Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…
… and one of those ways to forecast what’s possible for the Democrats now in the wake of last night’s debate.
Hokay, while, yeah, I had last night’s debate performance on my bingo card, I didn’t think we’d go full holy shit so fast.
Biden did catastrophically badly in the debate. Trump appeared to be still vigorous and in full possession of his bullshit but — if you listened to him — he alternated between lies and word salad. So we got the Senile-and-Slow versus Shark-Battery mini-scenario I mentioned yesterday morning.
The calls for Biden to step aside are now deafening and the Trump camp is crowing.
Biden ran in 2020 largely due to the existential threat Trump posed to American democracy — and to Americans. A giant part of why he’s running now is that he fears that he and only he can beat Trump because he’s the only one who ever has. If he’s convinced that today that is no longer the case — other Democrats can do it now — and that he’s already completed his duty to America, he may retire.
So I’m gonna emergency-future my ass off right now. As such, this will only be a quick-thumbnail look at the possibilities, not a full treatment.
There are really only two questions to ask about the Democratic ticket right now:
Will Biden remain on the ticket or not?
Will Democrats unite behind the new nominee/ticket or not?
Let’s make a scenario matrix out of them and see what we get.
Very Important, and Do Not Make Me Come Down There and Smack These Two Points into You:
Right now each of these scenarios are equally possible but that does not mean they are equally likely.
Nobody really knows how likely any of these are and you should completely suspend your skepticism and cynicism about them for now. In my decades as a professional futurist I have seen the future scenario the client was dead certain could never occur become their big honking reality.
My point is that we have to honestly consider all the possibilities so that none of them grab us in the ass later. I am anti-ass-grabbing. Which, no, I see what I said… yeah-whatever-OK-you’re-not-12-stop-giggling.
Let’s go through all four:
Biden vs. Trump — Biden remains the Democrats’ nominee and Democrats shovel themselves back up and unite behind him again and decide he had a one-off bad night. Biden tries to recover from his performance at the debate and regain Democrats’ confidence and his momentum and mojo. Trump continues trying to electorally survive his legal and financial troubles and himself. The race turns into a dead-heat existential white-knuckler with both sides terrified that their guy’s chances — or their guy’s health or cognitive capacity — will fall through the floor at any second.
United Trump vs. Backstabbed Biden — Biden remains on the ticket but a prominent enough Democrat challenges him at the convention, crippling his campaign and splitting his vote.
Trump vs. Box of Squirrels — Biden retires but Democrats compete with each other so fiercely they split the Democratic vote many ways, sabotaging everyone’s chances of defeating Trump.
New Blood vs. Trump — Biden retires, the Democrats form a new ticket, and Democrats quickly unite behind the new presidential and vice presidential candidates in the name of defeating Trump.
Quick links: Could Biden be replaced on the ticket? Yes. Here’s how and at different stages in the game.
The new ticket — for a range of reasons — would very probably have Kamala Harris at the top and one of these as her running mate.
That WaPo piece — which is excellent and succinct — lays out the (sometimes very strong) cases for Kamala Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, Jared Polis, Gavin Newsom, Raphael Warnock, Michelle Obama (who wouldn’t consider it), Amy Klobuchar, and Andy Bashear.
Could Kamala win? Actually, yes — especially if Democrats’ overperformance in recent special elections isn’t yet accounted for in polling like it wasn’t in the polls ahead of many of those special elections. And she — and almost all of those possible running mates — can fight. Imagine how Kamala would have performed against Trump last night: she would have shredded him.
Could a, say, Harris-Somebody ticket with a united Democratic Party behind them win over Democratic voters and enough independents? Yes, and maybe easily. They’d just have to show up on camera together and say We’re here. We’re young and strong and smart. We are going to do the right thing and we’re going to body-block some evil. We have your back and our allies’ backs. We’re going to fix some shit. We need your help. Oh, and one last thing: we’re going to whip his ass. And that will be enough.
So as far as this futurist can foresee, that’s what’s possible — at least that’s within the Democrats’ control. Biden of course could keel over and suddenly we wind up toward one of the two right-hand scenarios. Trump, of course, could die or implode onstage. Or the world could flip upside down and flood. Other things are possible.
Anyway.
If you’ve been reading Think Future for a while you know I try to conclude with something reassuring or inspiring or witty or good. Or adjacent to those. But I don’t have anything this time. I just don’t. Except this:
You didn’t think this was going to be easy now… did you?
The bottom line is (as it so often is) the bottom line. And the line hereis this: The Biden/Harris ticket has a campaign war chest of about $2B that's been four years in the building. Legally, no other candidate can access that money -- or, in fact, has any money they can legally use for a federal campaign. Any candidate who's not one of those two would have to raise a couple billion bucks from scratch in the next four months -- realistically, in the next four weeks.
That's not happening. Period. Booting Biden for anybody but Harris would basically shut down the party's financial ability to run anyone this year. It would be effectively taking the D line off the ballot, and handing the race to Trump.
All these supposedly smart pundits who are discussing a candidate switch are just revealing that they know nothing about how campaign finance law works. This is locked in. There is no turning back.
And Harris cannot win. The ONLY Democrat on the scene who we know can beat Trump is Joe Biden. We're stuck with the best Dem president we've had since FDR, boo effing hoo for us. Time to suck it up and go out and win this thing.
The one thing Harris would have said in the debate that Joe didn't:
"Well, Donald, since the moderators won't call you out on your lies, I will. That is a lie. You know that's a lie, I know that's a lie, the American public knows that's a lie". ... and then smoothly move on to answer whatever question was actually asked of her.
CNN put the fix in for Trump, and no one should be surprised that Biden didn't "win". He didn't win because the format was specifically designed to prevent it.