Can Anyone Still Convince Biden to Step Aside?

Since his dreadful performance in a June 27 debate with Donald Trump, President Joe Biden has been the object of intense scrutiny from every part of the U.S. political sphere. Whereas Biden’s renomination to lead the Democratic ticket in the November 2024 elections seemed a fait accompli for much of his presidency, the last two weeks have turned that assumption on its head. And, after Thursday night’s much-hyped press conference — at which he repeatedly mixed up the names of politicians he was referring to — the future of his candidacy is as uncertain as ever.

Whether Biden will step aside or not is ultimately his decision, alone. He secured the vast majority of delegates to the national convention in the Democratic primaries and no other person, per party rules, can take his place at the top of the ticket without him first releasing those delegates. Even if the majority of party members called for Biden to step aside, he would still have to do so of his own volition. With Biden apparently defiant and determined to stay in the race, the responsibility for changing the electoral course of the next four months has now devolved to groups of actors who still have some influence on Biden.

Outside of Biden’s family members, who are reportedly holding a huge amount of sway in Biden’s decision to stay in the race, the remaining influence on Biden resides with a few different groups.

First are the media, which have kept the question of whether Biden will step down in their headlines for the two weeks since the initial explosion of concern after his debate with Trump. Beyond merely following the horse race, some outlets have even taken the unusual step of seeking to influence Biden himself — The New York Times recently published an editorial calling for him to exit the race. Whether this will have any effect on Biden, who told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” hosts that he “[doesn’t] care what big names think,” is doubtful.

Next, donors have reportedly been exerting a significant amount of pressure on Biden behind the scenes, though not many have publicly called for him to step aside. A notable exception came earlier this week when actor George Clooney, a longtime Democratic megadonor and organizer of Hollywood fundraisers, published an opinion piece in The New York Times entitled, “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee.” While anxiety from big donors is surely causing alarm behind closed doors at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, more public statements from this group are also unlikely to move Biden and his team. Conversely, pressure from big donors may actually aid him in feeding into his narrative that “elites” are turned against his brand of middle-class friendly, kitchen table politics.

Beyond these two groups, though, there is another force that has more power to overtly signal, without Biden’s approval, that his reelection campaign has come to an end: congressional Democrats. Members of Congress can command media attention nearly as well as the president, and if they appeared to be deserting Biden en masse, his candidacy would surely be doomed. While 18 members in the House and one senator have already called on Biden to drop out, a mass push for his ouster has not happened yet, although there have been rumblings during the last week that such a mass desertion may be imminent. To determine whether this is likely to happen, and where such defections might first arise, it’s important to take a closer look at how congressional Democrats have reacted to the crisis so far.

Democrats in Congress have decidedly not led the charge in calling for Biden to step aside, even after his disastrous debate performance. But, once the question of Biden dropping out of the race was aired publicly by the media and donors, some congressional Democrats have been among the most assertive voices calling for Biden to end his campaign.

Within this broad group, there are three tendencies, each responding to the crisis in different ways. Notably, these tendencies run against the usual ideological lines in Congress, with some of the most progressive members of Congress, who have been frequent critics of Biden throughout his presidency, now appearing to back him much more than moderate Democrats who were more closely aligned with Biden’s legislative agenda. To parse this curious reversal, it’s worth examining the stakes for each group.

First, we have the frontliners, whose calculus is fairly straightforward. These are moderate Democrats in purple districts who are nervous that Biden’s cratering poll numbers will doom their candidacies along with his. These members of Congress need a groundswell of enthusiasm from Democratic voters in November to keep their seats, and they are concerned that Democrats, disenchanted by the nominee at the top of the ticket, will simply not turn out. Among these representatives already calling for Biden to drop out are Pat Ryan of New York and Angie Craig of Minnesota. As more post-debate, state-by-state polling becomes available, it would not be surprising to see more defections in this category. There is reportedly widespread anxiety among this group of frontline Democrats, and it is hard to see what Biden could do to calm them at this stage.

Never in modern U.S. political history has a major party found itself in such precarious circumstances, with so little time left before the presidential election.

