The Extremely Simple Reason MAGA Wants President Joe Biden to End His Campaign

If you’re a Democratic or independent voter who’s been suckered into the idea that Biden ending his campaign would do anything but ensure a second Trump term, it’s time to awaken from the fever dream.

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Let’s cut to the chase: President Joe Biden is not going to end his 2024 campaign over a single poor debate performance, any more than Donald Trump did in 2020 after a first-in-the-cycle debate performance that voters conclusively told pollsters was worse than the one yesterday by this sitting president.

President Biden will stay in the race not simply because he’s already the nominee; not simply because there’s no mechanism to force him to exit; not simply because major media’s and politicos’ hyperventilating response to his debate performance yesterday—about 40% of voters appear to think he won the debate, and only 5% said it changed their vote (a sentiment unlikely to survive beyond a day in any case)—fails to take into account that the president had a cold, is a lifelong stutterer, performed much better as the debate went along, told a fraction of the number of lies his rival did, and saw his intermittent “old man” optics repeatedly belied by his conspicuous command of facts, policy, and history (check the transcript of the debate if you doubt this); no, Joe Biden will not step away from the 2024 election cycle because it would hand the presidency, beyond any doubt, to a confirmed rapist, serial sexual assailant, active insurrectionist, convicted felon, pathological liar, malignant narcissistic sociopath, gleeful adulterer, career criminal, unrepentant con man, traitorous would-be U.S. dictator, misogynist, antisemite, racist, homophobe, transphobe, Islamophobe, and budding war criminal.

Why would a Biden exit ensure a Trump victory? Let us zoom through some reasons:

(1) Nobody now polls, or has ever polled, better against Trump than Biden. Rightly or not, it appears that at present American independents prefer one particular old white man to Donald Trump over any other option available to them. It is true now, and it was true in 2018 when Joe Biden first floated a presidential run and behind the scenes Trump and his team concluded that Biden was the biggest threat to his re-election. Team Trump thought so then—and turned out to be right—and it thinks so still. Why?Because all the polls say so. No poll has anyone else close to Trump, and Republicans are well aware of this.

(2) Biden has beat Trump before. Even if we ignore polls, we cannot ignore results. Joe Biden beat the pants off Trump in the popular vote and Electoral College in 2020, and the results weren’t that close. Biden picked up states Democrats thought they couldn’t get, more than doubled Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote margin over Trump, and did all this while, well, old. Was he less old in 2020 than today? Yes, of course. But he was still a stutterer who sometimes loses his train of thought, misspeaks, and underperforms in many debates and interviews. Nevertheless, voters decided that they liked him, trusted him, and believed he’d surrounded himself with great advisers. Which he did.

(3) Biden has had—unlike Trump—a successful presidency. Nonpartisan historians now universally rank President Biden in the Top 20 presidents ever. Yes, really; feel free to Google it. They do this because the Biden administration has gotten results, even when and as they have not been widely reported by the media. But the results are there even if you’re not a historian: inflation is easing, the economy is healthy, crime is down, COVID-19 is under control, we’re out of Afghanistan, NATO is stronger than ever, and the Executive Order the president just signed on the border has clearly had a major and immediate effect on reducing border crossings. Unemployment’s low and Biden has avoided any major scandals. Foreign leaders like him and trust him. By comparison, nonpartisan historians universally rank Donald Trump among the worst five presidents in American history due to his rank incompetence, deceit, corruption, and moral depravity. Why would the Democrats trade a Top 20 president for some as-yet unnamed pol who is untested on the national stage and has no POTUS track record?

(4) Incumbency has enormous benefits. Joe Biden has the bully pulpit and the gravitas of being president; if he steps down, he not only becomes a lame-duck president through late January of 2025 but loses the bully pulpit—no one listens to a lame-duck president—even as Democrats writ large lose the historically proven benefit of being the incumbent party. Indeed, it’s worse than that, because in this case Trump is an ex-president, so Biden exiting the race would technically make Trump appear to be the incumbent, give him a new kind of bully pulpit, and possibly gift him the advantages a conventional incumbent would have. Instead of running on the Biden administration’s obvious accomplishments, the Democrats would spend the summer and fall defending any daylight between Biden-replacement aspirants and a clearly successful presidency.

(5) Joe Biden is an amazing fundraiser. Joe Biden has been raking in the cash, and it may be a sad fact, but that does matter in contemporary American politics. President Biden is right now out-raising Trump, and it is angering Republicans—and scaring them—to no end. One reason they want Joe Biden gone is that no other Democrat has the proven fundraising prowess Biden does this side of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. And whatever you may think of the value of fundraising capacity, the simple fact is that it’s an irreplaceable commodity. You might hope all money going to the president would simply go to any new upstart, but that’s not how political fundraising works or has ever worked. Donations are built on trust and affection and longstanding ties, and Joe Biden has all those things with the biggest Democratic donors and tens of millions of small donors.

