People walk past Tom Moran holding a sign calling for U.S. President Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race in Detroit, Mich., on July 12.JEFF KOWALSKY/Getty Images
For Joe Biden, things were fine the way they were.
The focus for the 2024 election campaign was on the character flaws of Donald Trump. The effort to paint Mr. Trump as unfit for office was going apace. The polls were close, the number of battleground states small – but all within the President’s grasp.
With the Republican convention complete and the wolves of worry baying at the door of Mr. Biden’s Delaware beach house, things are no longer the way they were – and for Mr. Biden and the Democrats, they are no longer fine.
The Democrats still haven’t settled the identity of their presidential nominee, and the chances of Mr. Biden remaining a candidate seem to be diminishing by the hour. The party is approaching its August convention amid the kind of contention that, from 1988 to 2012, was the exclusive province of the Republicans. Their disunity is accompanied by their sudden, sullen belief that their rivals are charging into November with momentum, purpose and a sense of both clarity and destiny. The Democrats have a sense of doom.
That doom has been deepened by the dramatic change in the political landscape.
The law-and-order party has just nominated a convicted felon for president. He is ahead in the polls. Whereas the party that for generations was the sentinel of workers’ rights and interests is struggling to regain its footing in its traditional core of strength. It just witnessed the leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters address the Republican convention.
Joe Biden is giving the Democrats a Rashomon summer
One party has a nominee who just survived a near-death experience. The other has a putative, though tottering, nominee whose own supporters fear he looks like a dead man walking.
With the Democrats’ nominating convention only four weeks away, the U.S. political world has turned upside down.
This dramatic transformation occurred in an age of great tension at home and mounting challenges abroad, of rapidly shifting political allegiances and perceptions, all at a time when both parties believe the other is a threat to American values.
The contrast between the two parties 15 weeks before the election could not be more stark.
The Republicans accomplished their midsummer goal. They left Milwaukee Friday morning in a unity forged by a would-be assassin’s bullet, a presidential nominee’s fortitude and physical fitness and a plan to win the handful of states it will need to secure the 270 electoral votes required to prevail in the election.
The Democrats are clinging to hope, which business consultants – their new constituents, having defected from the GOP – could tell them is not a strategy.
One measure of their distress: To the extent that they have any optimism at all, it rests in one of their previous disastrous presidential campaigns. In 1988, then-governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts emerged from his convention with a 17-point lead, according to the Gallup Organization. Vice-president George H.W. Bush won the election with nearly four times as many electoral votes.
The hope among Democrats is that history will repeat itself, this time to their advantage.
“One of the risks is that Democrats wring their hands and say it’s over because of Trump’s early lead and his emergence as some kind of an American folk hero,” said Steven Grossman, a former Democratic national chairman, in an interview. “I reject that.”
In seeking to close a polling gap and surge to an unlikely victory, Mr. Biden has a disadvantage that Mr. Bush didn’t possess: Democratic donors are conducting a wildcat strike.
A second (faint) hope: If Mr. Biden abandons his re-election campaign, the party may have the time to remake itself – to freshen itself – in the way the Republicans did this week.
The change in the political colourization of the Republicans was startling. They abandoned their preoccupation with the grievances of the past, instead emphasizing a profile that was future-oriented – another theft of a traditional Democratic advantage.
Political conventions are usually stuffed with remnants of the past – county and state leaders who were veterans of battles of earlier times. Not this Republican convention. The GOP past had been more than repudiated. It was wiped out. Absent were figures like the two Massachusetts governors, William Weld and Mitt Romney, who had prevailed in the bluest of blue states. Nowhere to be seen were one-time GOP giants such as Dick Cheney, a youthful White House chief of staff to one Republican president, defence secretary to another, vice-president to a third and also a House Republican whip. He (and his daughter, like her father a one-time chair of the House Republican Conference) are now apostates, considered dead to these new Republicans.
Former president Harry Truman appeared at the 1956 Democratic convention, Bill Clinton at the 2004 conclave, Barack Obama at the 2020 session. George W. Bush was not there in Milwaukee. He wasn’t even mentioned.
The result wasn’t so much a changing of the guard as the solidification of a new guard.
If Mr. Biden becomes the Democrats’ nominee, the party will go into the November election with a candidate whose political vision was formed in 1972, when the country was watching the movie Deliverance and listening to the Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose sing Too Late to Turn Back Now.
The Republicans surely hope it is. They are in the position of pillorying Mr. Biden and hoping he stays in the race. Senator Katie Britt of Alabama told the GOP convention that American economic prospects were in decline, “just like the man in the Oval Office.” David Sacks, investor and founder of the social networking platform Yammer, called Mr. Biden “senile.” Others made the argument more gently, yet unmistakably.
Over the weekend, Democrats will be pressing the same point. They desperately want deliverance from the lock Mr. Biden has on the campaign and long for a fresh nominee and to sing the reprise from Too Late: “I believe, I believe, I believe I’m falling in love.”