The Push For A Biden Replacement Becomes Real
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Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and you may have noticed that this podcast is in your feed on Wednesday instead of Thursday. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One, it has really started to feel like the ground is shifting around the debate over whether Biden will stay on as the Democratic nominee in 2024 or go. In fact, literally, as we were about to start recording this podcast,

Our producer Cameron alerted me that there was breaking news from The New York Times with the headline Biden told ally that he is weighing whether to continue in the race. So on top of the limited Democratic defections that we have seen over the past couple of days, lawmakers suggesting that, well, one in particular, Lloyd Doggett from Texas, suggesting that Biden not stay on as the nominee and other Democrats suggesting that Trump would win if he does.

In addition to that, now we have some news that actually Biden is, in fact, considering whether to continue in the race. But to pull back the curtain a little bit, our plan was to today release a podcast about the British election.

and preview what is expected to be a historic victory for labor on July 4th. The reality is that that no longer seems as relevant to the American public. So we're going to hold that and hopefully still release it the morning of July 4th. It's a great podcast. We get the Talking Politics podcast team back together to do a crossover podcast. So

Stick around, check your feeds tomorrow. We will have a special July 4th edition about the British election. But right now, we are going to talk about the breaking news in the American election. And here with me to do that is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Welcome to the podcast, Jeffrey. Happy July 4th, a day early, Galen. Yeah, something, something. Happy July 4th. We may have fireworks a day early here. Oh, but I'm...

Okay, so the reality of the situation is we were kind of waiting to hit the record button with the hopes that the New York Times-Siena College poll would come out because, in fact, as we were sitting down to record just to talk about the ground shifting, we got word that the Biden campaign was preempting a little bit this New York Times-Siena College poll. And here's the quote, and I'll say that maybe by the time you're listening to this, the poll has come out.

But the campaign said, quote, poll after poll that surveyed voters after the debate consistently shows this race remains within the margin of error. With that said, we expect the New York Times Siena poll, which just last week acknowledged that they were an outlier, to show a more notable drop. Again, that would be an outlier.

So not saying explicitly there that they were sort of leaked the poll or anything like that, but they suggest a more notable drop in the Times-Santa College poll. Let's just start off, Jeffrey, by sticking to what we know, which is the data. The campaign said that there has been the change in that same in those same comments. They said the change in the polling has been half a percentage point away from Biden. I think it's actually more than that. What are we seeing so far?

Yeah, I mean, it obviously depends on which polls you're looking at. If you look at all the head-to-head polling that was conducted after the debate, in which the pollster also had a somewhat recent poll, so either just before the debate or maybe a month or two before the debate, so like relatively recent pre-debate reading of the race,

You get Trump gaining about maybe a hair over two points on average in terms of margin. Now, there's a wide variety in those results across that change. Of course, that's why we throw things into an average just generally, because some polls will show more movement than others. There are a handful of polls that actually showed Biden actually gaining slightly in terms of margin relative to the last read by that pollster. But most of them showed Trump gaining at least somewhat marginally.

And to be clear, this very much – sort of that before and after reading of individual pollsters matches what our polling average is doing, which has shown Trump gained roughly two points in margins since the debate. So –

Everything is pointing to Trump has gained some ground pretty quickly in the aftermath of the debate. And if you look at just the polls that have come out post-debate, so not the shift per se, but just the polls that have come out post-debate, it looks like a Trump plus three race nationally, correct? Yes. Yeah. If you average all of them across, that's what you're seeing. Yeah. Because our average today is still considering some information nationally.

pre-debate because it's a rolling average. And so while it will put more emphasis on new polls, it will not completely forget about polls from, say, the first half of last week. And in an environment like this where things are shifting quickly, you might have reason to put a lot more emphasis on just the more recent polls. It's also worth saying that already in the northern battleground states,

Trump was outperforming the national polls by about a point or two. So if it's a three point race nationally, you would expect that in those northern battleground states is about a four or five point race. And then in those southern battleground states could be up to somewhere between, you know, a seven and ten point race.

