less true today than it was then. So for all the unease among Democrats (which Perry is absolutely right about), they’re in about as good a position as they could have hoped for.
