Would Democrats be better off replacing Biden?

I often see claims that President Joe Biden’s polling is so weak, while the party brand is holding up sufficiently well, that the party should open up the nomination for someone else to take over as its standard bearer in 2024.

I do not believe it. Why? Basically, when you have an incumbent eligible for reelection, opening up a contested nomination process is an own goal. It is far more likely to help the other side than to help you.

But maybe my take assumes an incumbency advantage that won’t actually be there in 2024. Well, yes, it does. And maybe it won’t be. The thing is, either there is an incumbency advantage, or the party is going to lose. Either Biden is strong enough and voters happy enough that Biden wins reelection, or the winds blow against Biden and take down his replacement nominee just as they would have taken him down personally. It would be hard to find whatever narrow window there is through which Biden himself weighs down the party, but the party could find an alternative who could save it. Maybe the window exists, but good luck locating it, let alone locating the perfect candidate to ride to victory in both a primary and a general.

Basically, in presidential systems and the “presidentialized” parties that result, any election is a referendum on the incumbent–whether he is personally on the ballot or not. It gets even harder for a party when its own standard bearer is under pressure to differentiate himself or herself from the co-partisan incumbent. It gets harder still when the alternative standard bearer would have needed to explain how he or she would be different in order to win the nomination. And that is surely a task that the winner of a primary would have to accomplish, and would also be a question that would come up throughout the general election campaign.

Perhaps the “how different” problem vanishes if there is a “coronation” of an alternative rather than a long competitive process. The more viable candidates, and the longer it takes, logically the more the winner has had to emphasize differences with both the incumbent and the other challengers. I do not see how this could work out well for the party.

It is possible that in an ideal world there would be a seamless transition to a new standard bearer. Perhaps even the incumbent would resign, the Vice President would take over, and no one would put up a serious challenge to her as the nominee. This is fantasy. It also assumes Biden has real problems with reelection, which, current polling aside, I do not believe.

Yes, Biden is old, but the evidence that this is affecting his abilities is just not present. If it were “common knowledge” that he could not perform his duties, I might change the argument I am putting out here. But such common knowledge is lacking. (Whether he might be incompetent at the end of a second term is not relevant, in my opinion, because few actors in this whole process really look that far ahead. It is all too speculative. I care only about 2024 in assessing this question.)

Bottom line, if he is weak enough that the party should replace him, the party is weak enough that it has bigger problems than Biden. And I do not believe that is the case.

And finally there is one more problem, which only makes all the above worse for the “change the nominee” crowd. It is not as if there exists a PARTY with authority to order Biden off the ticket. US parties do not work that way. I suspect most presidentialized parties do not have that ability in practice, although there may be exceptions in some other presidential systems. Seeking reelection is, ultimately, his choice, and other actors can only complicate whether he can pull it off, or go along for the ride. That’s presidentialization!