What The Campaign Is For

Biden is the candidate. The stakes are existential. The whole point of a campaign is that poll numbers in July are not immutable destiny.

I gave a lecture on the fundamentals of effective advocacy to a group of high school students yesterday afternoon. It was 99 degrees outside. I opened with an offhand remark that they had chosen a great summer to visit DC, because “this will be the coldest summer of the rest of your lives.”

They didn’t laugh. I wasn’t joking.

I mention this because the very best-case scenario in a second Trump administration is that we lose four more years to climate inaction. He will claw back implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, decimate the EPA and other agencies, appoint judges who are ticking time bombs for any future efforts, and back out of all international commitments.

This isn’t the most-likely scenario. The most-likely scenario is much, much worse. Project 2025 is designed to subvert electoral democracy as a whole. The authors of that document will be senior officials in his administration. In the best-case scenario, they prove to be such bumbling idiots that not much comes of their plans. The most-likely scenario is that they are bumbling idiots who still cause lasting harm that requires decades to undo.

And the worst-case scenario is outright fascism. The Claremont Institute has been writing fan fiction for years about a post-democratic reign of christian nationalists. They’ll be in the administration too. We should take them seriously in a way that CNN panels and the New York Times Editorial Board simply are not.

But still, even for the pundit-class optimists who find it comforting to insist “let’s lower the temperature. Democracy isn’t at risk,” there is something willfully obtuse about their reasoning here. Ask yourself whether we have another four years of climate inaction to burn through.

We do not. We simply don’t.

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I turned on CNN last night to watch the RNC. I wanted to see Sean O’Brien’s speech and find out if he was as much of a fool as he seemed to be. (Read Hamilton Nolan’s latest. Short-version: yeah, Sean O’Brien is a chump and a sellout.)

The CNN panel only showed bits and pieces of the speaker lineup. They mostly broke in to talk about (1) how united the Republican Party is behind Trump, (2) how enthusiastic they were after the heroic imagery from Saturday night, and (3) Lester Holt’s NBC interview with Joe Biden, in which Biden continued to both be old and running for President.

The clear consensus of the panel was that Biden is inevitably going to lose. The country has already rejected him and unless the Democratic Party does something drastic (and dramatic! Think of the ratings!) then we’ll all just be living under Trump. It occurs to me that the excuse the news networks gave in 2016 for not taking Trump’s agenda seriously was that they didn’t really think he would win. Now, in 2024, they excuse they are giving for not taking his agenda seriously is that he is bound to win. This is cowards’ logic. I don’t know what else you could call it.

I turned off CNN. It has become unwatchable.

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For what it’s worth, I would prefer if Joe Biden left the race. I have come to believe that Kamala Harris would be the stronger candidate. Biden has been a very good President. The Presidency ages everyone, and his aging is particularly hard to miss. He hasn’t actually lost much ground in national polls since the debate. But for months he has been slightly trailing. He needs to make up ground. And that is going to be hard to do when the RNC is caricaturing him as “too old” and the mainstream media is caricaturing him as “too old” and then every photo and video clip potentially reinforces that caricature. That’s a tough hill to climb. With the stakes as high as they are, I’d prefer an easier path.

But that doesn’t matter. Joe Biden isn’t going to step down. He won all the primaries. He has all the delegates. The only path to a non-Biden nominee was for him to choose to stand aside. There was a window, of about a week or so, when that was possible. The window has closed. He has done 22 public events since the debate. He has been fine in all of them. Not great. Not spritely. But fine. Much better than the debate, certainly.

I understand there are a few last-ditch efforts to get him to reconsider. Members of Congress are quietly murmuring. Pollsters are sharing polling numbers that look real bad. As Taniel noted last night, Biden is running 11-14% behind the Democratic Senate candidates in multiple swing states. That isn’t great.

But he isn’t going to leave because the-polls-in-July-look-bad. He is going to insist that he can campaign his way out of bad polling. And he might be right. He had better be right.

And just to be clear, those poll results are real. The polls aren’t rigged. They don’t need to be unskewed. Willful denial isn’t much help to anyone. If the election were held today, Biden would most likely lose. But polling numbers can change.

That’s what the campaign is for.

This, I strongly suspect, is why both AOC and Bernie Sanders have strongly endorsed Biden. They recognized that he wasn’t going to choose to leave, and concluded “okay, well this is going to be our guy, so we’d better campaign like hell to get him reelected.”

