President Biden Has Zero Chance of Winning this Year’s Presidential Race, but that's No Concern to his Wife, Son, and Political Associates Who are Pushing Him to Stay In

For that group, having a starring role in his reelection campaign, even if it’s already fatally doomed, trumps all other considerations.

Joe Biden on the 2020 campaign trail. He didn’t seem all that sharp back then, but at least he was lucid outside of the 10 am to 4 pm time frame, the six hour window his current political handlers have assured the country he’s completely on the ball now. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Even before last month’s presidential debate ended, the question of whether President Joe Biden will remain as the Democratic nominee has completely dominated the political conversation and there’s no indication that’s going to change any time soon. “The angst among Democrats...is intensifying,” said a story in yesterday’s New York Times. “A growing number of donors and business leaders have added to the pressure by calling on Mr. Biden to drop out, with some threatening to withhold dollars..”

Cracks in Biden’s support have also opened along particularly important fronts of Democratic ranks. Just yesterday:

• Senator Peter Welch of Vermont urged Biden to step aside as the party’s 2024 nominee for “the good of the country,” making him the tenth Democrat in Congress to publicly call for him to withdraw from the race, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who’s a close political ally and friend  of the president as well as one of the party’s most powerful figures, urged him to reconsider his decision to seek reelection and said the party needed to have an internal discussion about the matter as soon as this week. 

• Jon Lovett, a one time speechwriter for President Barack Obama, joined a growing chorus of party insiders who directly called on Biden to step aside as the Democratic nominee. “Joe Biden can leave office as one of the greatest presidents in our lifetimes, who defeated Trump and put his country first at every turn; or he can leave a stubborn old man who allowed hubris and insecurity to destroy his legacy,” he posted on Twitter. 

• “I love Joe Biden,” George Clooney, a prominent leader of the Democratic Party’s core Hollywood celebrity constituency and co-host of a recent fundraiser for the president, wrote in a New York Times op-ed, but “we are not going to win in November with this president.” Furthermore, Clooney continued in a devastating section, “This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and Congress member and governor who I’ve spoken with in private... irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.” 

The problems for Biden don’t end there, as an ominous rift has also erupted among the party’s financial supporters, as the Times noted in its story yesterday. Donors view their support for political candidates as an “investment,” Semafor reporter Kadia Goba explained during a PBS News segment last weekend, and following the debate many concluded Joe Biden is a terrible investment. “It was just, hey, he is not going to win,” Goba said of a recent conference call Democratic financiers held that she was allowed to listen in on. “How do we convince the Biden campaign that we need someone else at the top of the ticket.”

The most ominous development is that Biden’s support in the media, arguably his most dedicated supporters, has diminished as well. The clearest sign his hold on the nomination is in jeopardy came in a July 8 story at Slow Boring, Matthew Yglesias’ Substack publication. “I was, of course, aware that Joe Biden was old and showed signs of aging,” wrote Iggy, as Yglesias is known among connoisseurs of his mind-numbingly bland prose, but he acknowledges it was only after watching last month’s debate that he realized just how serious the president’s condition was, which was at least three years after that dawned on most Washington observers, including elementary school students who typically don’t closely follow political affairs. Now, though, with his eyes wide open, Iggy had analyzed the vibes and determined Biden should withdraw in favor of another Democrat who had a better chance of defeating Trump in November.

Yglesias’s defection wasn’t significant because he’s deemed to be an astute, influential analyst, which he isn’t other than among a small, concentrated demographic of the nation’s most clueless political boobs. Its importance stems instead from his status as Washington’s most peerless weathervane of conventional wisdom, so if it finally penetrated Yglesias’ consciousness that  Biden is a fatally flawed candidate with no chance of being reelected, the president’s political prospects couldn’t be more dire.

Matthew Yglesias’s graphic rendering of “Rabbit-duck Illusion,” as seen in his Substack story, which caused him to totally miss Biden’s rapidly declining cognitive abilities because most people saw a duck but he saw a rabbit. You can learn much more about this fascinating matter by reading his story, but I am begging you not to.

