Biden: will he or won’t he?

With President Joe Biden having recently produced what has been described by many commentators as the most disastrous performance in a debate in modern times and his cognitive decline becoming more and more apparent with each public appearance, the question is: why is Biden and his camp so determined for him to stay in the race? And then, as a follow up, why have the Democratic Party heavyweights been so reluctant to come out publicly and call for him to stand down?

Why is Biden so determined to run?

The first thing to understand as part of Biden’s DNA, is that like him or hate him, the man is a fighter who has overcome much adversity in his life. He won his first senate race at 29, and then before he was sworn in, he lost his wife and baby daughter in a car crash. He has reportedly survived two brain aneurysms, and lost a son to brain cancer. His other son has caused him nothing but anguish with his very public battle with addiction. He lost two presidential races before finally winning in 2020. As the Economist put it, “He has good reason to believe in his capacity to confound his sceptics and beat the odds. But now he’s facing an opponent no-one has ever defeated” – namely, father time.

Biden also believes, and has said it repeatedly, that he is the best placed in his party to defeat Trump, although the polls aren’t showing this, and he is no doubt being egged on by his campaign staff and coterie of close advisors. Sadly for them, they are all failing/refusing to see the obvious truth: that the aging and visibly confused president is in no state to defeat Trump, and even less likely to be able to govern the country for another four years.

Why have the Democrats been so reluctant to turn against the president?

At this stage, only a trickle of Democrats have openly urged the president to abandon his campaign. There are many reasons for this:

First, no senior members of the party want to be seen to be disloyal to their leader and possibly jeopardise their career and prospects for re-election in their own House or Senate races.

Second, every senior Democrat fears chaos. Their worst nightmare is Biden standing down and a free-for-all ensuing at the Party Convention in August, with bitter infighting and a public brawl among a whole group of candidates, all putting up their hands to replace him. A convention is meant to be an uplifting and unifying spectacle, a coronation, not a divisive melee played out on national television viewed by millions. History has shown that candidates who get appointed after bitterly contested conventions tend to lose the presidential election, and the Democrats’ worst nightmare is a contentious convention like the notorious one they had in 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would drop out of the presidential race and not seek re-election.

Third, the other problem the Democrats have is that if Biden steps down, Vice-President Kamala Harris would be in the pound seat to replace him. She was a poor campaigner in 2020, and is hardly doing any better in the polls against Trump than Biden is. She’s not popular nationally, and doesn’t inspire much confidence. However, removing her as well would be another divisive move, particularly for the progressive wing of the party. As the Economist quotes a White House insider, “Are you going to shove aside your [president] and vice-president, and beat Trump in six weeks? If you fail, you’re dead.”

The next few weeks will be pivotal

A few more Democrat legislators have recently come out against Biden running. About 20 Democrats in Congress have now called for the president to stand aside, as have a few big donors. Many were saying that the party wanted to allow the president to attend the recent North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) conference as his “swansong” before they openly turned on him. The NATO conference went better than expected for the president, although at the end of the conference, he did accidentally refer to Kamala Harris as “vice-president Trump”. The next few weeks will be pivotal. In a few months’ time, it will be too late to replace him on the printed ballots, and there’s probably a 50-50 chance that Biden won’t actually end up running for re-election. If he does pull out, he will no doubt discover, as many other aging leaders have before him, that although it’s never easy to acknowledge your mortality and pass the baton to the next generation, once you do so, you quickly find that there are many able, willing, and competent younger leaders ready to take your place.

• Harry Joffe is a Johannesburg tax and trust attorney.