Biden may already be on borrowed time

Stick or twist? The gambler’s choice is the Democrats’ awful dilemma as the presidential election draws ever closer. Do they stick with Joe Biden, their painfully decrepit commander-in-chief, who is losing in the polls? Or twist and gamble on replacing him, which could tear the party apart and make Donald Trump’s victory even more likely?

The president may already be on borrowed time

The news over the weekend showed that the Democrats are already at war with themselves. Biden’s ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos did little to reassure the president’s anxious supporters and Sunday brought more stories of House Democrats, and other senior Democratic figures, calling for him to make way. A newly hatched plan for a special “blitz primary” to find a replacement candidate has been briefed-out. The idea is somehow to persuade Biden to fall on his sword in mid-July — perhaps satisfying his vast ego by casting him as a “modern-day George Washington” in the fight to save democracy, someone willing to give up power for the greater good.

The trouble is that Biden seems implacably opposed to such a move. The president, his family and a shrinking but hardcore group of loyalists remain passionately convinced that he is the only man who can stop Donald Trump. And if Biden doesn’t withdraw, or die or become horrendously incapacitated, he probably cannot be stopped from winning the party’s nomination in August. It’s possible that the party’s bigwigs — Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the Obamas, Jim Clyburn — whose support for Biden has wavered since the debate, will find a way to coerce him off the presidential ticket in time for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month. But the lack of faith in Kamala Harris, the vice president, and in any of the other leading alternatives, will continue to give these power-brokers pause. 

But now that Biden’s frailty — ignored so long and so shamefully by the pro-Democratic media — has become easily the most talked-about factor in the 2024 election, the president may already be on borrowed time. If he has another major slip this week, at a campaign event or at the NATO summit in Washington, the “Joe must go” brigade may become unstoppable.

A “blitz primary” would no doubt then be spun as a great unity moment for a party determined to stop Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. But it seems highly unlikely that Harris, the presumptive nominee in the absence of the presumptive nominee, would accept a new contest. The Chicago convention of 2024 could then turn into a strange echo of the Chicago convention of 1968, with an unpopular vice president foisted on angry voters, with calamitous results. Which brings us to the Democrats’ greatest fear about Joe Biden: that they can’t win with or without him. 

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.