The road to a crisis: How Democrats let Biden glide to renomination

In the aftermath of Thursday’s presidential debate, as Jill Biden led President Joe Biden off the stage, former Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., raised what she called a “hard and heartbreaking” question.

“You have to ask,’’ she said on MSNBC, “how did we get here?”

Barely seven weeks before Democrats gather in Chicago to formally nominate Biden for a second term, the Democratic Party is in crisis. Many party leaders, donors, activists and ordinary voters, stunned by the president’s faltering debate appearance, now fear he will lose to former President Donald Trump and drag Democrats to devastating defeats in congressional and state elections.

The answer to McCaskill’s question is a complicated mix of historical circumstance and structural deficiencies, a party struggling with ideological and generational fissures, and an aging Democratic president who spent his life battling for this job.

Biden is surrounded by a tight circle of longtime aides and family members who have encouraged his desire to seek a second term. But interviews with top party strategists, office holders and people close to Democrats seen as possible presidential hopefuls suggest that, just as crucially, party leaders were lulled into complacency or pressed to step in line at crucial moments when they might have persuaded Biden to step aside.

Many of them, including the president’s top aides, drew what could prove to be overly encouraging lessons from Biden’s victory against Trump in 2020, his run of policy victories as president and the party’s surprisingly strong showing in the midterm elections of 2022.

“It was the ’22 elections,” said David Plouffe, who was the senior adviser to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012. “We’ve had three good elections in a row. The feeling was, ‘Let’s stay the course.’”

And some 50 years after the Democratic Party rewrote its rules to marginalize the role of political bosses, there was also no leader to step in and quietly prepare a Plan B. Other key Democratic figures who might have pressed Biden to consider retiring, or suggested an alternate plan, like Obama or Bill and Hillary Clinton, have moved on to their own post-White House lives and, operating outside Biden’s close circle of advisers, did not to appear to be in position to engage the Bidens in such a sensitive conversation.

At key moments, those who tried to sound the alarm about Biden’s potential weaknesses — among them David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, and James Carville, who helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992 — were slapped down by Democrats, often in the brutal discord of social media sites like X, and chastised by top Biden aides for being disloyal.

Candidates who might have considered challenging Biden, after reviewing his weaknesses, yielded in the face of the threat of backlash from a party united behind its president. That also acknowledged the weight of history: Challenges to sitting presidents almost never succeed, and Biden had broad support among Democrats — particularly, until quite recently, with Black voters, a critical bloc.

“I said then, privately and publicly, if Biden ran he would be the nominee,” Axelrod said. “I felt a primary challenge would fail and only help Trump. I’m sure there were potential Democratic challengers who made the same calculation and didn’t want to jeopardize their futures by running and taking that risk.”

Even as McCaskill spoke on television after the debate, there were reminders of what could have been — and, in the hope of some Democrats, what still might be this year — as Harris, 59, and Newsom, 56, turned up in post-debate television coverage, making a better case for Biden than the president himself had made as he appeared, often frozen, opposite Trump.

“Those two people are signaling to a whole lot of Americans that are paying attention, ‘How come they’re not running?’” McCaskill said. “How come the Democratic Party doesn’t have them at the top of the ticket, instead of using them to shore up what have become, after tonight, some pretty glaring weaknesses in our president?”

In November, a New York Times/Siena College poll found that Biden was trailing Trump in five of six key battleground states, with voters expressing deep concerns about the president’s economic policies and his age. Axelrod again raised questions about the president’s viability if he took on Trump.

“What he needs to decide is whether that is wise; whether it’s in HIS best interest or the country’s?” Axelrod wrote on X.

Axelrod drew fierce pushback from Democrats across the country, including from inside the White House. In his own post, Biden’s former chief of staff, Ron Klain, noted that Axelrod had referred to Biden as “Mr. Magoo” in 2019. And word leaked that Biden had vented about Axelrod in salty language.

For Democrats surveying a landscape that, after the debate, looks even more alarming than it did in November, it is hard not to wonder what might have been had someone persuaded Biden not to run.

That would have opened the way for the party’s newer stars to become known by the public and undergo the kind of on-the-ground vetting that a contested primary provides.

But the decision was Biden’s. Whatever his weaknesses as a general-election candidate, he dominated the primary field. He was the president. He was the party’s unrivaled leader. And, as he and his aides repeated, he had proved his doubters wrong in 2020 and 2022.

“We had an incumbent president who has the best record since FDR on the economy and who is a very compassionate man,” said Barbara Boxer, the former Democratic senator from California. “Of course we are going to stick with that.”