Biden’s Refusal to Step Down Could Spell Disaster for Down-Ballot Democrats

New polling data out this week suggests that President Joe Biden’s increasingly tenuous candidacy risks shredding down-ballot Democrats’ hopes of retaining the Senate and winning control of the U.S. House of Representatives this autumn.

The Cook Political Report reported on Tuesday that momentum is building for the GOP and away from the Democratic Party in six states, including several that Democrats thought were safely in their camp. Minnesota and New Hampshire, as well as Nebraska’s second congressional district (the state allots its presidential electors via individual congressional district) are all now less solidly Democratic than they were before Biden’s widely panned debate performance in late June. In traditionally swing states such as Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, Trump is consolidating a lead that has been building over the past year as voters’ concerns about Biden’s competence have mounted.

In the week leading up to the presidential debate, ABC News’s 538 polling average had Biden and Trump essentially in a dead heat, with some polls showing Biden out ahead. Now, 538 has Trump up by 2 percent. Similarly, The Washington Post has found a 2.5 percent shift toward Trump since the debate. True, that’s still within the margin of error, but if one views that trend alongside the data coming out of swing states and states like Minnesota and New Hampshire on the edge of the Blue Wall, the prognosis is devastating: Trump may not be surging (there’s no poll evidence to suggest he is, and he remains deeply underwater in favorability ratings), but Biden is cratering in key states. That combination could be enough to return a perennially unpopular, twice impeached, law-breaking bigot to the White House. Indeed, the Las Vegas odds-makers now give Trump a 60 percent chance of winning the election, and Biden only a 14 percent chance. The remaining 26 percent are divided between Kamala Harris and miscellaneous other stand-in candidates. Those are spectacularly sorry odds for a president who has presided over consistent job creation over four years, historically low unemployment levels, economic growth and the passage of signature legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act — and who is running against a man convicted on nearly three dozen felony counts and facing dozens of additional charges in three still-to-come state and federal trials.

Beyond the potential loss of the White House, these numbers also show a tremendous risk of Democratic hopes deflating across the board. Sure, in one critical Senate race after another, the Democratic candidate is significantly outperforming President Biden. And there’s even some evidence that in critical states such as Arizona the Senate candidates are producing their own coattails effects, raising Biden’s numbers beyond what they would be absent a competitive Senate race drawing in voters.

But, realistically, there’s only so much a Senate or House candidate can do if the top of the ticket is as compromised as the Biden candidacy now appears to be. Presidential elections tend to generate high voter turnout. This time around, however, the vast majority of Democrats tell pollsters they want Biden to be replaced by a different Democratic candidate. In so blatantly sticking a finger in the eye of his own base, Biden risks massively depressing voter turnout among Democrats — and if that happens, congressional candidates in tight races could pay the price for Biden’s stubbornness.

For the Democrats to retain control of the Senate (they currently have a one seat margin), they were already in a scenario where they either had to thread the needle in every single state they are currently defending or somehow find a way to beat incumbent Republican senators in unfriendly states such as Florida and Texas.

The threading the needle scenario includes winning in West Virginia, a solidly Republican state — more than two-thirds of its voters backed Trump in 2020 — where outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin has bucked the trend and kept the Senate seat blue for several electoral cycles. It includes Montana, where Jon Tester has performed the same improbable balancing act, but where Trump won in 2020 with nearly 57 percent support. It includes Ohio, where Sherrod Brown has similarly built a rapport with voters, many of whom routinely split their vote between the progressive Democratic senator and GOP presidential and gubernatorial candidates. It includes Senate seats in the key swing states of Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Only one of those elections has to go belly-up and the Senate is back to a 50-50 tie — which, if Trump wins the presidency, would hand control of the Senate to the Republicans. If two go belly-up, then it doesn’t matter who the president is — the GOP will control the Senate regardless. In other words, there is pretty much zero margin for error here, and anything that serves to tamp down Democratic voter enthusiasm could hand control to the right.

A similar scenario could unfold in the House. The GOP is currently defending one of the smallest majorities it has ever had. If three seats go from Republican to Democrat in November, the Democrats will once more control Congress. By most political calculi, especially given the dysfunction and extremism on display among the House GOP and the hard right decision to bring down Speaker Kevin McCarthy and to try to bring down Speaker Mike Johnson, that ought to be an easy bridge to cross: If the Democrats get their act together in New York, there are enough seats for the picking just in the Empire State to secure a majority. If they win a couple key seats in Arizona, they’re well on their way to flipping the House. If they reclaim just one or two of the seats they have recently lost in Florida, that’s game, set and match. And there are many other potential pickups dotted around the country that all could contribute to a Democratic Party victory.

Yet, as with the Senate, that depends on a motivated electorate, and, by the day, that electorate is indicating to pollsters that it is up in arms about Biden’s efforts to remain the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. Politico recently reported that the president’s support is tanking in New York and that panicked party officials are urging an infusion of campaign resources into six House races that could determine which party controls the U.S. Congress come 2025. Realistically, it’s hard to see how even a diminished Biden loses New York in a head-to-head with Trump — New Yorkers have, after all, learned to loathe Trump over the course of his more than half a century in the public eye — but it’s certainly possible that he only wins it by a narrow margin, and that as his support erodes so go the chances of those down-ballot Democrats in swing districts.

It’s a fair bet that if down-ballot Democratic Party candidates are in trouble in a blue stronghold such as New York, they’re also seeing warning signs in other states. In 2019 and 2020, Biden told voters, and his own staff, that he saw himself as a “transition” figure, a one-term president providing a bridge from the chaos and violence of the Trump presidency to a new generation of up-and-coming Democratic leaders. Four years on, he apparently has had a change of heart, deciding that he — and only he — is capable of defeating Trump again. The polls suggest that this is a stunning political miscalculation, and one that could massively impact down-ballot races around the country this November.