race. Jeff, it's interesting to be recording a podcast right now because things feel like they are changing in real time, which is to say we've referred to the betting markets a couple times in the post-debate era. And as I'm looking at them right now, both on PolyMarket and on PredictIt,

Online bettors now view Kamala Harris as the likelier Democratic nominee than Joe Biden. So just predict it specifically puts Kamala Harris's chance of being the Democratic nominee at 48 percent. Joe Biden's at 30 percent. Gavin Newsom at 11 percent and on down from there. Again, all of the caveats with online betting markets remain the same, but.

You know, are you buying or selling those ads? I mean, what are you thinking about the likelihood that Biden is not the Democratic nominee? I think the fact that we got that news a little while ago or just as we're about to start recording that Biden told an ally he really is weighing whether to stay in the race is.

could point to, I mean, this really could be happening. You know, you could really have a presumptive nominee and incumbent president decide to not run. I think it's one of those things where I'm sort of trying to be, I'm sort of waiting until it actually happens, you know, but I think it's a realistic, like it really could be happening. And to some extent, I know I've spent a lot of the cycle being like,

People talking about Biden dropping out, Biden this, Biden that, is very unrealistic. And it was unrealistic until he had the worst debate performance basically ever. And with all the questions about his age, it seems to have, did we hit an inflection point where it's not just people are worried about age, it's just like no one sees how you come back from the concerns about your age. But I know he's supposed to be doing an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, and I

on Friday. So we may not have any sort of decision just yet, but clearly it's a real possibility. This really could be happening. I'm not sure I would put Harris ahead of Biden at this point, but I am glad to see that Predict It finally got wise to the fact that it wasn't going to be Gavin Newsom. Indeed. Jeff,

What you're saying about wanting to take it slow and not wanting to jump to conclusions too quickly. I think, you know, I have been working at FiveThirtyEight since 2015. And so my first cycle here was the 2016 election and working for FiveThirtyEight during the 2016 election. You learn two, I think, big things, which is that.

Oftentimes when we're talking about election data, we're talking about historical data. And you can only apply historical data to

present day if there's some sort of precedent for the situation that you're facing. And so when past is not, in fact, prologue and we're just in a completely new situation, you can't just apply historical data and get an answer. And oftentimes the historical data that we're looking at only dates back to 1976 anyway. And so even just from a data perspective, it's a limited sample. But also one should be open to the possibility of a paradigm shift that doesn't make that data applicable.

The other thing that you learn is like to to like slow down, slow your roll a little bit when it comes to making bold predictions about what will happen next. I mean, I'm talking in particular about the 2016 Republican primary where it seemed like all historical evidence would point away from Donald Trump becoming the nominee. And then, of course, he actually did. And so if you made bold predictions about, nope, they're just going to go with Jeb Bush in the end anyway or Marco Rubio or whoever, you would have been wrong.

When it comes to making historical parallels here, I do think that something interesting is going on, which is this sort of the press going to Democratic lawmakers and saying, how do you feel? Do you think Biden should remain in the race? Do you think it should be someone else? Brings up memories of the Trump era, right? When reporters were chasing down lawmakers in the hallways, did you see the tweet? Do you think this is presidential? What do you think of this norm-breaking behavior?

And oftentimes what we saw was that there were lawmakers that would oftentimes say, I didn't see the tweet. No one said that they didn't see the debate. But there were lawmakers who would break with Trump. But oftentimes you would either see them eventually get back in line or you would see them basically ostracized from the party. And I think there's a really important difference today, which is that the voters always stuck with Trump.

Even when the lawmakers felt really uneasy about what Trump was doing or saying or how he was behaving, if you looked at the polling, the voters were always with him. The situation is the reverse today.