So, it’s all over for Biden, who’ll be announcing his decision to withdraw as the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential candidate at any moment, right?  Wrong.

With the ass-covering caveat that the situation is rapidly evolving so if it turns out I’m wrong, the blame lies elsewhere. 

Here are the four main reasons why I’m probably right, in no particular order except for No. 4, which comes last on the list but ranks No. 1 in importance.

1/ You can’t make me.

Biden is still, for better or in my opinion worse, the president of the United States and if he doesn’t want to step aside, which it’s apparent he doesn’t, no one can make him unless he completely loses touch with reality in which case the 25th Amendment could be invoked. He could be convinced to step aside by others, but the only people who have sufficient personal sway with Biden to persuade him to do that are First Lady Jill Biden and his children, including son Hunter Biden, who was convicted in June on three felony counts related to his purchase of a revolver six years ago when he was a crack addict, who the president is said to regularly turn to for political advice. However, neither Jill nor Hunter nor anyone else in the Biden family wants the president to accede to calls that he be replaced – for reasons that are best explained at a later date – so that’s not going to happen.

It’s generally not a great idea for a politician to rely heavily on family members and political sycophants for advice. When the politician is Joe Biden and the family members are his wife Jill Biden, seen here in her official photo as First Lady, and recently convicted son Hunter Biden, it’s a terrible idea. Photo credit: Cheriss May via Wikimedia Commons.

2/ A feckless party that’s long on caution and short on courage.

There was a time that the Democratic Party had the institutional strength to force an intransigent president to withdraw as its standard-bearer, but those days have long since passed. The process that led to that was prompted by events of the the 1968 presidential election, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June after winning the California primary and party bosses subsequently installed charismaless centrist Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the nominee – over Senator Eugene McCarthy, who campaigned on an anti-Vietnam War platform and otherwise had a lock on the nomination – who went on to lose to Richard Nixon. 

Liberal Democrats were able to push through reforms that created the modern primary system and were designed to make the party more responsive to its base and reduce the influence of the more conservative establishment wing that blocked McCarthy from claiming the nomination. The reforms succeeded in weakening the party’s back room, but ultimately created a more corrupt and dominant front room, where decisions aren’t made by insiders and wheeler-dealers but by cold cash from Super PACs and dark money vehicles. 

An additional important outcome is that the Democratic Party is no longer a political party, at least in the traditional sense of the term, but – and the GOP is no different here – is effectively a gigantic money laundering operation whose primary purpose is washing billions of dollars in unrestricted, unregulated political donations from corporations and oligarchs, of which a significant chunk is contributed illegally. 

All this, in turn, has dramatically reduced the institutional power of the Democratic Party, which is currently a hollowed out husk controlled by a small group of insiders and bureaucrats where the word “base” has no real meaning, and which has far less ability to influence events than the presidential clique and the party’s neoliberal wing, which has been predominant since Bill Clinton was elected in 1992. What that also means is the Democratic Party couldn’t exert sufficient pressure on Biden to force him to withdraw even if it wanted to.

There are Democratic power brokers – who have become more powerful over the years in lockstep with the waning influence of the party as a collective entity – who don’t have as much pull with Biden as his family, but nevertheless carry enough weight with the president that they could impact his thinking. There aren’t many of them though – Obama, Pelosi, Senator Chuck Schumer, Mike Donilon, a close advisor to Biden going back until the 1980s, and perhaps one or two more – but if any of them wanted to step up to the plate, none have so far other than Pelosi, but she hedged her bets in her comments yesterday and there’s no indication she’s offered sterner advice to the president in private.

Clooney pointed in that direction yesterday in his Times op-ed “We love to talk about how the Republican Party has ceded all power” to Trump, he wrote, “and yet most of our members of Congress are opting to wait and see if the dam breaks.”