(6) It would lead to a civil war within the Democratic Party. Do people understand that the second an incumbent president is out of the way, that party’s nomination becomes a bloody free-for-all? Because Republicans definitely understand this. They know that for all that Democratic politicians claim to be united against Trump and honorably concerned about America’s future, if the Democratic nomination reopens they will scratch and claw at one another in public in ways that discredit themselves, the party, and all their past claims of concern for American democracy. It is simply how politicians are; apparently, they can’t help themselves. There is no consensus Biden replacement, which means weeks and weeks of public infighting between now and August 2024 that leads to so much bad feeling between warring camps that the victor who emerges from it will be irreparably crippled. Remember how Clinton voters refused to vote for Obama in surprising numbers? Quadruple that effect and imagine Gretchen Whitmer voters refusing to donate to or vote for J.B. Pritzker and vice versa, or Gavin Newsom voters refusing to donate to or vote for either of those former two. It may not be sensible, but it’s fact: bloody primaries cost votes and cash and triply so when it’s not a primary but a mad summer scramble for absolute power in a major political party.

(7) The Democrats do not have good options. Put aside the polling; put aside the fact that there is no reason for Democrats to not have good options given that the country largely supports the Democratic policy agenda and—for that matter—dislikes Trump. The fact remains that Americans do not like Gavin Newsom and do not know who Gretchen Whitmer or J.B. Pritzker even are; Black voters do not like Pete Buttigieg (putting aside how the Boeing Scandal and other transportation hiccups have hurt his political standing) and it certainly appears as though no one likes VP Kamala Harris. It is not possible to gain name recognition, trust, and public respect over just a few weeks the summer before an election, and GOP politicos certainly understand this even if Democrats do not. And this normal operation of U.S. politics is exacerbated, to Democrats’ detriment, by the fact that Trump has a highly motivated, even fanatical cult following that will definitely turn out to vote. If Democrats had a superstar with that sort of appeal, they’d already have made themselves known. (And be aware that Michelle Obama has made very clear that she will not run for President of the United States, and that putting up a neophyte leftist celebrity against Trump is only going to dispirit America further by seeming to confirm that U.S. politics is permanently over).

(8) This election is simply not about Joe Biden. When will people understand this? This election is about two things: how the country is doing and the fact that Donald Trump is a monster. The latter fact isn’t going to change—in fact, Trump’s monstrousness is only becoming more clear with each passing day—and the former is incontrovertible: the country could be doing better, but it’s doing fine, and much of that is attributable to the good work of the Biden administration. Is President Biden the leader of that administration? Yes. Which means whatever he is or is not doing behind the scenes is apparently enough to effect a result nonpartisan historians say is a Top 20 presidential administration in U.S. history. All this need not be made more complicated than it is.

(9) Debates do not matter. Even if we were to put aside everything else, the simple fact is that 48 hours Fox News and the ABC News 538 polling forecast—two ends of a spectrum of reliability—were both saying that President Biden is favored slightly to win this November. So either that remains true or a single debate performance altered it to the point that President Biden has gone from being ahead to being no longer eligible to run. The problem with that analysis? Decades of polling tells us that debates do not matter, and that people only remember them for a day or two. So which is more likely: that this debate is the first debate in U.S. history that will matter, or that it’s just like all others because the 24-hour news cycle prohibits American voters from retaining any sentiment even in the medium term?

(10) The next five months will be all about Trump, and Democrats need to keep it that way. You cannot claim to be combating instability in our democracy by waging a very public internal civil war over a president’s successor; what you can do is use Monday’s near-certain SCOTUS ruling block Trump’s immunity claims, and the late summer or early fall federal criminal trial Trump will face in D.C. as a result of that decision, to ensure that this election is a referendum on whether Americans like Trump—which they manifestly and palpably do not. Conversely, Joe Biden’s ability to stay out of the news is an underrated superpower at a time when Americans have less faith in politicians than ever and are exhausted by the drama in D.C. It would be the biggest favor Democrats have ever done for Donald Trump if they turn a summer of discussions of Trump’s criminality into esoteric, boring, and ultimately pointless debates over whether the Democratic governor of Illinois is a better politician than the Democratic governors of Michigan or California, a topic that is sure to anger a U.S. voting population that understandably wants politicians focused on doing good for the country. Internal political-party strife is not what Americans want to focus on right now, nor what Democrats want them focusing on. Instead, what Democrats want and what America needs is a president who recedes into the background and simply does his job 90% of the time, showing up largely for major events and a couple debates that clearly don’t actually move votes.

And all this is the tip of the iceberg. I haven’t touched on how historically horrific the debate performance Donald Trump turned in was—saying the pandemic ended in January 2021? Telling so many lies per second that fact-checking him live on-air took CNN several minutes? Making rambling statements about conspiracy theories and alleged Biden crimes that made no sense to anyone listening?—nor have I addressed even more esoteric facts, like Biden’s excellent post-debate performance at a rally of his supporters, which saw him looking and sounding just like he did at his amazing State of the Union speech just a few months ago, raising questions about whether he has actually changed at all since then or simply had a bad beginning and ending to a 90-minute debate (which is more likely, employing Occam’s Razor?) I didn’t get deep into the post-debate polling showing that American voters are actually—at least in the battleground states—divided about who won last night’s debate, or the fact that we have no large-scale post-debate polling data yet, or the fact that the timing of this debate put it just a matter of days before July 4, which tends to obliterate all prior news (just as SCOTUS’ likely Monday ruling against Donald Trump is likely to do). It really does seem that calls for President Biden to step aside—often from the same media pundits who said his SOTU speech just a matter of weeks ago was amazing—are largely an emotional reaction to basic election-year anxiety. This too shall pass.

To sum up, if your political enemies are begging you to do something, maybe ask why?