For years, Democratic voters, not just voters in general, have been saying that Joe Biden should not run for a second term. And the most common reason cited is his age. And that's across all different kinds of polls. It's from, you know, the summer of 2022 New York Times Siena College poll that said 60 percent of Democrats wanted a new nominee.

up until earlier this year. And then, of course, now in the post-debates polling, we see something similar, that Democrats, not just voters in general, Democrats think Joe Biden is too old to be an effective president.

in a second term. And so actually kind of what we're seeing, it's the same phenomenon. It's just it's going to maybe have the inverse result, which is that in politics, you oftentimes have to meet the voters where they are. And this is where the voters have been within the Democratic Party for quite some time. I think that's very true. I think the situation has long been no one was going to take on Biden, who was significant in the presidential primary.

All the names bandied about of other possibilities, none of them ever jumped in. And it was unlikely that one of them was going to challenge an incumbent president who... Because what's interesting here is that on the one hand, we did have the polling showing that a lot of Democrats felt like Biden shouldn't run again, but they still liked Biden. They still had a strong approval rating of Biden. They still felt like they still liked him, had a favorable rating of him. And that actually probably hasn't changed.

But I do think what, you know, it's pretty clear that what happened after the debate is that the skepticism that many Democrats and just a lot of voters in general had toward Biden hit sort of new heights in a way that seems like it may be difficult to come back from. And, you know, we were talking a bit in the channel and our politics channel on Slack yesterday about the fact that, you know, one of the things that could be going on here is that

Biden just may not have it, may not be capable of doing the damage control that someone does after they have like a bad debate. You know, you go out and you campaign, do tons of stops, go all over the country. You do a bunch of sit down interviews with, you know, major news channels to try to control and put it out there like, you know, that you still are basically just to change the narrative after the debate. Right. Right.

And it is true that Biden looks like he's going to be maybe still doing a sit down interview with ABC, but it's not necessarily the case that Biden is like out there campaigning nonstop. Right. In the aftermath of this. And so is a guy who's 81 now.

who clearly, you know, even if the debate was a bad night for him, has lost at least some steps. Is he capable of doing that kind of damage control and mounting the comeback, right? Sort of the comeback after a bad debate. And he may not be. He may not be capable of that. And that could be, I think, a big part of this too. Like for Democratic lawmakers, I think that concern and knowing that voters already had these concerns, they're like, I have to run on the same ticket with this guy. Right.

And I don't know if he can do this. I don't know if he can mount the comeback. Well, right. And maybe what we have seen in terms of the change in tone is a reaction. Well, one to polling voters, the, you know, narrative, but also that lack of mounting a conversation.

comeback. And so we've seen a shift. I'll just go through some of what we've heard lawmakers say. And a lot of this happened on Tuesday, just yesterday, when it really started to feel like things were shifting. So Lloyd Doggett jumped first in many ways, the Texas Democrat who represents the Austin area. He said,

President Biden has continued to run substantially behind Democratic senators in key states and in most polls has trailed Donald Trump. I'd hope the debate would provide some momentum to change that. It did not. Instead of reassuring voters, the president failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and exposed Trump's lies and then called for him to get out of the race.

Nancy Pelosi said yesterday, I think it's a legitimate question to say, is this an episode or is this a condition? Vermont Senator Peter Welch said, so I think we have to have an honest assessment of where we are with the objective being keeping Donald Trump out of office. We've got to serve the country, not the party.

Illinois Representative Mike Quigley, I think he has to be honest with himself. His decision not only impacts who's going to serve in the White House over the next four years, but who's going to serve in the Senate, who's going to serve in the House, and it will have implications for decades to come.

It goes on and on. One of the ways that lawmakers made news yesterday was already starting to speculate about what would happen if he would step aside. So that's where Representative Jim Clyburn comes in. He said...

about Kamala Harris. I will support her if he were to step aside, but I want to support her going forward sometime in the future. I want this ticket to continue to be Biden-Harris, and then we'll see what happens after the next election. Then he goes on to say, no, this party should not in any way do anything to work around Ms. Harris. We should do everything we can to bolster her, whether it's in second place or at the top

of the ticket. And just as we were sitting down, I saw another quote from Representative Summer Lee in Pennsylvania.

