The Voters Did Not Chose Biden as the Nominee
Trying to Put to Rest a Genuinely Fatuous Talking Point
Programming Note: I know, I know, I said last time that a politics post was going to be an exception to my rule, just a one-off—and, indeed, said it the previous time too. Sorry.—No, really: I am sorry: I wish the world would let me focus on other things. But the sound of the collapsing Republic is too loud in my ears to let me concentrate on other matters, and I am choking on the kicked-up dust. So here is something I felt needed saying that I hadn’t quite seen anyone say. I won’t promise not to do it again (and wouldn’t be believed if I did), since it’s that sort of year, alas. But I am trying to minimize it! Just not, y’know, successfully, so far.
The talking point that “the voters nominated Biden” is going around, and though I am but a mosquito in the great swamp that is our cultural conversation, I wanted to do my tiny bit to put it down. Because it’s ridiculous.
Of course unlike Trump lies, this one has a certain plausible truth to it: Biden did, in fact, win the Democratic primaries, in the sense that among the candidates who ran he got the most votes. So that if you yada-yada over all the intervening steps, it looks true that Biden was chosen by the Democratic voters. But Democratic voters only picked Biden in a Hobson’s choice: a horse race with only one horse.
Let’s go through this step-by-step, shall we?
First, it’s not a choice if there is only one option.
This ought to be clear enough. If you go to a supermarket and look for a choice of brand of toilet paper, and they only have one, then they don’t have a choice for you. The fact that you might in theory go to another store or decide to do without toilet paper doesn’t mean that this store had a choice. It had one option, which isn’t a choice. This is why Hobson’s choice is a phrase: because even though people will call this sort of thing is a choice, we know damn well that it’s not one. “Take it or leave it” is a choice of sorts, but it’s a not a choice of things to take. It’s a lack of choice.
This is even more true in political circumstances. We are all familiar with the cases where some autarch will offer an up-or-down choice as to whether you want him1 to stay in power or not. This is not a serious political choice! Even in a real democracy, in races where there is only one candidate on the ballot is not one where we are given a choice. (And the very rare, extraordinarily difficult possibility of a write-in campaign does not make it a choice on the ballot: it is an attempt to circumvent the lack of choice given on the ballot!) If some candidate who had no competition bragged that they were the choice of the people, we would laugh—and we would be right to laugh. Because it’s so obviously, blatantly false.
Second, it is not a choice if there is only one realistic option.
This is perhaps a more common situation in politics than a genuine one-choice option, at least in high-profile races (in lots of small-bore races there isn’t an opposition candidate, certainly). I mentioned autocracies that present a yes-or-no choice, which does happen.2 But it’s more common for the autocrat to throw up a fake choice so as to provide a slightly less pathetically obvious fig leaf to the lack of any choice.3 But only a fool would pretend that it was a real choice, unless, of course, you were unlucky enough to live under the autocrat’s control, in which only a fool (or a foolishly brave and principled person) would not so pretend.
But this dynamic isn’t reserved for autocracies. It should be familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with American politics from the antics (and subversions) of third party candidates. This is a situation where there is a clear choice—a binary choice—and the falsehood is people insisting that there are, in fact, more than two choices. We will face this situation again in a few months: the choices will be either Trump or the Democratic nominee, period. There will be no third choice. Some people will try to pretend that Jill Stein or Cornel West or Robert Kennedy, Jr or Chase Oliver (the Libertarian candidate) are choices, but they are either fooling themselves or you. It might be nice to live in a world where there were realistic third options. And it is not unknown for genuine third party candidates to do well enough that they were an actual, honest-to-God choice (I think the last time it happened was Ross Perot in 1992). But there isn’t one now. There are two choices.
(Which is why, of course, that if Biden does not step down as the nominee, then we will have no choice—compos or non, alive or dead—to vote for him over Trump. To borrow David Sedaris’s famous analogy, if the choice is stale bread or cyanide, then of course you take the stale bread. But it would be better if the choice were actual chicken or cyanide.4)
To return to our grocery store example, the grocery store did not have a choice of toilet paper brands if they also carry a $60 bidet. That is a choice, of a sorts, but it is not a choice of brands of toilet paper. It’s a fake option.
Third, Biden had no serious competition.
Yes, there were a few other candidates in the race. Do you remember who they were? The main one I remember is RFK, Jr., the man with the famous name and the worm-eaten brain.5 Which is to say: not a serious candidate. Meanwhile I remember very well people who did not run against Biden: Kamala Harris; Gretchen Whitmer; Gavin Newsom; JB Pritzker; Raphael Warnock. That is, every single person mentioned as a serious possibility should Biden drop out. None of them ran.
