In February, there was a flurry of discussion about whether Joe Biden’s advancing age and seeming weakness in a matchup with Donald Trump meant that he should step aside. I wrote a column on that theme, but the more notable (that is, nonconservative) voices arguing that Biden should consider withdrawing from the race included the polling maven Nate Silver and my colleague Ezra Klein. The report from the special counsel Robert Hur, which indicated memory problems for the president, was also part of the discussion — or, if you prefer the terms favored by the president’s allies, part of the unnecessary freakout.
“The Drumbeat for Biden to Step Aside Will Only Grow Louder” ran one headline from that period, from Robert Kuttner in the American Prospect. Kuttner was wrong; the drumbeat has quieted. All it took was Biden giving a passable State of the Union address: Thereafter his poll numbers marginally improved, the optimists on the Democratic side seized the rhetorical initiative, and the “should Biden step aside?” discourse faded into background noise.
But here we are entering May, with just six months before the election, and the basic dynamic that inspired the original discussion/freakout is still with us. Biden’s mini-surge was, well, miniature. He’s still slightly behind in national polling, and he still trails Trump in the swing states that won the Electoral College for the Democrats last time — Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The gap is narrow: Depending on your preferred polling average and what you make of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s polling numbers, Biden probably needs to make up just a few points to pull ahead — maybe three points, maybe four. But it’s also quite consistent; since last fall, both candidates are bouncing around within a very narrow range.
The Democratic response to this consistency blends unwarranted confidence with unwarranted fatalism. On the one hand, there’s the belief that Trump’s lead is unsustainable — because he has a ceiling and can’t get past 50 percent (but does that matter in a race with several well-known third-party candidates?), because voters aren’t paying close attention yet (but don’t they already know both of the candidates quite well?), because polls don’t matter until after the convention (in April 2020 Biden led the FiveThirtyEight polling average by about five points; he won the popular vote in the fall by 4.4 percent), because Trump’s trials haven’t yet had their effect (but what if he’s acquitted?).
On the other hand, there’s a “what can we do?” irritation with anyone who suggests that Biden should deviate from the way he’s approached policy and politics to date. He’s done great! The public is just ungrateful or confused, misled by the media or blinded by partisanship! He should be up by 10 points! If he can’t win with this record, America deserves what it gets!
Here is an alternative view of Biden’s situation. One plausible lesson of the Trump years is that if you are consistently beating Trump in the polls, you want to be temperamentally cautious, focus on your campaign fundamentals and get-out-the-vote efforts, and project normalcy at every opportunity. This was what the Democrats did well in 2018 and 2020, their years of anti-Trump success.