The progressive wing of the party tends to believe in campaigning in a way that moderate like Jared Golden do not. Progressives believe that the way you win victories is by actively campaigning for them, usually against long odds. The moderate wing of the party tends to believe that you win by raising a big pile of money, paying consultants to tell you what’s popular, and then running an ad blitz to inform voters about your courageous centrism. Progressives can sometimes lie to themselves about how unlikely the path to victory actually is. But the moderate wing is just as likely to lie themselves into complacency, insisting that there’s simply nothing to be done.

This is all to say that, if I was Biden’s Chief of Staff, I’d still be privately nudging him that the best way to secure his legacy is to pass the torch. But I’m not his Chief of Staff. And neither are you. So, unless we’re resigned to twiddling our fingers while the world literally burns, it’s probably time to get behind our President and push real hard.

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What’s more, the polling is not catastrophic. Nothing moves the polls very much these days. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts didn’t move the polls. Biden’s debate performance didn’t move the polls. The failed Trump assassination attempt most likely won’t move the polls either.

2024 is, in a very real sense, the first post-social media election. People used to get their news from the tv and newspaper. Then we had a decade of news-via-google, followed by a decade of news-via-big-social-feeds. Now the big social feeds have been fractured and nothing has replaced them yet. The subset of the public that tunes in for national politics basically have their minds already made up on Trump-v-Biden.

That ought to change in the final couple months of the election, as the broader public presumably tunes in. One thing we know pretty well from political science research on presidential campaigning is that general election campaigns have limited persuasive impact, but they serve to bring voters back to the candidate they would likely have supported anyway. A good campaign brings wayward Biden voters back home. It doesn’t convince imaginary centrist voters who are genuinely undecided up until the last minute. (y’all should be reading folks like Seth Masket, Julia Azari, and Jonathan Bernstein, btw. They know a lot more than I do.)

The Democratic Party has 111 days to convince the 11-14% of voters in Wisconsin and Virginia who currently support the Democratic Senate candidate but aren’t so sure about Biden that his administration has done a good job and they really don’t want to live through Trump’s YOLO-revenge-fantasy of a second term. Plenty of people currently saying responding to pollsters with “eh, Biden’s too old for another term” could decide by Nov “nope. Absofuckinglutely not. We aren’t electing Trump again.”

That is what the campaign is for.

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The Tech Barons, by the way, have made it very clear who they support. Elon Musk officially endorsed Trump over the weekend. David Sacks spoke at the convention last night. Musk also announced that he would be donating $45 million per month to a Trump-supporting SuperPAC.

I wrote a piece for Tech Policy Press last week about the a16z and the rest of Silicon Valley’s failkings dressing up their embrace of authoritarianism as ackshually being about startups and economic freedom. Here’s the bit that directly overlaps with Trump-v-Biden:

This is the main reason why so much of Silicon Valley has decided to embrace the candidacy of former President Donald Trump. It isn’t that tech leaders necessarily love incompetent authoritarians. It isn’t because they believe any of his promises. It’s that they have spent 3.5 years facing Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and they cannot handle answering to a competent regulator anymore.

(…)

This is what the “Little Tech Agenda” is fighting against. They are opposed to having an FTC that prevents outright fraud. (…)This is why many VCs would much prefer autocracy to accountability.

Musk and his groupchat pals stand to make a lot of money off of a second Trump administration. They’ll be awarded government contracts. Their employees and customers will have lawsuits tossed out of court. Regulators won’t bother to conduct any oversight. J.D. Vance is a Peter Thiel protege who started his venture capital fund with Marc Andreessen’s backing. Project 2025 will put a lot of cash in the hands of a select few individuals.

The good news is that their money cannot outright buy the election. Donald Trump is a bad candidate and a horrible person. He has been convicted of 34 felony counts, and found liable for committing defamation of the woman he raped. He was the worst President in history, a nightmare that people have largely forgotten because the pandemic has rendered everything pre-2020 the before-times.

I do absolutely believe that Joe Biden can run a campaign to remind a majority of voters of what a disaster Donald J. Trump was as President, and convince them to elect Biden to a second term.

I do not believe it will be easy. I wish it was easier.

But Joe Biden is the candidate. And the stakes are existential. And this is what campaigns are for.