Three Cheers for the Dem Establishment

Criticizing Democratic insiders is fun. But avoiding a primary was the right call.

In the wake of Biden stepping down, a lot of people who I think are quite smart, and who write about politics, had a similar reaction: he should have done this sooner.

This wasn’t a new opinion. Ezra Klein was arguing back in February that Biden should decline to run for re-election. David Axelrod, as brilliant a political messenger as anyone I’ve met, made the same case last November. And a lot of people made a broader point - that the Democratic establishment, by denying voters a competitive primary, were betraying democracy and/or dooming the country to four more years of Trump.

“If you’re a Democrat,” wrote Nate Silver after Biden flopped in the debate “you should be angry at these people for putting you in this predicament.”

Am I “these people”? Sort of. On one hand, I haven’t formally worked in politics since 2016, and I give money to Democrats but not at anything approaching megadonor scale. On the other hand, I worked for Obama in the White House, have lived in D.C. full or part-time since 2009, and, at 37, am no longer the youth vote. And to the infinitesimal extent my opinion mattered, I thought that Biden should stay in the race and that his health wouldn’t be a deciding issue - I even said so a few times on TV.

So if I’m not these people, I’m at least these-people adjacent.

I’m certainly close enough to many members of the democratic establishment to have witnessed what a thankless job it’s becoming. People act like the DNC is the illuminati, but in fact for a half-century national political parties have been growing weaker, not stronger. “The establishment” doesn’t have a weekly meeting or group text. It’s a bunch of influential people, each making their own decisions but sometimes in concert, using their influence as effectively as they can, which is often not very. Usually, the establishment is too disjointed to coalesce around an idea. When they do coalesce, they often get it wrong. It was pretty clearly the wrong call, for example, to push all the mainstream Democrats besides Hillary out of the 2016 primary.

No wonder that criticizing the establishment is fun and sticking up for the establishment is lame. Writing a post praising Democratic insiders feels like praising Darth Vader or Nurse Ratchet or the FBI guys from Diehard.

Apropos of nothing, I think Democratic insiders deserve a whole lot of praise. Because as tough as this election is going to be, their collective decision-making - in the face of constant, intense criticism — has made it a whole lot more winnable.

My goal here is not to take a victory lap on behalf of people who aren’t me and are doing fine already. But if you care about politics making a difference in people’s lives, you can’t reflexively support the status quo or reflexively burn down institutions. You have to think carefully about how our system works in the real world, how to change that system where necessary, and how to use that system, when possible, to make change.

So here is my short-as-possible explanation of what the insiders did, what it accomplished, and why a lot of smart people owe them an apology.

WHAT SHOULD THE ESTABLISHMENT TRY TO DO?

It’s important to start out by saying that people who think about politics and people who do politics have very different goals. The thinkers are trying to figure out what should happen. The doers are trying to figure out what should happen with the constraints, fair or not, imposed by the way the world currently works.

Robert Kennedy (the good one) described this version of politics as “the art of the possible.” But that sounds too lofty for people who aren’t once-in-a-generation inspiring leaders. Instead, I’d just say that insiders are trying - or should be trying - achieve the Best Possible Realistic Outcome. Or what I’ll call the BPRO.

A lot of non-establishment figures are cynical about this idea, and it’s easy to see way. First of all, establishment figures, like all people, have personal incentives - and many of them pursue those incentives instead of the greater good. That’s bad. Also, insidery types often use “it’s unrealistic” as code for “I don’t want to do this, but I don’t want to state my reasons for not doing it.” That happened over the last three weeks. There were reasons to argue Biden should stay on as the nominee - but “he’s the nominee and there’s nothing we can do it about” wasn’t true. Some people argued it, and they did so because they wanted to avoid having a real discussion, which is human nature and also not ideal.

But it’s easy to make the opposite mistake as well. The political thinkers who wanted Biden to drop out in November or February, and to have a typical primary election, imagined that the candidate who emerged from the promise would be, if not best suited to beating Trump, at least in the top tier - and that instead of running an unpopular incumbent, Democrats would have had a fresh, unblemished leader to take on deeply unpopular Donald Trump.

Would that have happened? Or were the insiders practicing the art of the possible while political writers practiced the art of political writing? Obviously we won’t know. But we can make some educated guesses.

WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF BIDEN STEPPED DOWN SOONER?

Let’s start with something pretty important: while Biden’s approval rating was never very good, he really began to lose ground to Trump in November, about two months before the first votes would have been cast. Most candidates for president launch their primary campaigns about a year before the first votes are cast. (Nikki Haley, for example, launched her campaign in February 2023.)

So if Biden had dropped out at the first sign of weakness, the primary that followed wouldn’t have been typical. Every decision - from whether to run to whom to hire to how much to distance oneself from Biden - would have to be made much, much faster than usual.

It would be tempting to say that the result would be “chaos” - a word that was also thrown around recently as the prospect of an open convention loomed. But that’s not quite right. The outcome would have been unpredictable. But the direction the race would take would be quite possible to predict. There are a few possible ways a primary could have played out, and they all move in the same trajectory.

First, Harris jumps in the race and everyone falls in line behind her. Unlikely to happen - and if it did, we’d be right where we are now, but probably without the wave of relief that has driven her enthusiasm and fundraising sky-high.

Second, a candidate whose views are far to the left of the median voter’s wins. Such a candidate would consolidate the base - but with the Republican advantage in the electoral college, and the hold Trump has on the majority of the white working class, it would be really, really difficult for a candidate who turned off suburban swing voters to win.

Third, and most likely, we get a big primary, with a few candidates from the mainstream of the party (Harris, Shapiro, Buttigieg, Newsom, Whitmer), a few credible candidates who represent different versions of the left, and one or two message candidates running to raise their own profiles or that of an issue they care about. (Imagine Rashida Talib jumping in to highlight atrocities in Gaza, or Andrew Yang returning to the democratic fold to push universal basic income and grow his social media following.)

The problem is that all mainstream candidates — those most likely to win the swing states, and thus the presidency — would basically agree with each other on everything but risk splitting the mainstream/electability vote (say, 60% of dem voters) a half-dozen ways. So now, they’re locked in a race to see who can be the last mainstream candidate standing.

This is bad. On one hand, they have to embrace President Biden’s record (which I think is a fantastic record, but swing voters don’t agree), which means that they’ll have trouble coming out of the primary unburdened by Biden’s non-age negatives. At the same time, the mainstreamers will have to make flashy promises to the left and the base - things like Medicare for All, defunding the police, reparations, cutting off relations with Israel, etc. No matter what you think of these policies on their merits, they’re deeply unpopular with swing voters. And at the same time, you’d have the non-mainstream candidates criticizing the mainstream ones as sellouts in ways that could easily be harnessed by Trump. (Bernie’s attacks on Hillary as “corrupt” in the 2016 primary damaged her in the general by playing into the “crooked Hillary” frame.)

So the end result is that the eventual nominee would be tethered to a president with a low approval rating and a bunch of unpopular policy positions. And quite possibly, given the deep divisions among democrats, particularly over Gaza, the “most electable” nominee would limp into the convention at the head of a deeply divided party anyway. And that’s the best-case scenario.

Would the hypothetical candidate that came out of a primary definitely lose to Trump? No. Trump’s quite unpopular. But that’s not the question. The question is whether a candidate to come out of a primary would be a stronger position to win than Dems are right now.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED?

The idea that the DNC, the establishment, or anyone else decided there would be no 2024 primary wasn’t quite right. It’s more that potential top-tier candidates looked around, realized that no one serious would help them support a challenge to Biden, saw that (at the time) most democratic voters supported him, and decided not to enter the primary. Because politicians usually follow incentives, a pair of non-top-tier candidates decided to take a run at Biden, including by making his age an issue, and failed miserably. Establishment dems, such as big donors, were worried about Biden as a candidate, but still felt that Biden was the best option because he was the incumbent because of the risk of all the scenarios I described above.

Also - and this part is pretty important - Biden’s age seemed like way less of a problem in November ‘23 than it did in June ‘24.

Looking back, I think I — and other these-people — got this part mostly wrong. I wasn’t a fan of the Biden team’s decision to have the president decline a traditional pre-super-bowl interview, but I thought they were doing so because the president was treated unfairly by the media (which he was/is, fwiw). I noticed that a lot of direct to videos had many cuts - meaning they were stitched together from multiple takes - but figured it was just a fluke or something to do with the camera setups. I dismissed the Hur report as political nonsense. All of these notions were, I think, reasonable. But they turned out to be incorrect.

