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President Joe Biden is currently losing the 2024 presidential race to former President Donald Trump. If the election were held tomorrow, Trump would win — likely convincingly. The fact that this is increasingly obvious, and that Biden finds himself fighting an uphill battle to prolong his already ancient political career, has precipitated some epic handwringing on the MSNBC airwaves and a veritable five-alarm fire at the Democratic National Committee.
The big polling news last week was that The New York Times/Siena College, one of the country's most accurate pollsters, has Trump up in five of the six most important swing states — including an astonishing 13-point cushion in light-blue Nevada, and a nine-point lead in purple Georgia. This week, the big polling update came courtesy of the Cook Political Report, another highly regarded polling outfit. The Cook Political Report poll also has Trump leading or tied in each of the seven states polled — in both a mano-a-mano and a three-way race that also takes into account independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The fact that the Cook Political Report corroborated the eye-opening Times/Siena findings from the week prior led polling savant Nate Silver to post this warning on Thursday: "If Biden is still struggling in August[,] he needs to consider stepping aside. It's not a great situation for D[emocrat]s either way, but you have to do due diligence on the question. It's an important election, obviously. It shouldn't be taboo to talk about." Indeed, polling cross-tabs routinely show that a plurality or majority of Democrats would prefer Biden do just that: Step aside and exit the national stage.
The party's basic conundrum is this: Democrats purport to view Trump as an existential threat to "our democracy," but they are being led to the political slaughter by their senile octogenarian-in-chief. So perhaps Democrats are planning to depose Biden and pull the old switcheroo at their summertime nominating convention in Chicago — a spectacle already expected to be mass-protested by pro-Hamas radicals who abhor the man they call "Genocide Joe"?
It's not going to happen. Democrats, whether they like it or not, are stuck with the doddering Delawarean dolt as their 2024 presidential nominee.
Biden first arrived in Washington, D.C., as a U.S. senator in Jan. 1973. He first ran for president in 1988 — the year before your humble columnist was even born. Good luck trying to convince him to voluntarily bow out, after he finally ran a successful presidential race on his third try. Furthermore, the fact that Biden is so decrepit and diminished makes it less likely he will receive earnest advice to drop out from those around him — in his weakened state, he is merely a puppet to be taken advantage of by close staffers and confidants. And there is no more cynical or self-serving confidant than his wife "Dr." Jill Biden, a 21st-century Lady Macbeth if there ever were one.
But there is an even clearer, more obvious reason the Democrats have no choice but to roll the dice with Biden this fall. Democrats, humorously, are now trapped by a self-defeating intersectional quagmire of their very own making.
The single most frequently floated suggestion for the Democrat who can swoop into the August convention in Chicago and save the day for the donkeys is California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Other possibilities are thought to include Vice President Kamala Harris, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
There is a glaring structural problem here. If Democrats leapfrog the Black female Harris to choose any of these white men — especially the Hollywood villain-resembling Newsom — they will have committed an egregious sin, according to the tenets of their very own woke catechism and "diversity, equity and inclusion" ideology. How can the Democratic Party, which two years ago explicitly chose Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace the retiring Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that she is a Black woman, now defenestrate the first Black woman to ever serve as president or vice president? And to do so for a dreaded white man? Scandalous!
Democrats simply can't do it. And they doubly can't do it at a time when their presidential ticket is struggling so mightily to retain Black support — especially younger Black males, who show signs of trending toward Republicans at historic margins. There is therefore no world in which Biden is discarded for anyone other than Harris herself. But Harris may well be the only Democrat in Washington, D.C., less popular than Uncle Joe himself. The dimwitted cackler-in-chief is about as popular these days as venereal disease.
Democrats therefore have no choice but to take a deep breath, pray to the deity they probably don't believe in, and roll the dice with their impotent current ticket. And Republicans couldn't possibly be happier about it.
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Josh Hammer is senior editor-at-large at Newsweek, a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation, counsel and policy advisor for the Internet Accountability Project, a syndicated columnist through Creators and a contributing editor for Anchoring Truths