America’s Strange, High-Stakes Election Gets More Unprecedented

It’s not about Biden’s age anymore. Time to focus on the larger stakes.

The 2024 election was already unusual, and President Joe Biden exiting the race makes it even more so. No presumptive nominee has dropped out this late in the process. The closest analogue is 1968 when Lyndon Johnson declined to seek reelection, but that happened in March, not July, and before modern primaries.

In 2024, a current president was running against a former president for the first time since the 1800s. The Republicans are the first major party to nominate a convicted criminal, who is the first to call for the “termination” of the Constitution while vowing to be “a dictator.” Meanwhile, the Democrats were running the oldest candidate in history, and now launched into uncharted territory by changing their nominee with less than 3.5 months to go.

It should be Vice President Kamala Harris, and likely will. This is the main reason America has a vice president, and why parties put a vice presidential nominee on the ticket. Harris isn’t a sure thing, of course, and might be an underdog, but as I argued before Biden dropped out, Harris’s chances are likely similar or better than his. 

Early signs indicate Harris is quickly consolidating support and generating a flood of donations. Democrats raised over $50 million online in less than 24 hours, the biggest haul since 2020.

If Trump wins the election, there will be all sorts of blame to spread around, and I bet historians ultimately say the avoidable mistake was Biden running for reelection instead of giving Democrats a full primary season, rather than his decision to drop out given his awful debate and weak polling. But who knows. 

However, if Harris defeats Trump, Biden’s decision to drop out will go down as the capper on a highly consequential presidency. Saved democracy from Trump by winning in 2020, brought the country out of the COVID pandemic, passed a big climate change fighting package, kept Russia from conquering Ukraine while avoiding escalation or spread, and saved democracy again by passing the torch when unable to win in 2024.

Yes, he chose to run for reelection despite serious voter concerns. Yes, he spent weeks after the debate insisting he was staying in, and dropped out only after imploring in the media, and increasing pressure from Democratic officeholders. But it was still a choice, and opinions of the process will be overwhelmed by the results. 

Biden won the primaries, so he could have pushed through, his party be damned. Trump did that in 2016 after the release of the Access Hollywood tape where he brags about grabbing women “by the pussy.” Some Republicans called on him to drop out, but he stayed in and narrowly won. And he’s doing it again on a bigger scale now, running despite his criminal indictments and conviction. 

The GOP’s fate is tightly intertwined with Trump’s, and if he loses, he’ll have led the party to poor showings four national elections in a row. 

The Democratic Party was never as intertwined with Biden personally, and now their fates part. Though the election remains an up-or-down vote on Constitutional democracy, boiled down to whether Americans think Trump should be in the White House or prison, Biden dropping out will scramble the dynamic.

The most apparent difference will be the possibility of generational turnover. Harris will be 60 on Election Day, more than 18 years younger than Trump, and 21 younger than Biden. Anyone who felt disillusioned by the race between two old men who don’t seem up to the job (albeit for different reasons) has an opportunity to turn the page. Don’t underestimate the impact of Americans hearing a presidential nominee who regularly speaks in coherent sentences, and doesn’t lose their train of thought and trail off.

The Trump campaign and its supporters are, if not panicking, at least thrown for a loop. “Biden is too old” was their main strategy. It’s been the public’s biggest concern about the president, easy fodder for mockery and memes. A lot of media treated Biden’s age as the election’s top story. The age issue fed Republicans’ talking points, including ones about “strength,'' facilitating arguments along the lines of “whatever you’re unhappy about could be easily fixed if Biden weren’t so old and out of it.” By being louder, and seeming to have declined relatively less, Trump neutralized concern about his age and incoherence. 

Now that’s gone.

Republicans’ secondary attack was about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. He doesn’t work in government and there’s no evidence he ever influenced U.S. policy, so much of the argument amounts to “imagine Hunter Biden did what Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner actually did.” But still, they hammered it, trying to whatabout away Trump’s egregious corruption, even holding Congressional hearings in an attempt to recreate the fact-distorting but politically successful hearings on Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi attack.

That’s gone too.

The Trump campaign will surely come up with something. But they’ve been attacking Biden along these lines for over five years, and it seemed to be working. Any new attacks will start from a lower baseline. They thought they were winning, and didn’t want the race to change.

The most vocally negative reaction to Biden’s announcement, by far, came from Republicans. The top two in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, along with prominent figures such as conspiracy theorist Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller, denounced the move as terribly unfair to Democratic primary voters.

Twitter owner Elon Musk, fresh off giving Trump $45 million and getting a rally shout-out for it, tried claiming billionaires forced this on Democratic voters. His fellow Silicon Valley rich guy, right-wing culture warrior, and Putin apologist David Sacks tried similarly silly conspiracy theories.

