Joe Biden’s Primary Challenge

H eading into tonight’s State of the Union address, Joe Biden is in a historically unique position. A year from the first presidential primaries, his own party’s voters, by large margins, do not want him on their presidential ticket. Yet no obvious primary challenger appears on the horizon, and the entire apparatus of the Democratic Party is being bent against the emergence of one.

The evidence from public polling is unambiguous. Poll after poll after poll after poll shows that solid majorities of Democrats do not want Biden to run again and would choose another candidate if offered one. Biden’s national approval ratings remain poor, and his approval among Democrats is soft, although he has one saving grace that helped him in 2022: While nearly everyone who disapproved of Donald Trump over the years has told pollsters that they “strongly disapprove,” the bulk of those who disapprove of Biden disapprove “somewhat,” a finding repeated across many public polls.

That tepid sentiment is reflected by CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere in reporting from the Democratic National Committee meetings: There was little market for Biden merchandise, and “many congressional Democrats privately say they still wish their party had a fresher, more heart-thumping candidate.” Lack of enthusiasm for Biden is a big reason that Democratic turnout was poor in 2022, and the party had to rely on firing up voters against Donald Trump.

The party establishment has nonetheless mostly resigned itself to Biden, and then some. Therein lies the story of so much of what Biden has done in the past three years. Few presidents have been so singularly focused on preventing the emergence of a rival within their own party. That is an approach to campaigns and governing that few would have predicted from a man who promised to be a transitional figure to the next generation of Democratic leaders, who was elected with an implicit promise to his party that he was probably only running for one term, and who has become the first president to turn 80 years old in office.

Joe Biden is a man of many well-documented flaws, but after a half century in Democratic politics, one thing that he understands as well as anyone alive is the transactional nature of the Democratic Party’s coalition. And so, from 2019 onward, he has labored to ensure that everybody gets something to keep them inside the tent. He went out of his way to praise Kamala Harris when she dropped out of the presidential race in late 2019, and he touted her for higher offices. He held onto the decisive support of James Clyburn in South Carolina by publicly pledging to consider only black women for his first Supreme Court vacancy, a promise Biden stuck to in office despite the political cost it allowed Republicans to extract for its brazen discrimination. He cut the legs out from under Bernie Sanders in the primary by getting Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to drop out of the race simultaneously, consolidating the non-socialist wing of the party behind himself. After winning the nomination, however, he pivoted to offer concessions to Sanders with detailed negotiations that remade the Biden agenda into something much more favorable to the Berniecrats. Biden then put Harris on the ticket, a step that he and his team have had many visible occasions to regret. He followed up by putting Buttigieg, another potential presidential rival, in the cabinet. In office, Biden has played a double game, presenting a moderate old-white-guy face to the public while letting the progressives run the administration on one issue after another — and letting Senate moderates Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema be the bad cops who take the heat for preventing progressives from running entirely amok legislatively.

Meanwhile, in order to make it harder to mount a primary challenge, the DNC has favored Biden by demoting Iowa and New Hampshire, where he fared poorly in 2020 and remains unpopular, from the top of their primary calendar in favor of South Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, and Michigan.

Who could run against Biden? By keeping Harris and Buttigieg within the administration, Biden has all but neutralized them as short-term threats given the odor of disloyalty around launching a challenge to the very administration you serve in, and the difficulty of attacking its record. He has also managed, at least partly intentionally, to undercut them publicly with endless press leaks against Harris and the dumping of impossible tasks onto Harris and Buttigieg, both of whom look much diminished today compared with where they were in 2019–20.

There are seven potential themes that could be deployed in a primary against Biden. Some of them are mutually exclusive, while others are mutually reinforcing.

1. Biden is too old, and a newer leader is needed who is more physically and mentally vital and represents a younger generation.
2. Biden is unelectable due to his unpopularity.
3. Biden is incompetent, and therefore a new leader is needed without a change in agenda.
4. Biden is stained by corruption and scandal.
5. Biden is too moderate, and the party demands a leader who embraces a progressive agenda more openly.
6. Biden has veered too far to the left, and the party needs a Clintonesque course correction in order to avoid coming entirely unmoored not only from Middle America but also from socially moderate Hispanic, Asian, and black voters turned off by socialism and sex-and-gender-identity radicalism.
7. Biden stands in the way of elevating a woman or a member of another identity group not previously represented in the presidency.

Who can make these arguments? The age issue has taken some of Biden’s possible rivals off the table. Bernie Sanders, who is older than Biden, has said that he would not run if Biden runs again, and Elizabeth Warren, who will turn 75 in 2024, would likewise have a hard time making a generational appeal against Biden. The lack of a midterm blowout in 2022 has made it harder to openly tell Democratic voters that Biden is an unpopular political disaster. Biden’s tightrope between the progressive and moderate wings of his party has reduced the space for either to stage an open rebellion in the primary. And running on charges that Biden is incompetent and/or corrupt would be regarded as “parroting Republican talking points,” which is tantamount to treason.