Above all, I figured that Biden would do better once he actually got in front of voters. The State of the Union seemed to prove that point. Biden didn’t seem like a young guy, but he was sharp, high-energy, and had what it took to win. I assumed the same strategy was at play in challenging Trump to a June debate. Biden was trying to get out in front of age-related concerns early, and I thought he’d succeed.

I still think there was a decent chance that the strategy “should” have worked. The USA Basketball Team will usually beat, say, Mongolia. So going all-in on a game against Mongolia is a pretty reasonable strategy. By the same token, I think when Biden issued his challenge to Trump, he would have beat expectations in the debate six or seven times out of ten. That, of course, didn’t happen. But if it had, we’d be having a very different conversation right now.

But here’s the most important thing I (and I suspect others) thought when we argued Biden should stay in the race. If we turned out to be wrong, he could always drop out.

This is not something I ever said in public. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t believe it. While people who write about politics get paid to state their opinions publicly, people who work in and around politics have the opposite set of incentives. Most of the time, it’s better to publicly say nothing, or nothing of substance, and save all your important opinion-having for private conversations.

When Biden proposed a June debate, I figured he was confident that he would outperform low expectations. But I also figured he knew, given the timing, that if he truly bombed - which I didn’t think he would - he’d most likely have to step aside. I similarly thought there would be plenty of opportunities for Biden to show us he was up to the job of candidate - and if he couldn’t take advantage of those opportunities, he could figure out how to not be the candidate anymore. I imagined the early debate as a kind of insurance policy. Probably he had more energy than the media claimed - but if not, we could adapt.

I made a mistake in that thinking. I assumed, from what I’ve read, more strategy than actually existed - I think the president didn’t realize how all-in he’d gone. But in other ways I was correct - Biden did poorly in the debate, and immediately people (including but not limited to the establishment) began to demand he prove he was up to the task of campaigning for the next four months. When he couldn’t do that, the drumbeat grew.

And now, here we are.

Kamala Harris is the presumptive nominee. But she hasn’t made policy concessions to the base that make her look too extreme for swing voters, and she didn’t have to go through a divisive, bruising primary. Instead, she has a party united around her, a huge campaign infrastructure that looks like an incumbents rather than a new candidates, and a Trump campaign that built a giant war machine for attacking someone else.

Just look at Harris’s first campaign appearance campaign in 2024, compared to her 2019 primary campaign. Back then, she realized that she could run as a boring centrist, but also couldn’t run as a former prosecutor (her greatest general-election strength), given the concerns the base had about that. So she made some concessions to move left, but also tried to talk about being tough on Trump, and got caught in the middle.

Yesterday, she went to campaign HQ and leaned into the prosector stuff - simultaneously rejecting the extreme-leftist caricature put forward by Republicans and making the toughest we’ve heard against Trump all election cycle. And the base loved her for it.

This outcome - Harris with an incumbent’s organizational advantage, playing to her strengths - is obviously better for Democrats than if Harris was the nominee after a bruising primary fight. It’s better for Democrats than if our non-Harris nominee was a Trump-like figure who took advantage of a fractured field to win, despite being a very subpar candidate. And it’s probably about the same as if the non-Harris nominee was a hypothetical best possible mainstream candidate, only they’d spent the last eight months being attacked as too conservative while at the same time making policy promises to the base that alienated the middle.

It’s probably not as good as an outcome as Biden being unexpectedly healthy and youthful-seeming, but there’s nothing anyone could do about that.

BACK TO THE BEST POSSIBLE REALISTIC OUTCOME

By supporting Biden’s decision to stay in November, did the establishment guarantee that Democrats win? Nope. No one can do that. We’ve all got to get to work.

But the insiders avoided a lot of worst-case scenarios, while still landing somewhere where we have a solid chance in a difficult year - one where global anti-incumbent sentiment is sky high, Gaza threatened to tear the party apart, and the conservative media (and social media) is stronger than ever while the liberal media struggles to catch up.

I’d argued that’s pretty close to the BPRO. And it gives us a fighting chance to win - maybe even win big - and to finally turn the page on Donald Trump.

Nice job, insiders. Tell Darth Vader and Nurse Ratchet we say hi.