Anika Begay
Politics
/
August 16, 2024
Hey, can we go back to when a lot of supposedly intelligent people were making one of the most patently ridiculous political arguments of all time?
President Joe Biden speaks to supporters during a campaign rally at Sherman Middle School on July 5, 2024 in Madison, Wisconsin.
(Scott Olson/Getty Images)
On July 19, 2024, a man named Christopher Bouzy posted on X (formerly Twitter) about the then-heated debate over whether President Joe Biden should end his bid for a second term. Bouzy wasn’t alone in discussing the topic: At the time, it was top of mind for virtually everyone interested in politics. And as a liberal power user of X, he wasn’t alone in insisting that Biden should stay in the race. But what made Bouzy unique at the time, and what has made his post stick in my mind ever since, was his sheer enthusiasm. He didn’t offer a case theory for why he thought Biden could win, an argument against his potential replacements, or even a defense of the president’s record.
Instead, he said this: “Biden said fuck your polls, fuck your back-sliding Democratic lawmakers, fuck your wealthy donors, and fuck the mainstream media. He’s not going to step aside. Let’s go!”
Attached was a montage of the president dancing in front of a huge crowd, set to festive music.
Fortunately for all of us, Biden stepped aside two days after Bouzy’s post, and we’re all much better off for it. Since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden in the race, Democrats have surged on every metric you’d want to surge, from enthusiasm to fundraising to candidate likability to head-to-head polling against Donald Trump. A race that at times seemed on track for an inevitable Trump landslide now has a reasonable chance of ending in a Democratic victory.
In my assessment of the state of the Electoral College, I found nearly 100 electoral votes from states that once leaned toward Trump are now leaning toward Harris. That’s a gigantic shift, so huge that it’s virtually unprecedented in this political era, and it’s upended the entire election.
Such a stunning and immediate success for Harris was undoubtedly unexpected, but the critical question right now is this: could Some What kind of surge were predicted? The likes of Bouzy, call them BlueAnons, would prefer us to believe that it is not possible and to ignore their previous insistence that a change in the election would doom the Democrats. Instead of standing by their words and lamenting the decision of the man they presented as Trump’s strongest opponent to drop out of the race, they immediately rallied behind him and began campaigning for his replacement.
Virtually no one has admitted that they were wrong to ask that Biden remain. If they had their way, their opposition to his withdrawal would simply be quietly forgotten, their points of contention remembered as reasonable concerns that Harris has overcome, doing better than anyone expected at the time.
The problem for them, and for us, considering that those who took these positions include some of the most influential academics and writers in American liberalism today, is that none of their arguments for keeping Biden on the ticket were valid. At best, they relied on uninformed superstition; at worst, they carelessly spread disinformation.
Current number
To begin, let’s look at one of the most important arguments some have made to fight against a ticket swap: that it would jeopardize the party’s access to the ballot in several states where filing deadlines were approaching. This, to put it bluntly, was nonsense.
When BlueAnon mentioned states where the deadlines for filing nominations for new candidates or parties had passed, it ignored the fact that a replacement for Biden would not be considered a new nominee. This was simply because the Democratic Party, in July 2024, he didn’t have a candidate yet. He had a presumptive candidate in Joe Biden, who won the primary and had a majority of delegates pledged to vote for him at the convention. But that convention hadn’t happened yet, which meant Biden was as much of a Democratic candidate as you and I were at the time. party he was the only one with access to the ballots, and that access to the ballots would have been guaranteed regardless of the candidate, whether it was Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or my dog.
You didn’t have to be an election lawyer to see that there was no problem here: a modicum of common sense and intellectual honesty was all it took. But that didn’t stop people with gigantic platforms from spreading this falsehood as if it shut down the entire debate.
Along with these blatantly inaccurate claims about procedure, which, at one of the low points of the saga, included none other than DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison arguing that a potential August ballot access deadline in Ohio required Biden to receive an early nomination in mid-July, there were also attempts at substantive campaign arguments in Biden’s favor. Again, these points were alarmingly poorly fleshed out.
Some based their claims on the idea that abandoning Biden would mean giving up the party’s “incumbent advantage,” without ever explaining why being an incumbent at a time when the public widely wanted change, and when the incumbent was deeply unpopular, should have been an advantage. Others, like Boston College history professor and liberal social media star Heather Cox Richardson, tried to point to history to say that, in Richardson’s words, “if you change a presidential candidate at this point in the game, the candidate loses.” Not only did Richardson base this on a sample of exactly two elections, 1952 and 1968, but her argument was based on highly a questionable implication that Democrats lost those two years only because they didn’t run their incumbent candidates and opted for less influential alternatives. Given that Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson were both widely unpopular when they retired, this is, at the very least, a highly questionable claim, far from something that should be stated as fact.
At best, these people were ill-informed and careless with their platforms and credibility. At worst, they simply didn’t care about the quality of their arguments, as long as they served their purpose. In both cases, they demonstrated exactly the kind of reckless, electorally incompetent behavior that liberals have long claimed is the domain of only sectarian Republicans or starry-eyed leftists.
For a faction that has proudly advertised itself as a group of hardline political realists that Truly worry about elections and their consequences, they were extraordinarily willing to dive into conspiracies and superstitions as soon as reality didn’t fit their preferences. This may not make them unique, but it does make them a lot less serious. Unless we see some real and meaningful mea culpas, I won’t take these commentators seriously, and neither should you.
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