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Thursday's debate was the gift that keeps on giving for political horse race junkies like me. 2024's campaign was shaping up to be the ultimate snooze-fest. Neither party fielded competitive primaries. Neither candidate provided any sort of vision for the future. Two geriatric candidates were fighting a rematch over a tiny sliver of undecided voters. Despite the heated rhetoric, it was boring.
Everything is different now, and this is shaping up to be one of the most dramatic campaign seasons in history.
Biden's chances to win the Democratic nomination keep plummeting. On PredictIt, he is down to 50%! Kamala Harris's stock is surging - now up to 33%.
But while many within the Democratic media complex have called for Biden to step down (he even lost Brian Stelter!) elected officials have been much more circumspect. Nearly all prominent Democrats continue to support Biden in public. The knives are being sharpened, favors are being called in, backroom deals are being made. But the party unity hasn't broken. Somebody (Obama maybe) will have to strike the first blow. Until then, it's far too risky to stick one's neck out.
Biden's political instincts are stronger than many give him credit for. I've mentioned before how he's used the SPR to keep gas prices down, knowing that simple things like that matter a lot. Now he has a new mantra. Trust no one. Increasingly relying on his wife Jill, he is now apparently bringing in Hunter as an advisor as well.
Biden only needs to last a few more weeks. To appear on the Ohio ballot, Democrats must nominate someone before August 7th. He just needs to run out the clock. Big public speeches or appearances are a no no, as every senior moment will now be dissected in minute detail. Once he's the nominee, the media will come back onside to save democracy.
In any case, I can't get enough of the drama. Make election season fun again.
This was the main reason I was hesitant to call him senile. Closing the border was a smart move. It neutralizes one of Trump's strongest arguments for moderates. It could be that his aging brain can't handle the bandwidth of spoken conversation. Maybe we need to put Biden in a Stephen Hawking chair for his own good. We could even give him his old voice back via AI.
Was it?
There's no way that he can actually compete with Trump for the "no more illegal immigration" vote, and it is just going to hurt his numbers and dampen enthusiasm with his actual base. Furthermore, the manner in which he did it isn't going to convince anyone in the moderate camp - that claim will only last as long as it takes for someone to pull out a smartphone and google what he actually did.
Cross pressured voters are real. Someone out there might think "Trump's tariffs are going to be disastrous and wreck the economy, but this border situation is such a mess, we can't keep doing this." If Biden can make the border seem like not such an urgent problem, that voter then gets freed up to vote on the basis of tariffs.
While I can actually agree with that, I think that such people are a very small minority - and I also don't think he closed the border in any way that matters. The situation is still a mess, and Biden can't even begin to offer a real answer because his donors and political cohort want to make sure that the problem stays a big problem (because that big problem is incredibly profitable for them).
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