The next group is a motley crew of Democrats who, through a variety of avenues, have all arrived at the conclusion that they don’t need to worry too much about bucking the Democratic Party establishment. These mavericks may be worried about losing powerful committee chairships if the Republicans take both chambers in Congress, or fret over the difficulty of achieving any legislative accomplishments with Donald Trump as president. They may also genuinely fear for the country’s future under a second Trump presidency. Some, like Representatives Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Brad Schneider of Illinois, have often presented themselves as pragmatic and moderate legislators and may not feel that rejecting Biden is much of a political liability. Others, like Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado — who has not called outright for Biden to step aside, but has come right to the threshold — might see an opportunity to boost their national profile by taking a bold stance early.

The last group is, of course, Democrats who still support Joe Biden, or at least are publicly saying they do. This group contains some of the lawmakers one would expect to be most closely aligned with the president: party leaders, those with pronounced national visibility, and those who were the president’s biggest boosters in his 2020 campaign. Most other congressional Democrats fall into this group too, simply because calling for Biden to step aside is still controversial.

A curious subset of this group, however, includes some of the most progressive members of Congress, who have, by and large, stood behind Biden. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has often criticized Biden during his tenure, surprised many observers by appearing to vociferously back Biden’s reelection bid in a conversation with reporters. Whether her comments amounted to an endorsement or merely a reality check is debatable, but, notably, she declined to join some of her more conservative colleagues within the Democratic Party in calling for the president to step aside. Elsewhere, Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders also offered support for Biden’s candidacy, even while his fellow Vermont senator, Peter Welch, became the first in the Senate to call for replacing Biden.

There could be a few motivations behind this phenomenon. First, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have already telegraphed their desire to use Biden’s reelection campaign as a vehicle for pushing more progressive policies that they have long championed. They have argued, essentially, that if Biden is personally unpopular, the only way to shore up his flailing campaign run is for the Democrats to make bolder policy proclamations, thereby decentering Biden himself as the fulcrum of the campaign. “Biden and Democrats can win this election if they address the needs of the working class,” Sanders wrote in a press statement, encapsulating what has been the thrust of his own campaigns since he broke onto the national stage in 2016. With Biden bleeding support among the more moderate ranks, progressives might see an opening to broker another platform deal with Biden like the one the Sanders camp struck after their bruising primary contest in 2020.

Second, progressives are less eager than ever to buck the Democratic establishment in the current electoral climate. The left of the Democratic Party is still reeling from Jamaal Bowman’s primary defeat in late June, the most expensive primary campaign ever for the U.S. House. Bowman’s defeat came on the heels of over $18 million in spending against him, mostly by three Israel-aligned PACs. These same PACs have made it clear that other progressives are on their target list too, with comparable amounts of spending likely against vulnerable Squad members like Cori Bush. Progressives facing millions of dollars in spending against them cannot afford to go without the support of the party apparatus, milquetoast as that support may be. In calling for Biden to resign, those progressives would open themselves up to overt abandonment by party leaders, at a time when they can ill afford to lose that backing.

Finally, progressives may be holding their criticism of Biden’s candidacy for a more fundamental reason. There is some sense among the broader left that progressives should not engage in an internecine struggle between two factions of establishment Democrats, neither of which is likely to back a progressive candidate as the eventual nominee for president. As former congressional candidate Nina Turner wrote in an opinion piece for Newsweek, “The Democratic establishment has made clear that progressive voices are not listened to, which means the predicament establishment Democrats find themselves in is of their doing and is theirs to fix.” That is, progressives have very little to gain from getting involved in a fight with few eventual upsides for them. Instead, it makes more sense to wait until the dust settles on the nomination fight and potentially retain more leverage with the eventual nominee, who will need at least some part of the progressive wing of the party to back their candidacy.

Whether the next few days will bring a flood of defections away from Biden or a gradual ebb of dissenting voices is still unknown. What’s clear, though, is that never in modern U.S. political history has a major party found itself in such precarious circumstances, with so little time left before the presidential election.