16.6 million Americans voted in the Democratic primaries this year, 14.4 million of them for Joe Biden. That’s less than a quarter of the 81.2 million who voted for Biden over Trump in 2020. Primary voters are the party’s active base, the ones most likely to turn out to vote for the Democrat against Donald Trump no matter who it is. Republican politicians and wealthy Trumpist boosters neither speak nor care for Democratic primary voters. Pretending they do is what the internet calls “concern trolling,” in this case a sign they’re low on ideas.

Speaking of which, Donald Trump himself whined, “So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden… Now we have to start all over again.” 

Team Trump will surely develop lines of attack, but early attempts show the difficulty of changing course. Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance was among those arguing that Biden dropping out means he can’t “justify remaining President.” But Biden is a lame duck now. He can’t serve another four years, but can see out the next five months, especially now that he isn’t on a grueling campaign schedule. His presence in the public consciousness, already low for a president, will shrink.

National Review editor Charles C.W. Cooke argued that Biden dropping out but not resigning “is going to be a hell of a tough sell,” apparently not yet adjusting to the fact that Democrats aren’t selling Biden anymore.

Bari Weiss and Eli Lake of The Free Press argued that Harris has to “prove she didn’t cover up Biden’s health status,” as if the media will still fixate on the president’s age now that they have a massive jolt to their drawn-out, unexciting horserace. Or that undecided voters will care.

The loudest parts of the right that have already moved on from Biden and are directly attacking Harris have been explicitly sexist and racist. For example, Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire argued that Harris advanced her career by a combination of sleeping her way up and getting special advantages as a “non-white female.” The New York Post preemptively published a piece warning that “America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president.”

That’s one big way the race has changed. Policy-related attacks (immigration, inflation, etc.) will motivate Republicans against any Democrat. But concerns about Biden’s age-related decline were widespread, and the best counter was “okay, but Trump.” Racist and sexist attacks against Harris will be taken on directly, and likely motivate supporters.

No one knows exactly how many voters will be excited by a Black and South Asian woman president compared to how many were open to an old white guy but not a non-white woman. That said, I’m skeptical there are many who’d reject Harris based on race or gender but weren’t already voting Trump. Attacks on Biden’s age probably landed better with more undecided voters, including swing voters, those considering a third party, and those who might stay home.

If Trumpists overdo the racism and sexism, they could alienate too many people, including some who thought Biden was too old.

Elon Musk might’ve really screwed up here. By buying Twitter, reducing the reliability of information on it, and pushing it to the right via algorithm and personal contribution, he did tilt the information environment in his favor, not least because many journalists remain active on “X.” But a lot of what the website promotes is toxic, including numerous verified pro-Nazi accounts. The more the very online, culture war-fixated New Right seeps into the Trump campaign, the more it may alienate the offline normies it needs to win.

Musk and David Sacks were reportedly influential in Trump picking JD Vance, himself a creature of both Silicon Valley and the New Right. Also pushing for Vance was Donald Trump Jr., a rabid online culture warrior. If the online right lets loose with the bigotry, the Republican campaign could be dragged along.

Harris could screw up, or Democrats could screw up by making the nomination a protracted intraparty fight. Harris could smoothly unite the Democrats, campaign well, and still lose, as unhappy voters toss out the incumbent party. Or maybe there are just enough Americans in just the right states who really want a lying bigoted criminal to break the system.

Nobody knows.

But as someone very concerned about Trump’s threat to Constitutional democracy, I am feeling more optimistic about the election than I have in a while.

And based on my admittedly unscientific sense of the discourse, I’m far from the only one. Some passionately anti-Biden leftists are making binary choice arguments in favor of Harris and the Democrats. Many progressives, liberals, centrists, and NeverTrump conservatives seem enthused. The chances of a France-style “ugh, fine, unite to stop the fascists and work out the rest later” have gone up.

Trump and Biden are very well known, with locked-in public impressions, while Harris is not. That means voters can project their hopes onto her, warranted or otherwise. The candidate with that advantage has won every 21st century U.S. election without a sitting president. George W. Bush beat Al Gore (2000), Barack Obama beat John McCain (2008), Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton (2016). Every time, the candidate who had been in the political spotlight for longer lost, and the more novel one became president.

Then again, those elections all came after a president served two terms and couldn’t run again. This election comes after two one-term presidencies, and the only American election to follow an attempted coup.

The vote will probably be close due to partisanship and polarization. Harris was trailing Trump in hypothetical matchup polls before Biden dropped out, which means she’s the underdog. But based on that standard, so was Biden, and he did not seem capable of turning it around. Harris at least has the potential to.

Democrats’ electoral chances and Biden’s legacy both look better than they did yesterday.