Once Biden decided to run, the voters were all-but-inevitably denied any choice at all. Biden was not a choice; he was the denial of one.
Why didn’t they run? One person suggested to me on twitter that it was “because they knew they’d lose”. Which is likely true! But that doesn’t mean that it was that voters in the abstract thought that Biden was a better choice than all the others: what it means is that a sitting president has an all-but-insurmountable advantage. This is entirely different from people thinking that Biden was the actual best choice.
But no one else ran, because no one else realistically6 could. Which brings me to the fourth step in the argument:
Fourth, Biden could have no serious competition in our system.
This is the only even mildly difficult step in this argument, and it isn’t even really difficult in the sense of there being a strong point to be made on the other side. Rather, the reason it’s true is complicated and structural, and due to a variety of interacting forces, rather than being, say, a straight legal requirement, which means it’s a hard truth to express in social-media terms (“there’s no rule against it!”). So it’s a difficult argument to make pithily and in a way that can’t be rhetorically waved away.7 But that doesn’t make it untrue.
Let’s start with law. It is certainly in no way a legal requirement that the sitting president be given the nomination of their party. This happened regularly in the 19th century. It even happened occasionally in the 20th, most famously in 1948 (when Truman wasn’t covered by the 22nd amendment forbidding two terms since he was president when it was proposed and ratified) and 1968, when LBJ dropped out of the running on March 31. And in LBJ’s case, it was in part due to two challengers for the nomination, Eugene McCarthy and (the real) Robert F. Kennedy. There were later serious challenges to presidents receiving a renomination in 1974 (when Reagan challenged Ford), 1980 (when Ted Kennedy challenged Carter), and 1992 (when Buchanan challenged Bush the Elder). So you might say that it’s perfectly possible!
The first thing to note is that it’s never worked. Truman wasn’t (if memory serves) challenged at all. And Ford, Carter and Bush all got the nominations—and, quite possibly not coincidentally, all went on to lose; probably their being challenged was in each case a sign of the weakness that ultimately led to their defeats, but it is also perfectly plausible that the challenges helped ensure those defeats. LBJ was denied the nomination—but it wasn’t either of his challengers who got it, but his hand-picked successor, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who also went on to lose.8
Of course one conclusion one could draw from this is that it’s a mistake to do anything but rally around a sitting president. (I’m seeing a lot of “and did LBJ win?” responses to comparisons of Biden to LBJ; it’s a cheap shot, though, because LBJ was unpopular because of his policies (primarily the Vietnam war), whereas Biden is struggling in large part because of something particular to him, i.e. his age and sharply declined capacity.) But you could easily say that it’s foolish to run against a sitting president—not that it’s always foolish not to run them.
At any rate, whether or not this means there’s a chance if Biden steps down (and of course we don’t really know either way), none of these facts in any way imply that someone could have challenged him for the nomination and won. Rather, they indicate that if anyone had tried, they would have lost, and possibly hurt Biden in the process. So a race in which Biden stays in was not a race anyone else could realistically enter.
Why not? Most of all, I suspect, there is the presumption that the sitting president gets it. As I said, this wasn’t always true, but it has become true, has been true for decades, and was mostly true for decades before that—and inertia is a powerful force. Add to that the multiple advantages of incumbency to consider.
And one of those advantages is specific to this circumstance: the inevitable perception that everyone will agree that anyone who tried would be a traitor to the party and to Biden. Perhaps this oughtn’t to be the case—competitive primaries are democratic, and democracy is good!—but that doesn’t change the fact that it is the case.
And, of course, because of that all the serious challengers faced (as Ezra Klein has noted) a collective action problem: the one to move first would not help themselves, either in 2024 or in any future race, since they’d be branded a traitor to the cause. And even if their running against Biden showed he was weak and brought him down, they would because they had moved first be unlikely to get the nomination. And save in extraordinary circumstances9 serious candidates don’t undertake political suicide missions to help others win the nomination. Again, maybe it ought to be this way—we would be a far healthier democracy if this sort of public spirit was common, or at least not vanishingly rare—but it is, in fact, the case. Anyone who would do such a thing is almost definitionally not a serious candidate: the serious candidates are who gets brought in after a president decides not to run.
In short, while it’s possible that someone could have forced Biden out of the race, no one serious could or would enter it until that happened. Which means that the voters could have been offered no serious alternative save Biden. The only way there could have been a serious, competitive primary with serious candidates is if Biden had withdrawn.
