Donald Trump has made it increasingly clear that the survival of democracy in 2025 and beyond likely depends on a Democratic presidential victory in 2024. So panic is an altogether appropriate state of mind for democrats, and Democrats, who contemplate the electoral landscape. Joe Biden’s weaknesses — his age, his failure to connect with many young voters — are similar to his shortcomings in 2020. The big difference is that he is the incumbent now, and polls consistently show him struggling.
There is no politburo for the Democratic Party. No group of heavies convenes to decide who’s up, who’s down, who gets to be on the ballot next year, or who’s off. Running for president, or for any office, is an exercise of free will and hubris — or courage, if you prefer that term. If you fear that Biden may not be up to the task of safeguarding democracy next November, you need do only one thing to supplant him as the Democratic nominee: Run.
So, what should we make of the fact that no credible Democrat has?
The party has an unusually strong bench of governors. It has effective senators and at least one Cabinet member — Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — with uncanny political communication skills. None of those people lacks ambition. Each has access to money, quality staff, political networks and news media attention.
“A primary would be fratricidal,” said Robert Shrum, director of the Center for the Political Future and the Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. “The party figures it’s better off being united and trying to pull it off” with Biden as the nominee.
Fractured party
Potential challengers also understand that fracturing the Democratic Party in 2024 would presage the breaking of American democracy thereafter. Trump is openly campaigning as an authoritarian and his goons are preparing to transform the federal government into a clubhouse for the MAGA cult. Responding to comparisons of Trump’s violent rhetoric with that of the fascist dictators of Italy and Germany during World War II, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told the Washington Post that critics making such a point would have their “entire existence crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” Give credit where it’s due: It was a concise, effective way to confirm that Trump’s fascist exertions are wholly intentional.
No Democrat wants to be a catalyst for democracy’s demise. But many still fear that Biden might fill that role himself. One Democratic consultant, citing what he described as Biden’s abysmal poll numbers, told me he believes that whichever party can jettison its aged front-runner will prevail.
Yet neither party appears likely, or perhaps even able, to do so.
It’s a political cliché that elections are referendums on the incumbent. Trump is such a hulking figure, at once protean and unchanging, that it’s hard to imagine that any election in which he is a candidate can be anything but a referendum on him and the MAGA aggression he has unleashed.
Biden has been unwilling to shift the responsibility for defending democracy to other shoulders. A lot of Democrats are uneasy with that. Everyone in the party recognizes that 2024 is not simply another round in the yin and yang of liberal and conservative America.
Over the next 12 months, democracy will be walking a high wire. Don’t bother looking down for a net. Trump has shredded it.
Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S, politics and policy.
