Joe Biden and the Incumbent Advantage

Eric Medlin

History instructor. Writer. Rising star in the world of affordable housing.

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41 Responses

  1. Dark Matter says:

    Democrats should know better.

    Good thing the word “should” is in there.

    Having said that, Trump is not strong.Report

  2. Brandon Berg says:

    Meanwhile, history is not kind to parties that dump their incumbents. Those rejections are few and far between in the nation’s history, and in almost every instance they result in disaster. In 1952, Democrats rejected incumbent Harry Truman and instead chose Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson was trounced by Dwight Eisenhower in the general election, losing by more than 300 Electoral College votes. Lyndon Johnson, rejected by primary voters in 1968, was replaced on the ticket by Hubert Humphrey, who lost the Electoral College by over 100 votes.

    Not that I’m endorsing dumping Biden—for all his faults, he’s probably the best we can expect from Democratic primary voters, and I’d back his embalmed corpse over Katie Porter—but you can’t really draw any firm conclusions from that few data points, and what little data we have are biased by the facts that dumping the incumbent is usually a hail Mary play when the party is already in a bad place.Report

    • Pinky in reply to Brandon Berg says:

      That was my thought as well. 1968 wasn’t a turbulent year because Johnson wasn’t on the ticket; Johnson wasn’t on the ticket because 1968 was a turbulent year. Now, I do think something’s different this time: Biden is infirm, and I’d say (certainly for foreign policy) better any fit president than any unfit one. I think Eric’s underselling the depth of the story, whether out of spin or self-spin, I don’t know. And I might be overdramatizing Biden’s condition too, because I don’t like him. But if you ask 330 million random strangers whether Biden in 2 years is going to look ready for another 4, I don’t see him getting a thumbs-up.Report

    • PD Shaw in reply to Brandon Berg says:

      I agree, causation is hard to determine. The usual examples given against challenging an incumbent (Reagan against Ford; Kennedy against Carter) are of failed challenges, and they have the advantage of preceding close election losses. But it still seems like Ford and Carter were weak candidates even with incumbent advantages.

      OTOH, Truman and Johnson’s incumbency advantage was weakened by their length. Truman served almost 8 years and would have been ineligible for re-election but for being grandfathered by the recent 22nd Amendment. Johnson had served just under six years. Presidential popularity has historically waned after four years. Part, maybe most, of the reason Washington left office was the growing personal attacks and rancor directed at him during his second term.Report

    • Koz in reply to Brandon Berg says:

      Not that I’m endorsing dumping Biden—for all his faults, he’s probably the best we can expect from Democratic primary voters, and I’d back his embalmed corpse over Katie Porter—but you can’t really draw any firm conclusions from that few data points, and what little data we have are biased by the facts that dumping the incumbent is usually a hail Mary play when the party is already in a bad place.

      I’d endorse dumping Biden. That’s to say I would if I were a Democrat trying to figure out the best chance for Demos to hold the White House in 2024 (obviously I’m not).

      Two reason already mentioned by the other commenters:

      1. There’s not enough data to make any real conclusions.
      2. For the examples that typically are cited, the causality is backwards. The incumbent is doing poorly for whatever reasons, and attracts primary challenges.

      But there’s also a third reason why it’s a good idea to get rid of Biden before he runs for reelection, and for this one I have to give some credit to the Left twitterati Will Stancil.

      One of Will’s ideas is the “main vibe”. That is, you can’t strategize around events and policies in strictly objective terms, you also have to consider the grassroots Americans and the frame of reference they will interpret the events with, ie the “main vibe”.

      At this point, Will gets it exactly wrong. His idea is you can’t really know the main vibe, so Demos should flood the zone with as much inflammatory bullsiht they can with lib cable nets and legacy media (and social media). Meanwhile, they should implement whatever policy the lib staff/activist class likes.

      But even if Will’s inferences are wrong, the basic idea of the main vibe has a lot of value. There’s a lot of frustrations among Demos (including Demos working high up in the Biden Administration) that they got killed on Afghanistan but aren’t getting any credit for Ukraine. Or alternatively, they’re getting killed on inflation, but they’re not getting any benefit for a good employment environment. And Will is right here: you could come up with objective reasons why one is registering and another isn’t, but when push comes to shove you have to say the real juice in the matter is a vibe-y thing.