In fact, most partisans in both parties have by now internalized the idea that a primary against a sitting president accomplishes nothing but to hand over the keys to the White House to the other side. That is the lesson taken from 1992, 1980, and 1976 (all of which saw incumbents lose the general election after surviving a contested primary) as well as from 1968, when a primary drove Lyndon Johnson from the race and the election ended with Richard Nixon’s victory just four years after LBJ won 61 percent of the vote and carried 44 states. There is thus enormous institutional pressure against a primary challenge even when the voters say they want one, and that makes it difficult to raise money or win endorsements while it makes it easier for the incumbent to get the rules changed in his favor. In 2020, Republicans outright canceled a number of state primaries to head off even symbolic votes against Trump. The most disaffected Republican voters still made themselves heard in November.

The obvious prospect to run against Biden would be a younger progressive governor with an independent fundraising base who can run on a record independent of the White House. But who? Andrew Cuomo, touted in 2020 as presidential timber, has been dragged offstage. Gavin Newsom has the necessary ego and power base, and spent 2022 publicly flirting with a run, but has bowed out while dealing with California’s fiscal mess. J. B. Pritzker in Illinois has the requisite deep pockets, but Illinois is a basket case, and the gruff, heavyset Pritzker is hardly a charismatic figure. Phil Murphy in New Jersey only barely survived reelection in 2021. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania is too newly elected. And all of them are white men, depriving them of the symbolic contrast with Biden that could excite Democratic voters. Gretchen Whitmer, a favorite of some pundits, might be one possibility, but Whitmer has yet to show any interest in creating distance between herself and the administration.

That leaves the B team. Former HUD secretary and San Antonio mayor Julián Castro tweeted yesterday, “It’s the general consensus that Dems are content with Biden in a Trump rematch. But [a Washington Post poll showing Biden trailing Trump in a general-election matchup] undermines Biden’s central argument for re-nomination. Two years is forever and it’s just one poll, but if he’s faring this poorly after a string of wins, that should be worrisome.” Castro, who ran in 2020 to the left of Biden and touted his status as a potential first Hispanic president, is 48 years old, and the email domain name listed in his bio is still “JulianForTheFuture.com.” But he got trampled in the 2020 race and seems unlikely to generate a ton of financial backing.

History suggests that focusing to a fault on undercutting party rivals could backfire. Only one elected president in American history has failed to win renomination for a second term: Franklin Pierce, who in four years went from a popular majority and a 254–42 Electoral College landslide to being denied a nomination for another term at the Democratic convention in 1856. A generational divide was one reason why. Ironically, Pierce had been a “dark horse” choice at the 1852 convention after supporters of Stephen A. Douglas, the leader of the “Young Democrats” faction, alienated supporters of Democratic veterans Lewis Cass (the 1848 nominee) and James Buchanan with strident denunciations of “old fogeyism.” Pierce, while a member of the Young Democrats himself, had fewer enemies than Douglas, and became the nation’s youngest president to that point at age 48. Four years later, he was ousted in favor of Buchanan, who was 13 years Pierce’s senior and who installed the obese, enfeebled 75-year-old Cass as his secretary of state.

The irony was especially rich because Pierce’s entire presidency was consumed with his obsessive effort to hold together the Democratic coalition while preserving his position at the top of it. Pierce, a former chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, was the most pervasively partisan figure ever to hold the job. His fateful decision to support Douglas’s introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in January 1854 was driven by a variety of motives, but Pierce was especially concerned with finding a position that would unite his party and give it an external outlet against the Whigs after a year consumed with internal battles over patronage. He was also concerned with being outflanked by Douglas or being accused of going back on commitments made in 1852 to his party’s radicals in the South. The Kansas-Nebraska Act did succeed in destroying the opposition party, but it also torched the Democrats in the North so badly that they got annihilated in the 1854 midterms. In 1853, Pierce had cajoled and maneuvered Buchanan into serving as ambassador to Britain, thinking he would get the old intriguer a safe distance from Washington; instead, Buchanan’s removal from domestic politics made him a safe choice by 1856 because he was out of the country during the disastrous Kansas-Nebraska fight. The very thing for which Pierce had sacrificed the peace of the Union and the electoral fortunes of his party in Congress came back to oust him in 1856.

Tonight, Joe Biden will likely maintain his focus on keeping Democrats united behind him and using the specter of Trump and “Ultra-MAGA” Republicans as a foil to remind Democrats why they should fear the instability of a primary. But American politics hates a vacuum. If the middle of 2023 rolls around and Democratic voters are still yearning for another choice in 2024, it will be hard to stop somebody from offering them one.