Maybe folks don't want to hear, but we have timing that is running out. Time is not on our side. We have a few months to do a monumental task. It's not cheap and it's not easy. If our president decides this is not a pathway forward for him, we have to move very quickly. There's not going to be time for a primary. That time has passed. The vice president is the obvious choice. She's sitting right there. She's already been in the White House and has the name recognition and has been on the trail and the optics of pushing aside a black woman. It's not good.

Taking all of this in, if Biden does, in fact, step aside, one, is it just obvious that it would be Kamala Harris? Is it still an open question? And how would the process work?

I have to say it's very likely it would be Vice President Kamala Harris if Biden steps aside. To the point that Summer Lee made, there's both the timing consideration, so we're about a month and a half out from the Democratic convention, and there had already been talk about even officially doing a roll call before even the convention to nominate Biden. So in a way, maybe there's even less time, but in theory at least, there's a month and a half until the convention.

So you don't have a ton of time. I did have somebody, I think it was British, push back on me on Twitter when I talked about the timing being like, a lot of countries do like

Five-week campaigns. I was like, yeah, but this is an American presidential election. It's a different animal from a parliamentary race. Generally, the thought here is not a lot of time. You also don't want chaos if you're the Democratic Party. And Kamala Harris is the vice president. Vice president has one constitutional duty and one just general duty, and that's to be there if something happens to the president, right?

So if something happens to the president, the party turning to the vice president would make perfect sense. And so she could be sort of the port in the storm here. Now, there clearly are some Democrats out there who have concerns about her leading the national ticket. She did not exactly have a brilliant performance in the 2020 Democratic primary. She had kind of an early surge and then faded and people felt like she kind of underperformed and didn't do that well.

But at the end of the day, she's the vice president. And to the point that Clyburn made, there's also the fact that trying to maneuver such that Harris is not the Democratic nominee could actually create more sort of internal discord, I think, among Democrats. And the story becomes, oh, we went around the vice president, a black woman, the first black woman vice president. The party went around her. So just she's there and –

The optics, to some release point, would look very bad, I think. I have a question. This is just sort of broadly theoretical, but there's oftentimes you hear like panic in the press. Oh, that would be chaos or this party's in chaos. And, you know, during Trump's rise, there's oftentimes a lot of chaos within the Republican Party, too.

Is chaos bad electorally? That may sound like a really simple, dumb question. But say, for example, the Democratic Party has an open convention, which I don't necessarily think that's the likeliest outcome. I mean, obviously, if you want to avoid chaos, you can even stick with your

Zoom roll call before the Democratic National Convention and still nominate Kamala Harris or whatever. But if the party were to go the path of an open nomination and let people make their pitch for being the party leader, being the nominee, and it turns out chaotic and it becomes the most watched show in America and everyone's tuning in and, you know, getting riled up in one direction or another, is that bad electorally?

I don't know if it's necessarily that bad electorally. And what I mean by that is the country is very polarized. So at the end of the day, Democrats and people who lean Democratic, independents who lean Democratic, are mostly going to vote for the Democratic nominee regardless of who that person is.

I will say that there are some other campaign considerations, I think, that go into this. Like there may be questions about what happens to the Biden-Harris campaign fund if neither of them is leading the ticket.

And I actually haven't dug into that, but it seems to me that Harris gets to carry on with that money if she's the nominee, and it's a little bit more complicated if she's not. So there's some campaign considerations like that. She's also already well-known, right?

The other consideration I think has to be that, look, the convention could do the picking, whether that's sort of an organized – like Biden's delegates mostly back Harris and it's mostly open shut or the open convention thing. I'll say this. Convention delegates have not had to do this in over 50 years.