That leads to a related issue, namely the cowardice and spinelessness of Democrats in general. Long after it was clear that Senator Dianne Feinstein was long gone in La-La Land and incapable of performing her official duties, party elders – in the figurative and literal sense – refused to push her to resign, saying that would be wrong given everything she’s done for the country during her political career. 

Nor was anything significant done to speed up the departure of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, even though she was clearly on her last legs as a result of age and cancer, and liberal law scholars were pleading for her to resign in 2013 when Obama could have appointed her replacement and the Democratic-controlled Senate could confirm it. Instead, she stayed on until she died in 2020 and Trump replaced her with the ghastly Amy Coney Barrett.

The Democrat with the best chance of prodding Biden to think about withdrawing as the 2024 nominee is Obama, who’s always at the ready when the party establishment wants to rub out the chances of a liberal candidate winning office, as he did during the 2020 presidential campaign when he endorsed Biden and worked to persuade several of his similarly tepid political rivals to drop out – most notably Pete Buttigieg, who subsequently landed the position of Secretary of Transportation, which may not be a coincidence – to squelch any chance Bernie Sanders had to win the nomination. However, It’s almost inconceivable Obama would press Biden to relinquish his place on the 2024 ballot unless his candidacy becomes so embarrassing and degrading party VIPs are forced to convene a conclave to devise a plan to force him to. 

3/ AIl people are not, in fact, created equal.

There’s one element of the party that clearly wants the president to drop out: Democratic voters. A YouGov poll released three days ago showed 47 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents favor Biden stepping aside versus 39 percent who want him to remain as the nominee. Meanwhile, a pre-debate poll conducted by for the New York Times found 66 percent of Hispanics voters and 55 percent of African Americans would like to see Biden replaced at the top of the ticket, which is particularly bad news for the president as both groups traditionally rank high on the list of the Democratic Party’s most reliable supporters. 

The numbers in the July 8 YouGov poll don’t provide much grounds for optimism for Biden supporters. Note that his support is particularly low with younger voters.

However, the party establishment doesn’t give a shit about the base, to put it bluntly. Why that’s the case is simple: money, which leads directly to the final reason Biden is likely to remain as the Democratic nominee as long as he wants to.

4/ “The donor’s revolt is bullshit.” 

An emerging revolt by Democratic donors has been much discussed in the media – Netflix Chairman Reed Hastings, heiress Abigail Disney and Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel, have been prominently featured in news accounts – as being the most likely route to successfully force Biden out if he doesn’t change his mind. “Biden’s campaign has already suffered a major slowdown in donations and officials are bracing for a seismic fundraising hit, with the fallout from a debate nearly two weeks ago taking a sizable toll on operations,” NBC News reported yesterday. Things were so bleak, said the story, that some of the president’s top fundraisers weren’t bothering to “reach out to their lucrative networks because they’re not convinced Biden will be the nominee heading into the convention, despite his saying he’s staying in the race.”

I found that argument compelling myself as a modern presidential campaign can’t be run without cash, and obscene amounts of it, so if donations to Biden were to seriously dry up it could well present an insurmountable obstacle. If the NBS story proves to be correct – Biden’s campaign denied it, which it would surely do even if it was true, but it’s too early to know – but there’s a potential flaw in the logic, which I wasn’t aware of until two Democratic sources flagged it for my attention, one who said flatly, “The donors’ revolt is bullshit.” 

To sum up what they said, success in raising money from small donors, meaning those who give $200 or less, is a sign of enthusiasm on the part of supporters. Until a few months ago, Biden was bringing in a lot more money from large donors than small ones, and while that’s turned around to some extent  recently it partly reflected a wave of sympathy money that came in from the president’s fan after he bombed at the June debate. At this point, Biden and Trump have each raised about $400 million, of which small donors have supplied 43 percent to the former and 31 percent to the latter. 

