President Joe Biden’s flailing reelection campaign shows that blind party loyalty to the status quo can, in fact, cost parties elections.
All the alarms are blaring about Biden’s campaign, given that he is consistently polling behind former President Donald Trump despite having beaten Trump in 2020, Biden being the incumbent, and Trump being Trump. A Rasmussen Reports poll found that 54% of Democrats would like to replace Biden on the ballot, while a February poll from ABC News and the Washington Post found that 73% of Democrats think Biden is too old to serve as president.
Now, anonymous Democratic operatives are leaking to Politico in a piece headlined “Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden” that they are worried, but no one wants to be the one to say so publicly. Therein lies the problem. Democrats would not indulge any serious criticism of Biden and his age and declining mental faculties, lining up behind him and deluding themselves into thinking that their overperformance compared to expectations in the 2022 midterm elections meant that Biden was popular.
In fact, Democrats did not even indulge mostly unserious challenges to Biden in the Democratic primary, blocking ballot access for lesser candidates such as Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) while high-profile could-be challengers lined up behind Biden. This was all on the assumption that pushing Biden out in a contested primary would be damaging to the party, which it could have been. But it was clear all along that Biden’s candidacy would undoubtedly be damaging, with his historically low approval and the mental decline at his age being on display for the entire country.
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Blind party loyalty to the status quo of Biden being the president and therefore anointing him as the nominee prevented Democrats from replacing him with a younger candidate who would offer greater contrasts with Trump. You could point and say that Vice President Kamala Harris or Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) would then be the nominee, both with their own unpopularity and political baggage, but that only further proves the point. Blind party loyalty to the status quo is why Harris is where she is, immune from criticism from her own party despite her obvious lack of political talent. It is the same for Newsom, who has presided over a failed state in California that keeps failing because state Democrats can never admit their mistakes.
There is no point in choosing not to rock the boat when the boat is riddled with holes and sinking like a rock. Democratic politicos panicking over Biden’s campaign should have known where this would be going, and the party should have been willing to punt the historically old and unpopular president when it had the chance. This should be a lesson to both parties that sometimes committing to their status quo of “leadership” can be more of a death sentence in elections than choosing to change things up.