Therefore, the democratic voters did not chose Biden as their nominee; he chose himself. The voters, lacking a choice, ratified it.10
To say that “the voters chose Biden” is fatuous: the voters didn’t have a serious choice.
That is the whole argument, but it is worth pointing out a corollary, namely, that because of this lack of choice, Biden’s nomination in no way conferred democratic legitimacy (or Democratic legitimacy, for that matter). This is because everyone knew that Biden was the only serious choice on the ballot, so people either didn’t show up or voted for him as Hobson’s choice.
Rather than make this case myself, I will just quote Eric Levitz of Vox:
As Axios reports, one of the Biden campaign’s “biggest arguments” against a new nominee “will be that Biden won the Democratic primaries overwhelmingly, and that result is final.” One source close to Biden told the publication, “You guys don’t get to decide. That’s not how this works. We don’t have smoke-filled rooms.” But the idea that Biden stepping down would constitute an affront to (small-d) democratic principles does not withstand scrutiny. Throughout 2022 and 2023, polls repeatedly showed around two-thirds of Democratic voters wanted a nominee other than Joe Biden. In at least one post-debate survey, more Democratic voters supported Biden dropping out than opposed him doing so, even this late in the game. These polls represent the views of a much larger body of Democrats than the small minority who turned out for uncompetitive primary elections this year.
If there isn’t a real contest, people don’t show up and don’t vote, and even if they do it doesn’t mean anything.
People are saying we shouldn’t decide in a smoke-filled room when it was in fact decided in a smoke-filled head: Biden’s. Oh, I am sure his close advisors and family bear some responsibility as well. But ultimately the choice was his, and the responsibility was his.11
And it still is! There is no human being who can deny him the nomination. (And there really oughtn’t to be, in the sense that it would be on balance a bad thing if a genuinely voter-chosen candidate could be tossed out against their will.) But Biden can still do the right things. Whether that is to say he’s not running and throwing it to an open convention or to say he’s not running and that his Vice President, Kamala Harris, will be the candidate (and saying it would make it so, even if it isn’t otherwise inevitable), is a much-debated point, and I honestly go back and forth on this.
But at this point that is a decision subsequent to the main one: Biden needs to step aside.
He ought to have done it a year and a half ago. Not to have done it then was a gross dereliction of duty, a moral failing of the highest order. Biden let down himself, his party, his country, and the entire world. If he had done the right thing—the obviously right thing—and announced shortly after the 2022 elections that he wasn’t running, then we would have used the normal process to pick a nominee, and done our best to beat Trump with whomever the voters chose.
Now we don’t have that option. We have three bad options: 1) stay the course and have a candidate who is palpably and undeniably unfit to hold the office (and whose only major qualification is that he is less palpably and undeniably unfit than his opponent, which although unquestionably true is hardly much of a recommendation) be the only thing between us and an existential threat to the republic; 2) go with Biden’s VP, in many ways the obvious choice, but one so unpopular that a lot of people are pushing option #1 simply because they worry about her running; and 3) take the enormous risks of a contested convention (and setting aside a precedent-breaking nominee) and nominating, under highly unusual circumstances, something else.
Three bad options. But the choice between #2 and #3 is downstream of avoiding option #1: both are moot unless Biden, now, does the right thing. After he steps aside, then we can work out which of #2 or #3 is really the better chance at avoiding catastrophe (and let us never forget that those are the stakes). Until then, it’s on him. Yes, others can advise, and still others push those advisors (all the way down to me, pushing those who push those who push, etc, with God only knows how many steps involved); but it is Biden who will need to make the call.
Just as he, and in the end only he, made the call that put us in this position in the first place.
Since it wasn’t the voters who picked him as the nominee for 2024. They didn’t get a choice. Only Biden did.
And now he has another choice to make.
The rest of us can only hope and pray he makes the wise one.
You can’t seriously want me to make this gender neutral, can you? Of course it’s him.
I think the earliest examples were Napoleon Bonaparte using plebiscites to secure an illusion of popular legitimacy.