If campaign finance reports confirm a steep drop off in small contributions to Biden, it would present a problem for his campaign, but unless it’s a brutal drop off it probably wouldn’t be fatal because the majority of campaign cash is contributed by big donors, and a lot of that comes from a relatively small number of megadonors. Hastings, Disney and Emanuel – the brother of übersleaze party powerbroker Rahm Emanuel, currently the US ambassador to Japan, declared at the Aspen Ideas Festival on June 28, the day after the debate, that “We’re in fuck city” with Biden and a donor strike might be the only way to solve the problem – are large Democratic donors, Hastings especially, but they’re not megadonors, and if they don’t turn off the tap the president’s campaign will likely be able to carry on or sputter on for awhile and certainly past the point where finding a substitute would be impossible.

A list of the dozen megadonors who’ve supplied Biden with the most cash between his election in 2020 up until now, which I put together from data compiled by the essential campaign finance watchdog group Open Secrets includes George Soros, one of the wealthiest people on the planet; Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital; Miguel Bezos, the adoptive father of Jeff Bezos who provided him with the initial investment money he used to launch Amazon.com; Michael Bloomberg, the co-founder of Bloomberg LP and former mayor of New York City; Stephen Mandel Jr., a hedge fund manager; and Joshua Bekenstein, a managing director at Bain Capital. 

As of yet, none of them or any of the other six people on the Top 12 list have stopped funneling large amounts of money to Biden’s campaign, or if any of them have joined the unofficial donor boycott they haven’t said anything about it publicly, at least as far as I can tell. It’s highly unlikely that one of the 12 megadonors is still a major Biden contributor, that being Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, but I’m omitting him from consideration for present purposes since he was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March on seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering.

In May, Bloomberg donated $19 million to the pro-Biden Future Forward PAC and two other billionaires on the list, James Simons and Fred Eychaner, donated another $6.6 million and $2 million, respectively, according to a story published last week in USA Today. In a Twitter post last night, Alex Soros, the son of George Soros and chairman of Open Society Foundations who like many children, spouses, and relatives of the other major Biden megadonors on the list, explicitly rejected cutting off funding for Biden, writing, “Let’s stop running against ourselves and run against the existential threat that is Donald Trump! Biden-Harris 2024!” 

Unless Biden’s billionaire megadonors join the much discussed boycott that some contributors to his campaign have proposed, he’ll have more than enough money to soldier on with his doomed campaign. This tweet yesterday by Alex Soros, the son of George Soros, one of the president’s biggest financial supporters, is one of many signs that isn’t likely to happen.

As of now, shortly after 6 pm in Washington, rumors are still swirling that Biden plans to withdraw as the Democratic nominee despite his vehement denials and two top headlines on the Times’ website are “Some Biden Advisers Are Discussing How to Persuade Him to Step Aside” and “Biden Campaign Quietly Tests Harris’s Chances vs. Trump.” 

So, as noted earlier, I may be wrong about all this, but I’m going to risk it because I’m highly confident in my conclusion that Biden will remain in the race. My No. 1 personal reason for that is what’s propelling him to carry on – and more importantly the members of his family and closest political handlers – has nothing to with winning, which I’m completely confident has zero chance of happening, which I’ll explain in a story tomorrow.

Some of the people who are advising him to reject the growing chorus of calls for his withdrawal may believe he could somehow emerge triumphant in November, but I doubt it can be more than a tiny handful. Winning isn’t what’s at stake in the eyes of that crew nor is what’s best for the country; what they’re fighting for are their personal, political, financial, and career interests, which they believe are better served by being stars in a doomed campaign, whose failure can later be attributed to circumstances beyond their control, even if the country and candidate they profess to love go down in flames along with them, rather than by telling an elderly, increasingly brain-addled man it’s time to go home to enjoy his dwindling remaining years.

It’s a calculation that would be an ethical bridge too far for most of us, but not for the cynical cretins who currently surround Biden, whose time in the spotlight would be tragically curtailed if he drops out before the election, and preventing that from happening easily trumps all other considerations.