This is not a thing that people have had to deal with. So there's like very little practical experience within the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, for that matter, in handling a convention scenario where you don't have a nominee. The people who dealt with that situation, who have experience with that, they're not around anymore for the most part. So to me, that's another big question is you have a bunch of people who it's generally a coronation situation.

You go to the thing. It's like an honorary thing getting chosen as a delegate. Are you actually in the position to do like the debate and horse trading and discussion that like an open convention would really questioning questioning delegate competency? I like it. Yeah. No, I think it's a real question. It's a real question.

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Let's bring in data again here for a second. There was a CNN poll out on Tuesday that got a lot of attention from folks that showed

Biden with a six point deficit to Trump nationally, which was, for what it's worth, the same as what CNN's polling was already showing before the debate. So no movement there. But I think maybe what attracted folks attention was the other head to head polling. And so when you matched Harris against

Trump, Trump led by two points for some of the other options. Trump led by five points against Newsom, by four points against Buttigieg, by five points against Whitmer. I should say that's not the only polling that we've seen since the debate. Is that reflective of broader trends or something of an outlier?

So we don't have a ton of data post-debate on this. I will say that Data for Progress, the Democratic pollster, did polling right after – like the day after the debate on this question, asking about a bunch of theoretical alternatives to Biden, including Harris, and the numbers are really similar. So the CNN poll differs a little bit in that sense from what Data for Progress found. Now,

You know, different pollsters are going to find different things, but I don't think we have enough data to really say like there's a trend one way or the other. But we do know that Biden is trending down, at least relative to Trump. And, you know, the question here may be for a lot of Democrats is whether or not whether or not you want to make like a ceiling play with Harris. Like, you don't know. Maybe she can't beat Trump, but maybe she can.

Or are you so worried that Biden just can't do it now and you would prefer to give yourself –

kind of the unknown of Harris, because that might just seem like a better chance than Biden at this point. And, you know, it does seem like there is some genuine feeling out there that might fall in line with that among Democrats. Yeah, Jeffrey, it's interesting. I mean, it may be the case that there's actually no one today that they could replace Biden with who would be

presume to have the advantage over Trump in head to head. You know, maybe every single person they could replace Biden with and Biden himself would be the underdog in 2021.

And so, you know, we cover the horse race. We cover what is going to likely happen on November 5th. But the people in charge of the party and the people who should be thinking, I guess, about leading the country are the four years between January 2025 and January 2029. And so even if you think you're going to be the underdog, no matter what, you ought probably also to be answering questions about what happens.

the presidency, what leadership looks like for those four years, and who do you think would be the best at doing that job? Those are questions that the people in charge of the Democratic Party have to answer. Oftentimes, when the Republican Party has been faced with these questions and have continued to support Trump, despite having doubts that he would be the best leader for the country, they have been penalized by the

American public. I mean, Republicans have not had a single good election since 2016, period. They have not had a single good election cycle since 2016, period. And actually, also today, if you look at Nate Silver, friend of the pod and former colleague, wrote this up in the New York Times today, if you look at polling in battleground states where there's obviously a presidential race at the top of the ticket, and then in the places where there is a contested Senate race,

There have been something like 47 polls conducted since Biden and Trump were clarified as the presumptive nominees of both parties. In every one of those 47 polls, the Democrat is leading the Republican candidate. And it's only in a couple, a smattering of polls where Biden is leading or tied with Trump.

And so, you know, I guess, well, we're back to the electoral, but that's another thing that that people making decisions might be looking at. It doesn't seem like Americans don't want Democrats in power necessarily. It seems like they really don't want Biden in power.