There is a continuum here, of course. My personal favorite fake referendum, for instance, is probably somewhere between a simple yes-or-no vote and a choice between the autocrat and a fake choice. I speak of the referendum by which Ngo Dinh Diem (1901-1963), America’s puppet autocrat in South Vietnam, “legitimated” his power by a referendum giving voters a choice between former Emperor Bao Dai (1913-1997), who had been the puppet ruler for the colonial French regime (and, briefly, the Japanese) and himself. As historian Marilyn Young narrates:
The range of choice was narrow. Voters could support the deposing of Bao Dai and “recognize Ngo Dinh Diem as the Chief of State of Vietnam with the mission of installing a democratic regime,” or they could refuse to support that proposition. More significant, perhaps, were the police agents who went “from door to door explaining the unpleasant consequences which failure to vote would be likely to entail,” the police presence at the polling booths, and the unsupervised ballot count by Diem’s men. [U.S. advisor Major General Edward] Lansdale had urged modesty: “I said, all you need is a fairly large majority.” Instead, Diem rolled to victory with 98.2 percent of the vote. In Saigon, out of a total of 450,000 registered voters, an astonishing 605,025 voted for Diem. (The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (Harper, 1991), p. 53).
It is that last sentence which makes this my favorite example.
At this point in U.S. politics a choice between two edible meals is, alas, a pipe dream. It makes you wonder when the last election was when there was something that seemed like a reasonable choice on both sides? Opinions will differ, of course, but personally I think it’s a lot further back than people would like to think.
The most serious candidate was Dean Philips, the congressional representative from Michigan’s third district. According to the above-linked wikipedia article, he got the most delegates next to Biden… a grand total of four. You could say that this means that people overwhelmingly wanted Biden as the nominee, but only by deliberately ignoring the overwhelming context and shutting your eyes to the plain truth of the matter.
Which is why there were unrealistic candidates, but no realistic ones.
I suppose anything can be rhetorically waved away; here I mean that it can be rhetorically waved away in a way that is superficially convincing, i.e. persuasive to those who don’t think about it too hard.
In general, 1968 was a weird year: Robert F. Kennedy might have gotten the nomination instead of Hubert Humphrey if he wasn’t assassinated after winning the California primary. And he also might not have: the primary system was in its infancy at that point, and most delegates were still chosen differently.
Basically, 1968; and even then it took the not-that-serious candidacy of Eugene McCarthy on a political kamikaze mission to bring the quite-serious candidate Robert F. Kennedy into the race.
The only other argument I’ve heard that the voters chose Biden in any significant sense—and here I’ve only seen it once, on twitter, so I am relegating the rebuttal to a footnote—is that the voters effectively chose Biden for eight years when they picked him as the nominee in 2020; “this is pretty typical for a reelection. voters know they're choosing someone for 8 years” was how Noah Berlatsky put it. But this is even sillier than the other arguments that Biden was chosen. First and foremost, voters were not choosing Biden even in the contingency that his health deteriorated to the point where he couldn’t run again; to make that claim is so farfetched that I am rather at a loss to know where to begin to refute it. You might, conceivably, say that under ordinary circumstances—a healthy nominee and a non-existential threat from the other party—voters chose that, although even there I think it isn’t true (no one really votes that way) and is a bad idea to try to promote it (we ought to leave open the idea of having a real choice for nominee who isn’t the incumbent). But it’s at least a plausible argument. To think that it applies in this case is off the wall.
And this is even more true because Biden signaled in 2019 that he would only serve one term if elected! (See here and here). No, he didn’t say it himself—it’s not a “broken campaign promise”—but it was signaled by his advisors before it was walked back. (Basically, it was a trial balloon that wasn’t followed up on.) But this is all inside-baseball stuff: the fact that this was floated was enough all by itself, to nullify any sense that voters “chose” him as their 2024 nominee (unless there was some very strong pushback at the time, which there wasn’t; it was just dropped).
I’ve heard a lot of people say they feel sorry for Biden. And if what they mean is that they are sorry that people age and diminish in capacity and are sorry that he is no longer up to the job, I completely, 100% agree.* But if what they mean is that they are thereby excusing his not dropping out, I completely disagree. Am I sorry a beloved teacher or store owner or janitor who wants to keep going can’t, and maybe even feel a bit understanding at their hanging on? Sure. But those aren’t life or death jobs. My understanding starts to wain when they are in positions of real consequence—being a surgeon, say, or simply driving a car. And when they are in positions of great power—like Diane Feinstein or Ruth Bader Ginsburg**—then I no longer feel sorry: I think that they have betrayed their country and their moral duty. And most seriously of all, Biden never have ought to have run for reelection. And now we are in a crisis because he didn’t have the wisdom and self-knowledge to do what needed to be done.
* That it is probably inevitable is no matter what we do does not, in my view, make it any less lamentable.
** Whose capacities were not to my knowledge diminished but who was, like Feinstein and Biden, in a role she had, for reasons of age, to give up for the good of the country and failed to do so to our immense sorrow and loss).