      Will’s mistake is to think that the main vibe is fundamentally too obscure to understand directly. I disagree. Especially now, the main vibe is actually pretty simple. In fact, there’s two main vibes in circulation right now, both of them cutting hard against the Democrats.

      1. Lib/Demo activists suck. In the full picture, this needs a little more nuance because Demo voters actually like Demo activists, but still they are never accepted as final decisionmakers.
      2. Biden is a lazy, mentally compromised doofus. This is self-explanatory, and needs no further nuance at all.

      This is why it’s in the best interest for Demos to get rid of Biden ASAP. Fundamentally, nothing is going to improve the political standing for the Demos while Biden is still President. If something good happens, it’s either dumb luck or more likely, an apolitical thing that happened to go our way. But if something bad happens, it’s that fcuking ignorant Biden’s fault. And so Demos are stuck playing a game of heads we lose, tails we tie.

      If Biden is forced out by intraparty conflict, yeah Demos are going to have to pay the piper for that and take some hits and bad feelings, but then at least they get the chance to heal. They don’t have to deal with Biden reading the stage directions on his Teleprompter as a substantive part of his speech, or gaffes of a similar nature in the coming months and years.

      They have the chance to get a head start on putting the problems of their current situation in the past, and hope to create a more compelling main vibe that may actually cut in their favor.Report

  3. John Puccio says:

    I believe this is the 2nd piece by the author on the topic in which he does not include the President’s obvious cognitive decline in his calculus. Hard to take the argument seriously without an attempt to address the obvious.Report

    • Pinky in reply to John Puccio says:

      I think that now that the NYT is starting to write about it, it’s something that liberals are going to allow themselves to notice. This article feels like a last stand for the admirers of the Emperor’s clothes. But campaigning and fundraising take a lot of time, and the Democrats have to be ready with some kind of plan by mid-November – Harris, an open primary, or actually running Biden again – or the Republicans are going to get ahead of them.

      I don’t see Harris as charismatic enough to get the nod. The only way would be for the Democrats to keep the Cabinet members in separate rooms for a year and a half, then have Harris be a new incumbent going into 2024. Think Johnson in 1964. “The country doesn’t need another shock.” And Harris not getting the nod would only lead to identity group olympics. So I think in a few months, someone’s going to have to hand Biden a sheet of paper with his retirement speech on it and walk him toward a podium.Report

      • John Puccio in reply to Pinky says:

        The smartest thing the DNC did during the home stretch of the 2020 election was lock Joe in his basement. They won’t have that luxury 2 years from now.

        I never thought he would go for a 2nd term and it’s pretty obvious that the powers that be are guiding the Democrats to that inevitability. Mayor Pete didn’t take the job he doesn’t want in order to wait 8 years. Now you have Newsome starting to stretch his legs with the Florida trolling. We will see more of the contenders clamor for attention over the next year – and then yes – the inevitable LBJ speech. I just hope Joe can read the teleprompterReport

      • Dark Matter in reply to Pinky says:

        If Biden stepped down right now, Harris would be incumbent President going into the election.Report

        • Pinky in reply to Dark Matter says:

          Mathematically, yes. But she’s not what you’d call bright, or likeable, or experienced, or coherent. If people see her in action, the Democrats have a really hard sell in 2024, particularly if she’s in office for 2.5 years and has a recession and international crises left and right (and there’s good reason to think the next 2.5 years will look like that). If the Democrats want her to succeed in 2024, they should keep her behind the scenes as things get worse and worse, and the D’s suffer big losses in November, then she can emerge in, let’s say, late 2023 as the new president and have a feeling of momentum behind her. It’d be racist and sexist to say she was doing a bad job after only a few months, after all.

          For the record, I don’t believe that Biden can perform the job right now. This is what the 25th Amendment is for. I don’t see the Democrats using it any time soon, though, because it would hurt them politically. Their best hope is to have Biden in office through at least 2023 but have him agree to step down. Expect to hear a lot of talk along those lines in the next four months.Report

          • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

            He’s at least at as competent at being president as Trump was. More so in that he actually understands how government works.Report

            • Dark Matter in reply to Philip H says:

              You say that like it’s an endorsement.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Dark Matter says:

                I’m simply pointing out that trumps mental acuity was never really in question – other parts of his ability to lead and govern were and still are but not his brain function.

                Biden is both as mentally competent as Trump was – if not more – and more effective the Trump at governing because he actually knows how the executive branch works.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

                Are you conceding that all the “Trump mental decline” news stories were political hit pieces?Report

              • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

                I rarely gave them credence. He didn’t help himself by responding to them. Frankly his performance of actual governance was bad enough.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

                Did it affect your willingness to believe those news sources?Report

            • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

              We can argue about the word “competent”, but Trump proved himself consistently capable of being the kind of president that the voters could have reasonably expected in November 2016. That’s not a statement in defense of the voters or the Electoral College, or the House and Senate impeachments. It’s simply a statement that the 25th Amendment was rightly never invoked.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

                The only reason that Trump governed anywhere near effectively is that he had an army of 2 million highly capable federal civil servants who actually made most of government work despite his vicissitudes.

                And yes, we got exactly the guy we expected in 2016.Report

  4. Damon says:

    Biden may have been slow RE Roe v Wade, but he seems a bit more “slow” on doing anything about the inflation. You know some of the left are “disappointed” when papers publish this:

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11025383/With-blatant-lies-inflation-believe-Bidens-White-House-asks-ANDY-PUZDER.html

    “Joe Biden’s administration has consistently lied and lied again to the American people about the economy.”

    Inflation: welcome to 1981 🙂Report

  5. Philip H says:

    I have a hard time believing that a conservative rag in the UK has any idea how Americans feel about inflation. And considering that the author is from a radical conservative American PAC< one has to wonder why none of the conservative US outlets would publish him.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Philip H says:

      I think that inflation is one of those things that is easy to guess how others feel about, though.

      Like, let’s say that China was going through massive inflation right now.

      I could write an essay about how Chinese people feel about it. “I used to be able to buy a month’s worth of groceries for only 675 Yuan! Now it costs me almost 1000! It’s frustrating. I have had to cut back on tea ceremonies and calligraphy. THANK GOODNESS XI JINPING IS SHEPARDING US THROUGH THESE TROUBLED TIMES. HE IS A GREAT AND GLORIOUS LEADER UNLIKE THE FOOLISH DONALD TRUMP AND THE SENILE JOE BIDEN.”Report

    • Damon in reply to Philip H says:

      Do you mean “conservative” in terms of wich most American’s understand or are you comparing the Mail’s “conservative bias” against other media like The Intercept or Slate?Report

      • Philip H in reply to Damon says:

        The Mail is best known in the UK for being a gossip rag, interspersed with conservative political coverage in the sense conservative would be understood in the US.

        And again one has to wonder why the American author was not able to be published in the US.Report

    • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

      Does it bother you that the article doesn’t talk at all about how Americans feel about inflation? It twice asserts that Americans know the economy is in trouble. Nothing about Americans’ reactions or feelings. Did you just guess that’s what the article was about, and use it as an angle to attack it?Report

      • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

        In political commentary, polling data is used to describe how Americans feel about things. The article asserts that Biden’s alleged lies about the economy are the thing driving his polling – meaning the thing driving how Americans feel about him and how they respond to polling. Starts right off in the title:

        With blatant lies like these about the inflation crippling America, it’s no wonder that Biden’s approval rating is in the toilet

        And the author closes with this :

        But, at this point, the hard-working folks who are suffering because of Biden’s incompetence know darn well that the economy is in rough shape no matter what he tells them.

        All about feelings and poling data and alleged lies. Never mind what the President controls or doesn’t in reality. Never mind his actual albeit mixed economic track record. And never mind that its a hit piece on the President from an American conservative former CEO and current Think Tank darling that chooses not to go after the President in the American press.

        But sure, I just started chopping Jell-o because I like to chop Jell-o.Report

        • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

          Did you notice that the title doesn’t fit the article? That happens sometimes. Authors rarely write the articles. The piece itself mentions Biden’s low polling once, in reference to whether his own party would let him pursue certain policies. And again, there are two place it says that Americans know the economy is in trouble. So it’s not “all about feelings and polling data and alleged lies”. It’s not about the first, it passingly mentions the second, and almost completely focuses on the third. So when you criticize the publication for not having “any idea how Americans feel about inflation”, you were being (let me say this politely) not accurate. I don’t know the expression “chopping Jello”, but what you appeared to be doing was giving a passing glimpse to the article then poisoning the well.Report

        • Damon in reply to Philip H says:

          Politicians take the credit for a good economy even if they didn’t do anything to create it. They also, by association, get blamed for being in office during inflation or recession. Theme’s the breaks.Report