Yeah. The fact that the Senate numbers have continued to be much better for Democrats than the presidential numbers do point to the potential that the ceiling for Democrats could be notably higher than it's been with Biden. I guess the question really is, we don't know what will happen if Harris does or someone else even. That seems very unlikely to me. But

I'll leave open the possibility that maybe somehow it's not Harris. But if someone else takes over Biden's spot, it scrambles the race. It, in a sense, resets the campaign to some extent and creates a new set of options for voters. And I know we have the theoretical polling of where things stand right now between someone like Harris against Trump. But we don't know where that could be like a month from now after the campaign like

has changed gears. And now, just to throw out a hypothetical here, obviously people have been very worried about Biden's age. The concerns about Trump's age, more middling. Republicans don't seem to have much concern about it. Some independents do. Democrats, of course, do, but they also just have general concerns about Trump. You suddenly have Harris, who's almost 20 years younger than Trump, creating a new contrast, a new paradigm, if you will, for how this race is shaping up.

Again, this gets back to like seeing Senate Democrats polling better, even if they are incumbents, like we live in a very polarized time and a lot of those states, like you're not going to expect the Democrat to incredibly outperform the top of the ticket just because of how things are. So I do think it points to like there is a potential ceiling for Democrats to reach. They're not reaching it with Biden and they're not sure he can do it now.

Maybe they take a shot with somebody else. Yeah. I mean, it's important to note, right? Despite the polling that we see in these Democratic races, probably a lot of people are not tuning in that closely and maybe don't know the Republican candidate all that well. And I would expect the polling to get tighter as we get closer down the line. And the reality is that whoever is the Democrat at the top of the ticket is...

in 2024 for the presidency is going to have to contend with the fact that voters are still upset about inflation. They are upset about immigration. They're upset about global crises. And Harris being part of the administration, Harris was put in charge for a while of the border issue. And we'll still have to answer questions about despite double digit numbers of American, majorities of Americans saying that they were concerned about the migrant crisis,

the Biden-Harris administration doing nothing for three and a half years, passing stimulus like the American Rescue Plan in the face of folks like Larry Summers very loudly saying this is inflationary, don't do it, you just need to reopen the economy, there's historic levels of savings already. Like, you know, the arguments are still there for why you...

might not want to vote for a Democrat at the top of the ticket, period. And, you know, Harris would have to contend with that. I don't know if it would be different for somebody who hasn't been in the administration, but I kind of doubt it. And so, yeah, like I've already said,

Democrats may be the underdog either way when it comes to the presidential race, but I don't know that to be a fact. We'd have to sort of see how things change if somebody else were to get in there. And while we're in the mood of just sort of rolling with breaking news, more news out from The New York Times. Business leaders call on Biden to step up.

How does it feel to be recording a podcast while history is happening, John?

Well, it's very exciting. I think the other thing we should mention here, it may be obvious, but Democratic concerns about Donald Trump and what he might do if he gets back to the White House or even just beyond Democrats. Lots of independents are not excited about that possibility either. I think we know that Trump is not popular, but right now he's running against Biden, who is even less popular if we look at our favorability numbers and 538 trackers.

So the sort of fear of Trump, maybe it doesn't matter whether or not it's just sort of handed to Harris or if there is an open convention. Trump is a unifying force for people who are opposed to him, right? And we saw that in the 2020 election in terms of the anti-Trump coalition that elected Biden in the first place. So sort of getting back to the earlier conversation about does it matter if it's sort of handed to Harris or if there's like an open convention?

I do think the open convention thing with the delegates, like I do think that that could get super messy and maybe it ends up taking a while and becomes like a distraction more than anything. But I do think one way or another, Trump is a huge unifying force to the people who do not like him. And so if the Democrats end up picking somebody who can make the case to the people who are not sure about.

about who they want to vote for, but we're not into Biden for four more years, but are not super into Trump either. I mean, people who say like they might support RFK or some other third party candidate are not considering either candidate. We, you know, there was a notable percentage of the people in our five, three Ipsos poll who said that.

Maybe this is how you get somebody who they'll consider, even if they're not considering Trump. And that's important for the electoral calculus. All right. Well, we should wrap up this podcast so that folks can listen to it before maybe something even crazier happens. I'll say again, we have planned a podcast previewing the British election coming out on July 4th. Maybe that will get preempted. Who knows? We'll just have to wait and see. But for now, Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon.