Centrist Democrats are hijacking the election.

Fueled by poor political reasoning and donor angst over Biden's health, Pelosi and co. are disenfranchising their base and adding further uncertainty to a contentious election.

Centrist Democrats embodying their party’s mascot

Three weeks after the first presidential debate, Democrats have completely stalled their efforts to defeat Donald Trump this November. After a subpar debate performance by President Biden last month, an ever-growing chorus of Democrats have clamored for Biden to step down. Currently, as many as 20 Democratic members of Congress have called for Biden to quit, including members in vulnerable seats, such as Senators Michael Bennett of Colorado and Jon Tester of Montana.

Biden’s campaign has not been able to quell the defections. Calls with Democratic leadership and presidential events such as the recent NATO summit have done little to quell discontent. Biden’s recent COVID diagnosis has left him isolated even further. There are rumors that he may drop out as soon as this weekend.

The effort seems to be spearheaded by Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama. Both have said they concluded that Biden needed to drop out after meeting with him following the debate. However, their change of heart is suspiciously in tandem with that of a slate of megadonors who have said the same. In recent weeks, donors to the party have threatened to withhold funding and have used their influence with members of Congress they own have leverage over to get Biden to step down. Some, like George Clooney, have even gone public with their concerns.

It all seems like the stuff of a good political drama. The righteous protagonists use savvy backroom politics to outmaneuver their opponent and save their country. Except, this is not “Scandal”, and Pelosi is not Olivia Pope.

In reality, what we are seeing is nonsensical political theater and the disenfranchisement of the Democratic base. Regardless of what we may think of President Biden, he has been elected for the party’s nomination by Democratic voters. By pressuring him to resign, Pelosi, Obama, and their donor posse are essentially intending to override this vote and, in doing so, undermine democratic processes. All while Donald Trump, their actual opponent, is threatening to do the same (and worse) if he becomes president again.

The Democratic mutineers would argue they have sound reasoning to do so. Biden is old, they say, and clearly cannot handle the rigors of a presidential campaign. The polls, they say, show that Trump will defeat Biden handily if he stays in. In order to avoid this, a younger, more charismatic candidate is needed.

However, none of their assertions stand up to scrutiny and data:

Wait?! Biden’s Old?! Since When?!

The crux of the recent criticism around Biden has been his advanced age. That Biden is old is undeniable, and his age may well be a problem in performing his duties for four more years. The list of blunders and “senior moments” are too many to count. Voters are noticing too; as many as 70% are not confident in his ability to perform the duties of the presidency.

However, Pelosi and co. are acting like they just found out Biden is old three weeks ago. No one raised any issues about Biden’s age until after the first debate (i.e. when donors started to). To pretend that this is all of a sudden a new issue is disingenuous. It would be one thing if there were calls for him to step down a year or two before the election. Better yet, they could have put forth a primary challenger to Biden if they were so concerned about his ability to beat Trump.

But to make it an issue now, after he secured the nomination and just over three months before the election, is sheer political temerity.

If Biden truly cannot go on with his campaign, he should step aside. However, this should be a private decision based on medical advice. Last I checked, Pelosi is not a doctor, and George Clooney only played one on TV. Their opinions on one’s fitness, therefore, don’t really mean much.

Unpacking the Polling Hysteria

Many Democratic lawmakers are adamant that the polls show that Biden will lose in a landslide. Senator Bennett declared Trump would flip the Senate and gain seats in the House on his way to victory. Pelosi apparently told Biden the same privately.

If this is true, then they need to show the public what polls they are looking at. The publicly available ones tell a completely different story. An average of polls done by the site FiveThirtyEight has Trump leading over Biden by a little over 3 percent, which is well within a standard margin of error (i.e. Trump’s projected lead may be completely nonexistent). The site’s poll tracker simulations actually have Biden, yes Biden, winning 53 percent of the time.

Recent media reports will have you believe Donald Trump is rising in popularity. This is also not based on tangible data. Recent polls find that Trump’s favorability is in the low 40s, about the same as Biden’s, and that over half of the country has an unfavorable view of him. This is despite the fact that Trump had an attempt on his life last week, is enjoying a bump in popularity due to the RNC, and is currently campaigning against an embattled opponent. It can’t get much better for Trump at the moment, but it can get much worse for him later on.

When you drill down to state-level polling (which, due to the electoral college, is what really matters), the picture is more ambiguous, and interesting. Trump is indeed leading in all battleground states, though by variable margins. However, when looking at the down-ballot races in those states, Democrats have big leads over their Republican opponents:

Democrats losing? Where?

The double-digit gap between Biden’s numbers and those of candidates in those respective states is unprecedented. In the case of Pennsylvania, the gap is a whopping 16 points (Biden is down 4 points, but Senator Bob Casey leads his challenger by 12). In Arizona, where Biden is down by as many as 10 points in some polls, but Senate candidate Ruben Gallego is up 7, it may be even more stark.

It’s tempting to paint this as an indictment of Biden’s unpopularity, but that would ignore the entirety of American electoral history. While there are people who vote for candidates from different parties on their ballot (ie “splitting their ticket”), most voters generally vote for candidates from a single party down the line. In fact, as politics have become more divisive, fewer and fewer people split the ticket when voting. In other words, the likelihood that more than 15 percent of voters in Pennsylvania will actually vote for a Democrat as Senator but Trump as president is next to zero.

It’s hard to make sense of polls at the moment and, if you think about it, that makes sense in a way. This election has been completely crazy. Between Trump’s indictments, his unhinged fascism in the form of Project 2025, an ongoing genocide in Gaza, the attempt on Trump’s life, and now an intra-party squabble with the Democrats, there are so many factors influencing voters that the potential for noise in the data is quite high.

What is clear though, is that the notion that Trump has a big lead- as anti-Biden Dems have claimed- is just not based in reality. Pelosi and co. also seem to forget that polls are snapshots in time. They only reflect (to a degree) public sentiment at the time of the poll. So Biden may be down in mid-July, but the race is close, and there is plenty of time until November. The popularity of down-ballot Dems hints at a path for the Biden campaign to improve their fortunes and win the election (yes, I’m serious).

Centrists would see that if they spent more time analyzing the data rather than the vibes of their donors.

[Insert Name Here] for President!

The most asinine (and dangerous) aspect of the bid to remove Biden is that the people aiming to do so don’t have a plan for who would succeed him. They have been so focused on Biden’s age and (current) unpopularity, that they have completely ignored the difficulty of changing a candidate so soon before an election, let alone the process for doing so.

Here again, Democrats are being led by bad-faith arguments and donor angst rather than rationality and data. For the last three weeks, there has been consistent clamor from the news pundit class about how a younger candidate is more likely to defeat Trump. The talking heads are quick to show polls to hammer in the point. A recent Emerson poll found that 53.7 percent of swing state voters said they would vote for a younger Democrat over Trump.

While that sounds nice, “younger Democrat” is not an actual person. And when you do replace Biden with an actual alternative candidate in polls, the results are not encouraging.

VP Kamala Harris is the most logical choice to replace Biden. However, she fares little better against Trump than Biden does. Polls from FiveThirtyEight have her losing to Trump by between 2 and 5 points, roughly the same as Biden. Another poll found that only 6 in 10 Democrats think she would do a good job as president. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

Who else? A draft memo by BlueLabs, a Democratic-funded polling group, asserts that nearly every Democrat they tested performed better than Biden by an average of three points across battleground states. Four of them- Sen. Mark Kelly (Ariz.), Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer- outpaced Biden by around 5 points.

This seems significant but is hardly a guarantee to defeat Trump. The candidates mentioned would theoretically be in a dead heat in some battlegrounds, while still losing in others. And that may be the best-case scenario. Keep in mind that these candidates are tested in a vacuum, and against the backdrop of an unpopular incumbent as an alternative. It is impossible to predict how they will stand up to the scrutiny of a presidential campaign.

Gazing Into the Electoral Abyss

More importantly, how would a candidate who was not on the primary ballot even become the nominee? The process to do so at this point, per the AP, is murky at best. In essence, it would involve the Democratic convention, where delegates pledged to Biden based on primary results would have to vote for another candidate. In other words, they would have to go against the will of the people and for the will of a room full of politicians and their donors.

The notion that their methods are undemocratic, that they would discourage turnout among their voter base, all to get a temporary 5 percent boost in the polls, seems lost on Pelosi and the centrist gang. That shouldn’t be particularly surprising. During the 2010s, with Obama as President and Pelosi as Speaker of the House, these brilliant tacticians caused the Democratic party to lose over 1,000 political seats nationwide.

This is not an endorsement of Biden’s candidacy. For what it’s worth, I find his support for genocide, more so than anything, as unfit for a president. However, the move by centrists to oust Biden is another evil unto its own. It reveals a condescending, paternalistic wing of the party that is more concerned with the whims of their donors, the pointless drivel of pundits on TV, and so-called “experts” on Capital Hill, rather than the actual will of their voters. They know what is best for us, it seems, and they will carry it out in their celebrity cocktail dinners and backroom dealings, whether we want them to or not.

And then, we have to shut up and vote for their new focus group-tested candidate, lest we want to endure a second Trump presidency.

And, worse of all, centrists think this is a winning strategy and message.

Vote blue in November, they will say. I know your vote didn’t matter last time, but we swear it will this time!

(Good luck fitting that on a bumper sticker).

Pelosi and co. may well succeed in their efforts. Biden may be gone by the start of the week. But this will in no way guarantee Trump will be defeated in November, and will place the election in historically unprecedented waters.

Worse yet, it will undermine some of the very values we are supposedly protecting from Trumpism.